Just thought of dropping by giving credit for the new 18.04 release. I used Ubuntu for the first time way back before high speed internet was available. From a magazine (IIRC) I found a news post that Ubuntu is mailing CD-ROMs containing the distro for free. Young, broke and interested, I ordered one.
Right away, (probably much) over a decade later, I am here again. This time, I am running Ubuntu 18.04 as my main OS for the first time in a long one, and I couldn’t be happier. While I had some nagging issues with 16.04 when test driving Linux as a main OS for work, it seems like most if not all the troubling stuff is now gone with 18.04:
The touchpad functionality out-of-the-box has improved immensely (thanks libinput?)
The new Gnome GUI is sleek and beautiful, favoring this over Unity Launcher
The settings are clear and are easy to use
Everything just seems to fall in place (even if it takes a bit of making every once in a while)!
I’ve also found a lot of help through the Ubuntu forums and the Ask Ubuntu service. So, thank you Ubuntu community for fighting the good fight. Thank you Canonical for providing such an easily accessible Linux distro. Thank you all the contributors for putting in the great work. The new Ubuntu feels great and I am excited!
We (Canonical) made a conscious decision to fix up touchpad (libinput) functionality out of the box as the first step in improving gnome-shell performance. Because smoother graphics wouldn’t matter if people didn’t like the way the mouse pointer responded.
Most of the relevant libinput fixes are in version 1.10.4 shipping in Ubuntu 18.04. Although it’s worth noting that libinput 1.11 will be even better for responsiveness and sensitivity.
I agree, the new release is stable and smooth, the only thing i have encountered till now that disappointed me a bit is the missing of gksu package and related, I used to install gnome-tweak to clean up the system and now that’s impossible because it needs that package. Despite that I am really satisfied of Ubuntu 18.04, they improved the system stability and fixed some bug included those regarding gnome-shell.
@vanvugt in the alpha/beta phases I had the impression that the keyboard input lagged which went away at a certain point. But it was such a subtile lag that I didn’t want to open a bug for it. Was that an illusion or a real bug that got fixed?
Pretty strange question I know but I thought it somehow fits the libinput topic =]
I don’t know about keyboard input. At least I never saw any performance work relating to keyboards. But such problems could have been anywhere in the input, accessibility or output (graphics) stacks.
Ubuntu Tweak seems to be an abandoned project which made use of a PPA, and AFAIK it has never been in the Ubuntu archive. Currently available are gnome-tweaks for standard Ubuntu, mate-tweak for Ubuntu MATE, and unity-tweak-tool for Ubuntu Unity.
I LOVE Ubuntu 18.04 LTS! My install, personalizations and tweaks were all straight forward and gave me what I was looking for. I found the answers I needed by searching for them (here and a few other places).
I love gnome-shell and always used Gnome except when building new boxes just for experiencing new Linux distros.
I appreciate the Ubuntu Team including this community.
I must agree and I was a skeptic. Having used Unity since its inception I am certainly in the ‘Love Unity’ camp. However, 18.04 has been a pleasant surprise. It is workable, fast, and it has solved some of the qualms I had with Unity. Is it perfect? No. But is it good? Sure as H3ll it is. Thanks Devs.
The search in the Dash somehow never worked. In the end I used it for applications only, but the way it searched for and showed files was slow and not very user friendly (for me). The gnome launcher does a better job at just showing applications.
Not being able to interact with notifications, especially not being able to close it. It often overlapped what I was doing and that was annoying.
The default look is just terrible. Which is a shame. I always spend considerable time making it look better, which is a shame, because the experience could have been so much nicer.
However, now three weeks into Gnome I am starting to feel some annoyances as well. Most notably:
The awful use of vertical space. I know I can install extensions for that (like Unite or PixelSaver), but none integrate controls and titlebars as nicely as Unity did. I would love to have a vertical DashtoPanel, but sadly that won’t happen.
Somehow it is getting more and more sluggish over time. Especially the delay between lock screen and desktop after typing my password is annoying
I find the way the controls in the notification area are grouped to be very user unfriendly, that I need to install an extension to simply switch my audio output is frustrating.
So yeah, I might actually install Unity on 18.04 again or go back to 16.04. Or do some distrohopping
No, the Dash to Panel extension only comes in a Horizontal layout. You can put it either on the bottom or top edge of the screen, not the left or right. For me personally (and tbh rationally on wide-screens) that makes the most sense in order to optimise the use of real estate. I really really love the way Deepin allows you to configure this.
Well, I use dash to dock, which can be configured to be vertical or horizontal (I think I prefer it horizontal, but for development reason is always vertical )
As a user, I prefer speed over features, so I like gnome shell better, but as a developer I am struggling to cope with some gnome shell limitations lately so I am a bit biased
