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Effective immediately, the new release of Ubuntu, 17.10, aka 'Artful Aardvark' has been released!
This release will be supported for 9 months (until 2018) for Long Term Support, stick with release 16.04, instead.
Official flavors (e.g. Kubuntu) are also released.
See the above release notes for a full list of changes and where you can get a copy.
[Full disclosure: the majority of SoylentNews' servers run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS though we have taken steps towards moving to Gentoo.]
Also:
The customized version of GNOME that Ubuntu 17.10 uses is very much in the mould of the (now defunct) Unity desktop, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.
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Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by terrab0t on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:16PM (11 children)
I’ve read that Wayland is not production ready yet. I doubt only six months will change that. I only install Ubuntu’s long term support releases. It sounds wise to skip 18.04 if it’s going to have Wayland. Wayland should be fine by the time 20.04 comes out. I’ll stay with 16.04 until then.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
Wayland works well right now only if you use gnome or kde (and only use GTK or QT apps - Xwayland adds a bunch more issues). There aren't really any other mature and fully featured DEs/WMs right now, and due to Wayland's design, a less-than-mature option will mean you might not be able to configure your mouse, or copy-paste won't work as expected (or at all!).
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:15PM (1 child)
And ONLY if you have a working xorg stack to handle the hundreds of things wayland still hands off to x. (Especially in KDE).
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/using-linux-with-wayland/ [makeuseof.com]
Even Ubuntu devs were not so certain that Wayland was ready to be the default in 17.10 as little as 3 months ago.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/ubuntu-uncertain-using-wayland-default [omgubuntu.co.uk]
In the end it was another forced march decision with project leaders deciding they had to force the issue in order to find all the bugs. Like systemd and btrfs there's not a painfree choice to avoid it till it is ready, (Which won't be for another year IMHO)
And the security we were promised in Wayland is illusional, because wayland simply doesn't allow some operations that many became dependent on, such as sudo of graphical applications. In this regard its still no better than X, so they mask that by forbidding it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:59PM
It's ironic we can get more control in X11 via Xpra [xpra.org]. Now, not someday. You can separate things at will, so trusted apps can still work as before (global bindings, screen scrappers, eg) while unstrusted ones can't get out of the box they are put in. Local apps work as fast, same shared mem tricks than compositors.*
Add firejail [wordpress.com] or nsjail [nsjail.com] (new "toy") and the locking gets even better, no filesystem level surprises like touching configuration files of other programs.
Extra bonus: Xpra lets you do non-integer scaling, all old apps can work with HiDPI monitors, new apps can workaround crappy limitations of their toolkits. Check the default keybindings or tweak them to match your keyboard, or launch with script [github.com].
Meanwhile, all the cool kids keep on replanning half of the features and finishing half of that.
*: has graphic tech gone from video cards being accelerators to just dumb framebuffers unless you code your app in something like OpenGL? It sounds a lot like that.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:40PM (4 children)
At this point I'm seriously convinced that Canonical has long been infiltrated by Microsoft loyalists and others who don't want it to succeed.
Ubuntu had plenty of chances to be THE Windows killer. It had the chance to usher in Linux as being "ready for the desktop." Then their business decisions were one head-scratchingly dodo-brained misstep after another.
Yeah, Wayland does suck shit. I've tried it. It is bland, buggy, and with all the excitement of a lukewarm bowl of plain oatmeal. Shuttleworth and others like him should be fucking fired.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:27PM (1 child)
At this point I'm seriously convinced that Canonical has long been infiltrated by Microsoft loyalists and others who don't want it to succeed.
Ubuntu had plenty of chances to be THE Windows killer. It had the chance to usher in Linux as being "ready for the desktop." Then their business decisions were one head-scratchingly dodo-brained misstep after another.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
There's every indication that Mark is simply incompetent; he got lucky at something back in the dot-com days, and after that has been flailing around with this pet project of his. It did pretty well at first, mainly because there was a serious void in the early/mid-00s of Linux distros that were easy to install and "just worked". But after he succeeded there, it's been screwup after screwup, largely because of 1) no clear strategy for profitability on the desktop, and 2) poorly-conceived and executed side projects like Ubuntu Phone which distracted from the distro, plus 3) wasting resources on stuff like Mir out of either NIH syndrome or trying to get a competitive advantage in phones (again, poorly-conceived, they started way too late to attempt any kind of vendor lock-in tricks). Now he's given up on a bunch of that stuff and gone back to Gnome3, which was a totally stupid idea because Gnome3 is a crap DE built on a crap toolkit that the Gnome devs are constantly mucking with so you can't build anything on it as it's so unstable and APIs are always being deprecated. If he were smart, he would have switched to KDE (which is happy for people to customize it, unlike Gnome), then had his team fork Plasma and make a different version which lets them explore their particular UI ideas, while taking advantage of KDE's stable foundations. Instead, it's more-or-less another me-too Gnome3 distro like all the others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @01:16PM
I agree with what you wrote, but I'll say one thing to defend Shuttleworth - I think he tried to pivot away from what Ubuntu 10.04 was because his grand vision of Ubuntu conquering the desktop wasn't getting anywhere. Users loved it, but the growth of the user base was too slow to mean anything.
I'd argue that the reason Linux is making headway on the desktop today has less to do with improvements in Linux desktop distributions and more to do with Linux adoption through the rest of the technology industry. "Chrome OS is built on Linux. I wonder what Linux is?" "Android is built on Linux. I wonder what Linux is?" "These software setup instructions for my Mac have instructions right next to them for setting up the same thing on Linux. Interesting." "It seems like 30% of the companies in the US are using Linux on AWS." "Microsoft now offers Linux on Windows Azure? Wow, Linux really must be more than just a niche toy for supernerds." "Steam supports Linux now."
But at the time it looked like nothing was working, so he decided to go for radical innovation. He wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. But you can't be Steve Jobs with free software, you need to be a different kind of leader.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @10:28PM (1 child)
To Shuttleworth defense, they did try to develop Mir as an alternative to Wayland... and it failed... ok, nevermind I guess
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @11:10PM
Mir got a LOT of flak, and deservedly IMO: they started development of it *after* Wayland was announced and started its development, so it became in effect a competitor, though Mark later tried to argue that they had different goals. There was every indication that they were doing it because of their phone project, to try to achieve some kind of vendor lock-in there, and it was distracting people (namely toolkit maintainers and application developers) from Wayland, and the feeling was that they should have been contributing to Wayland instead instead of fragmenting desktop Linux even worse.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)
Wayland is a big disappointment. It's been under development for almost a decade now! The first release was just over 9 years ago, but it's still not "production-ready" according to many sources.
Why does it seem like everything is going so slowly these days anyway? The difference in computing between 1999 and 2008 is absolutely enormous in every way (and also the difference between 1999 and 1991), but the difference between 2008 and today really isn't much at all. You can point to many other non-computing things and see the same.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday October 22 2017, @12:00AM (1 child)
Enlightenment is moving to Wayland so you know Wayland is awesome. Fuck! I mean not Awesome, because that's all X all the way. Wayland is Enlightened. Yes. That's it, so very Enlightened.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday October 23 2017, @05:31PM
Good to know there will be at least one sane DE available whenever I finally end up making that switch. Unless I jump to a BSD first, which is certainly possible...