
Canonical releases Ubuntu 16.10 - Jarlakxen
http://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/10/13/canonical-releases-ubuntu-16-10/
======
sho_hn
So Unity 8 continues to be a no-show as production desktop environment,
despite the claim that adopting Mir instead of Wayland would accelerate
progress past Wayland. Meanwhile, Fedora 25 is shipping soon with Gnome on
Wayland as default, and KDE-based distros are not too far behind anymore. And
Mir would be even less far along without infrastructure created for and by the
Wayland community, such as libinput, which it came to rely on. (That's without
talking about mobile - Wayland shipped on Jolla's SailfishOS phone to endusers
more than a year before the first Mir-powered Ubuntu Phone.)

I'd say history has proven the critics right on this one.

~~~
owaislone
Writing a new backend for an existing DE (Gnome3/KDE) is not the same as
writing a completely new DE from scratch. A fair comparison would have been
porting Gnome3 to Wayland vs porting Unity7 (based on Gnome3) to Mir.

Also, Unity8 did land much much before on the phone which was the first
target.

~~~
sho_hn
> Writing a new backend for an existing DE (Gnome3/KDE) is not the same as
> writing a completely new DE from scratch.

Having written substantial parts of the Plasma 5 shell (also nearly a full
rewrite, which may just ship stable on Wayland before Unity 8, despite having
been started later, and the Wayland conversion even later), I don't agree -
"writing a new backend" is a substantial amount of work when the frontend
doesn't have a concept of "backend"; a lot of X11 shell code traditionally
made a lot of assumptions about being on X11. We had to rewrite our dock[1] as
well for example, and that's before you get to talking about turning a X11
window manager into a Wayland display server and its many additional
responsibilities.

And as mentioned, Wayland handily beat them to the phone, too. I don't see any
evidence that Mir hasn't just been an extra expense in resources for
Canonical, and that's _with_ freeloading on activity of the Wayland community.
How did it in any way accelerate their progress to production to be the odd
man out?

1 = [https://blogs.kde.org/2016/05/31/new-plasma-task-manager-
bac...](https://blogs.kde.org/2016/05/31/new-plasma-task-manager-backend-
faster-better-wayland)

~~~
Galaxeblaffer
Thank you so much for your work! plasma 5 is imo the first de for Linux that
can compete with Windows and Mac OS visually. And as much as I would like to
be a cli keyboard only user that's just never going to happen

------
curt15
Any word on what's happening with "Snappy Personal"? That's their desktop
build composed entirely out of snaps with an A/B system partition format. They
have been really quiet about it for the last few months. They started talking
about it for 16.04, but then planned to defer that until 16.10
([https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2312045](https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2312045)).

~~~
niemeyer
We have a sprint next week to discuss some of that. The recent focus around
snaps has been on the feature set leading to Ubuntu Core 16, which is itself
in freeze at this point. The features are mostly general, though, and have
been landing on 16.04 and 16.10 on the way.

This was the announcement:

[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snapcraft/2016-October/001...](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snapcraft/2016-October/001273.html)

------
smacktoward
I miss the days when new Ubuntu releases included things desktop/laptop users
could get excited about. Nowadays it's all stuff for servers and phones. I run
Ubuntu on both my workstations, so it's sad to see that use case feel more and
more like an afterthought.

~~~
Daishiman
To me this is refreshing. The Linux desktop has been, for me, a very mature
product for the past couple of years. I no longer fear that having to update
will mean tweaking everything to get things working.

~~~
cheez
Oh man, that brings back nightmares/memories

~~~
Daishiman
It's fun when you're 14, infuriating as you turn into an old far with
schedules and deadlines.

------
ohstopitu
I used to generally update version after version, but recently, I have not
seen a good enough reason to switch from 16.04 to 16.10 (I intend to stick to
16.04 till the next LTS version is released).

~~~
dleslie
I will be downgrading to 14.04 due to bad hardware issues with the newer
releases; there are big reports with many angry users, but ubuntu doesn't
appear to find AMD mobile graphics and Broadcom to be a priority.

~~~
foenix
I'm very close to doing the same. I haven't been able to get lightworks to
work on ubuntu with my AMD card since the update to 16.04.

------
solaris_7
Is anyone using Snaps in production - or even regularly on their development
machine?

I'm still on 14.04 and would be interested to know what the most popular uses
for Snaps might be.

~~~
niemeyer
Yes, people are using in production. Last community meeting we had some folks
reported a large server deployment in the UK (in the order of thousands of
servers) that was being partly transitioned to snaps. I think that's the
biggest use I've personally heard about so far.

There are some people interested in having them working on 14.04, btw. It'd be
great to see that working well.

------
tonyedgecombe
"Developer preview of Unity 8 includes desktop, tablet and phone UX
convergence"

Am I the only one that thinks this is a terrible idea?

~~~
solaris_7
I'm always intrigued by this desire for integration. Even if you want to have
one device that is mainly a phone but also a PC when you connect it to an
external 24" screen and keyboard - why can't it have totally different UX
experiences optimized for each state? Is that really so bad?

Windows 8 was a UX disaster - so maybe that's just coloring my judgement. I
haven't used Ubuntu on mobile yet so guess I need to try it.

