Ubuntu 21.04 To Stick With GNOME 3.38 Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 21.04 To Stick With GNOME 3.38 Desktop

While Ubuntu normally ships with the latest GNOME desktop as of release time, April's release of Ubuntu 21.04 will not be shipping with GNOME 40 but sticking to GNOME 3.38...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-21.04-GNOME-3.38

[Alexmitter]

This for once will make sense. Ubuntu has a lot of downstream patches and some extensions and of course they need to be ported.
This release for once is rather for on the edge distros like fedora who do not introduce downstream patches.

[darkbasic]

Will Gimp in Fedora 34 be behind by *two* major GTK versions instead of one?

[Mez']

This for once will make sense. Ubuntu has a lot of downstream patches and some extensions and of course they need to be ported.
This release for once is rather for on the edge distros like fedora who do not introduce downstream patches.

Absolutely makes sense indeed.
Beside those patches.
The final outcome or user experience of Gnome 40 is not even exactly known yet, let alone materialized. Even if it was, Gnome devs can get quite random in their decision making and still have some rabbit up their sleeve.

There's the question of extensions for once.

Specifically of the Ubuntu dock, it's always been a bit of a catch-up game for Dash-to-Dock with the latest version of Gnome and it is sometimes broken for a while with updated Gnome versions. Given the extent of the changes, I'm not really sure Dash-to-Dock (therefore the Ubuntu Dock) will be updated on time. Of course, Ubuntu can make the changes themselves and upstream to Dash-to-dock, but we're back to square one, a final behavior being clearly defined.

Even more importantly though is the issue of the DE starting on the no window yet picker (as they call it, which would be the activities or lack thereof overview).
I don't believe for one second Ubuntu will let this happen on their OS. Which begs the question of how to work around it (develop in-house, wait for a 3rd party extension, etc...)

If the delay between both Gnome 40 and Ubuntu 21.04 was greater, the final UI experience of Gnome 40 would have taken shape well enough for them to solve these questions. But it's not realistic with just the one month in between, not with changes impactful enough to lead to several breakages.

[Setif]

Ubuntu is a stable distro, it is not for testing new releases. That job is for Fedora.

[miskol]

Ubuntu is a stable distro, it is not its job to test new releases. That's the job is for Fedora.

if you really want stable use debian or ubuntu LTS, but in most cases old software
everything else is really for testing latest software versions and in 99% all works just fine. And if you really prefere latest version it is much better in most cases

[Decay]

Good idea. I hope that the shell interface overhaul will not be merged for the upcoming Gnome 40, it seems like it won't be quite fleshed out yet. From the few things I've read I got the impression that some important design decisions haven't quite been thought out properly yet, such as how the new vertical-scrolling overview (the idea of which I don't really like btw) is to work with multi monitor set-ups.

[Volta]

Ubuntu is a stable distro, it is not its job to test new releases. That's the job is for Fedora.

Paradoxically Fedora is very stable, but I know what you meant.

[treba]

From what I understand Gnome 40 will be much more fun on the Wayland backend because of all the new touchpad gestures. So as long as Ubuntu sticks to X11 by default, Gnome 40 won't show it's full potential anyway.

[perpetually high]

Smart move. GNOME 40 will be accessible to whoever wants to early adopt. I'm still on 3.36.7 and running 20.04.1 LTS but the desktop is perfect right now. I'm not a new kid on the block either, I've wanted this level of stability/speed/polishness for a while and it's here. Ideally I could run 3.38 but not looking to update right now.

Previously I would've already been on 20.10 and on bleeding edge everything, now I like to think I'm a little wiser and sticking to LTS. I still compile my own tweaked out kernel and run the latest Mesa, so I don't think I'm compromising literally anything by not updating.