Trying Out Ubuntu 17.10 On A Laptop One Month Ahead Of Release

[Guest]

It's a bad decision to choose Wayland, instead of Xorg, for distribution, which is mostly oriented at Linux beginners.

Wayland has a new architecture, which better than architecture of Xorg. But, Wayland is not completely finished yet, and still performs worse than Xorg.

Xorg still delivers better experience, and therefore it shouldn't be replaced by Wayland on such distribution, yet. It makes sense for Fedora, which is oriented more on Linux enthusiasts and developers.

[JeansenVaars]

Xubuntu is rock solid for beginners. If there is a standard distro, I'd pick that one. I agree Wayland is not mature and definitely not for beginners with many features not ready.

On my end, I am super happy with an XFCE Debian Testing. It's rock solid, rolling release but not for beginners. . and for more enthusiasts, a Debian i3 setup is superb. Looks like I am keyboard person, but if I had to consider Ubuntu 17.10, I cannot yet accept Wayland and 1G ram usage on startup. I know Ubuntu people is working hard, but this may be too rushed and too risky, although it would push further the development and user issue reporting base.

[Danny3]

So, they've spent the last ~6 months for nothing...
As I see, almost everything in terms of performance and power consumption has regressed.
This is disappointing.
Thank you Michael for including the Systemd boot time!
This is disappointing for me too, since my 8 years old laptop ( SATA2 SSD included) with freshly installed Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon and 1-2 disabled services can boot in about 7 seconds.
It's nice though that they've changed the title bar buttons position to the right by default, like any other sane desktop.

[oleyska]

So far, release 17.10 works well in a VM. I uninstalled the snap plugin for software center, because I'm not a fan of snaps. Also removed the dock. I cant get rid of the purple login screen though. It's a huge step back from the default Gnome login screen. There should be an easier way to change it (back).

I don't like all the customizations Ubuntu is making to Gnome. I'm still not sure whether to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 or switch to Fedora 27 (once it's out).

on my ryzen desktop computer i see the opposite and see it as a great improvement.
I'm no "KDE!!!!", "Gnome!!" or whatever kinda guy but I'm pleased with the 17.10

That GNOME desktop is a trainwreck.

Glad I moved back to Windows.

Somebody let me know when a real Linux desktop distro comes along and I'll be back.

ehm, trainwreck ? no.
It's that not very attractive, not ugly at all, a bit quirky girl you kinda fall in love with.
It has issues but when you've spent some time with it...
well, It's very very good and powerful.
-Gnome shell user for the past two months with the absolute frustration first time going in.

I thought the same about GNOME but it's actually not that bad although Unity was definitely better. The main problem with GNOME is that it doesn't come with any sane and sensible defaults, you MUST spend some time customising it to make it work.

If you want another Linux desktop distro check out some of the Ubuntu derivatives. Xubuntu is popular and provides a very Windows-like experience. Budgie seems to be gaining fans quite fast too.

Agreed, when I first booted into gnome I had no clue what to press and what not to press.
I could not use linux on my desktop due to nvidia quirks on unity but logging into gnome shell for the first time it felt like the DE was incompletely installed.
1 day into it I started to understand it and be able to use it, 3 weeks in I was using my computer more efficiently than anything (KDE is excluded cause I'd use two months to configure it...)
That is a problem.
The dock will probably solve a lot of initial starting issues for many, there are other issues but things work in gnome and performance is good.
I have no issues with Nvidia and the DE like unity (unity + nvidia is a nightmare).

[R41N3R]

I'm neither a user of Ubuntu nor Gnome, but I can understand why Ubuntu switched to Wayland by default. They changed their platform, user will notice this anyway. Going now to X11 knowing you need to switch to Wayland in the near future would be additional work plus another annoyance for the user. So it makes perfectly sense to switch now to Wayland and improving only one stack. I appreciate this decision. I'm sure that the missing features will be added now faster by having Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian on Wayland, the annoying bugs can be addressed and 3rd party applications like Steam and games referring often to Ubuntu as their target platform will finally consider Wayland as well.
Hope that we see a KDE distribution switching soon to Wayland by default as well :-)

[OneBitUser]

I don't like all the customizations Ubuntu is making to Gnome. I'm still not sure whether to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 or switch to Fedora 27 (once it's out).