~~~
WayneBro
Windows 8 was not a UX disaster. It just wasn't finished. How long did you use
it for?

I personally used it the whole time it was available. Despite the fact that it
was unfinished, it was still vastly superior in many ways to other desktop
systems. So, I'm quite certain that I don't know what you mean at all when you
say "UX disaster".

~~~
simonh
Most actual users had a disastrous experience of it. Hence user experience
disaster.

~~~
WayneBro
"Most actual users"?

How about a citation?

~~~
V-2
"Most" isn't probably true, but the number was quite significant, indirectly
confirmed by Microsoft by backing down from some design decisions in version
8.1 (bringing the Start button back) and 10 (restoring the more traditional-
looking Start menu). Userbase pressure was an obvious factor in these choices
/ concessions. I can't recollect anything similar in the history of Windows
UX.

------
holtalanm
Tried 16.10 with Unity 8 in a VirtualBox VM, and after typing in my password
and hitting enter, all I get is a black screen for a few seconds before being
put back on the login screen.

It seems their developer preview has issues.

~~~
thomnottom
I believe that Unity 8 currently does not work with VirtualBox but is
functioning in VMware Workstation.

------
0x54MUR41
I am currently using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. There are lot of changes since 14.04
LTS. GUI change is easy to notice at the first time. You will see different
look in GUI. But, I don't know the GUI somewhat buggy to me sometimes. The
screen appears to be black and it will repaint when you are moving your cursor
around the black screen.

My friend told me that Ubuntu's GUI system was so heavy. He suggested to use
Ubuntu Mate or Kubuntu as alternative distro.

~~~
gcp
Current Kubuntu with Plasma is anything but lightweight.

There's really lightweight alternatives like Lubuntu and Xubuntu. You can give
them a spin in a VM. If Linux for you mostly means a browser window and a few
terminals, they'll do fine.

~~~
Zardoz84
Common! Stop these old black legend about KDE being heavy weight! I saw it
running soft and fast even without 2d/3d acceleration!

~~~
Sylos
To be fair, in comparison to most other DEs, it is still rather heavyweight.
Definitely more heavyweight than LXDE and Xfce, and Unity is pretty well-
optimised at this point, too.

But yeah, for what KDE is capable off, especially in comparison to GNOME or
the Windows-world, it's actually incredibly lightweight.

I run it on a 4 year old mid-range laptop with 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics
4000, and as long as my system isn't under heavy load, it's buttery smooth,
even with many of the bells and whistles enabled.

~~~
allendoerfer
> I run it on a 4 year old mid-range laptop with 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD
> Graphics 4000, and as long as my system isn't under heavy load, it's buttery
> smooth, even with many of the bells and whistles enabled.

It is a desktop environment, not a 3D game. It should ALWAYS be buttery
smooth. You can run a desktop environment on a 20 year old machine.

------
ff10
Can anybody say how well will Unity 8 work with convertible and detachable
machines that run with Windows 10 out of the box? I have an HP X2 210 lying
around that runs 16.04 well but without PM, Sound, detached mode and
multitouch touchpad.

------
ithkuil
wonder if the name Yakkety Yak is a reference to
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving)

~~~
radarsat1
More likely the song:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakety_Yak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakety_Yak)

Don't remember it from Twins?

~~~
iso-8859-1
He is Italian, why would he know Twins?

~~~
radarsat1
?? Because it's a popular movie from the 80s?

------
hendry
No mention of systemd..

~~~
zbjornson
Not sure what about systemd you're interested in, but I was hoping for
improvements in boot time regressions since the switch from upstart. Searching
bugs it sounds like it might have instead gotten worse in 16.10.

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1626436](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1626436)

~~~
Diederich
Huh...strange.

Ubuntu 16.04 boots my macbook faster than any other OS before it.

------
qwertyuiop924
Does anybody actually use Ubuntu in production? I've forsaken it on the
desktop (I got sick of my system breaking every 6 months, and having out of
date packages), as have many others, but it's still quite popular there. On
the server, though?

~~~
bpicolo
Ubuntu is an extremely commonly used server OS, if that's the question.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Really? Huh.

~~~
pmontra
Really, basically every server I see is either Ubuntu or Centos. Very few
Debian. With containers is different, who packaged the container for a given
service wins. Example: Elastic uses Debian for their docker images on docker
hub.

See also the results of this survey
[https://brashear.me/blog/2015/08/24/results-of-
the-2015-slas...](https://brashear.me/blog/2015/08/24/results-of-
the-2015-slash-r-slash-linux-distribution-survey/)

It begins to be old but this section is telling "Which Linux distribution do
you primarily use on your server computers?"

    
    
        Distro  #resp  %resp  prev year
        Ubuntu  633    34%    27%
        Debian  539    29%    31%
        CentOS  214    12%    15% 
        ...
    

Not a large poll but I didn't find anything better in a quick search on
Google.

~~~
ufo
Doesn't that poll contradict your "very few Debian" statement?

~~~
pmontra
In part yes, but I'm a developer so I'm probably seeing those new Ubuntus that
made Ubuntu overtake Debian. If I were an op I'll probably have a more
balanced view.

Furthermore the sample is relatively small and my own sample is at least 100x
smaller.