What would be the point of yet another pure Gnome desktop distro?
I think if Canonical wants to drive their desktop users away, then using a vanilla Gnome desktop would be the thing to do it with. People would flock to Mint instead of Ubuntu.
Most of the customization Canonical did enhance functionality, aesthetics and ergonomics.

Let's just all agree on the fact that vanilla Gnome is terrible without extensions.
Shipping Ubuntu with vanilla Gnome would just force users to live with the retarded design choices of that DE, or spend hours to extensively customize it. And this is a beginner friendly/focused distro we are talking about, mind you. Most of these people just want to use their computers, not tinker with them. And Gnome is a fickle mistress to tinker with: even the order at which you enable extensions influences the result. I had this experience on multiple distros with Gnome, and it was extremely annoying.

It's OK for Fedora or Antergos to ship with vanilla Gnome, because they target users who will be able to do all the tweaking to make Gnome Shell usable, but targeting newcomers and the established Ubuntu-crowd requires something more recognizably Ubuntu-esque.

It's a bad decision to choose Wayland, instead of Xorg, for distribution, which is mostly oriented at Linux beginners.
[...]
But, Wayland is not completely finished yet, and still performs worse than Xorg.

I wholeheartedly agree.
Wayland is a great thing for the linux desktop, but it's just not ready yet. Pushing Wayland and Gnome is not a good thing as long as people have to miss out on commonly established desktop conventions because of them.

[bug77]

So, they've spent the last ~6 months for nothing...
As I see, almost everything in terms of performance and power consumption has regressed.
This is disappointing.
Thank you Michael for including the Systemd boot time!
This is disappointing for me too, since my 8 years old laptop ( SATA2 SSD included) with freshly installed Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon and 1-2 disabled services can boot in about 7 seconds.
It's nice though that they've changed the title bar buttons position to the right by default, like any other sane desktop.

Replacing the entire DE with so few (and small) regressions is hardly "for nothing". I expect it will only get better over time.

[devius]

I think if Canonical wants to drive their desktop users away, then using a vanilla Gnome desktop would be the thing to do it with. People would flock to Mint instead of Ubuntu.

Right... I remember some people also said the same thing when Unity was made the default and yet Ubuntu is still the most widely used linux distro. You're confusing "people" with yourself and devaluating the brand name that Ubuntu carries. The same thing happened when Windows 8 was introduced and some people predicted that everybody was going to flock to Mac OS or Linux distros, but that didn't happen. Brand names have power.

Let's just all agree on the fact that vanilla Gnome is terrible without extensions.

Let's not, because that would be a fallacy, i.e. believing that everybody has the same opinions, thinks and behaves exactly like yourself. I know people that had little or no experience with linux distros and used Gnome, KDE or Unity (all with default settings) without any major problems. Doesn't mean everybody is going to like it, but also doesn't mean that everybody is going to hate it like you seem to be implying.

[MagicMyth]

One thing worth noting (according to OMGUbuntu) is Ubuntu seems to have borked Flatpak in Gnome software in there attempt at pushing Snaps. The Gnome Software devs have done nothing to block the integration of Snaps into Gnome Software so this seems cheeky to me as it was Richard Hughes who basically created Gnome Software and it was Richard Hughes who integrated Flatpak really well into it and is responsible for AppStream - important to to get the best out of Gnome Software. Something as far as I can tell Canonical is being stubborn about integrating despite the fact that devs have pointed out it would solve many of their distribution issues.

IMHO Flatpak is the better option for desktop apps and Canonical should get on board rather than fracture things further. However, I am not outright against Snappy as it is basically a better docker than docker. Snappy's design is well suited to server application/service deployment. Canonical should reposition Snappy specially for servers as it fits perfectly with their cloud products which is there bread and butter. As Flatpak is 100% desktop app centric it will never challenge them there.

On a side note. Is it Snaps or Snappy? I see it written both ways everywhere and I've just done that myself!

[reCAPTCHA]

It's a bad decision to choose Wayland, instead of Xorg, for distribution, which is mostly oriented at Linux beginners.

Wayland has a new architecture, which better than architecture of Xorg. But, Wayland is not completely finished yet, and still performs worse than Xorg.

Xorg still delivers better experience, and therefore it shouldn't be replaced by Wayland on such distribution, yet. It makes sense for Fedora, which is oriented more on Linux enthusiasts and developers.

Canonical officially recommends LTS releases to regular users. Non LTE distributions like 17.10 are testbeds. Also consider the time for next LTS is close, so IMO it makes sense for Canonical to hurry up with Wayland.