
Ubuntu 17.10 Final Beta Is Ready For Testing - rayascott
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-Final-Beta
======
pasta
I'm using (x)ubuntu for over 10 years and every version there are strange
problems that still exist today.

For example now my volume control uses 5 steps at once instead of one. So
every version I have to search the net for some command line command to fix
things.

I wont leave Linux anytime soon but I can imagine people get sick of this.

Ubuntu is great, but maybe the priority should be flawless instead of yet
another window manager/desktop environment.

~~~
digi_owl
The underlying issue is CADT churn in the userland.

Every few years or so some new "kid" comes onboard and decides they can
rewrite some piece of code over a caffeine fueled weekend.

This then effectively solves some surface problems but resets the clock on a
whole lot of other issues...

~~~
msla
Yes, blame everything on the young. That isn't biased at all.

And the fact young people are more likely to be People of Color due to
demographic shifts isn't a factor at all, I'm sure.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting this kind of comment to Hacker News? It breaks
the HN guidelines, specifically this one:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Also this one:

"Assume good faith." (<\-- Edit: whoops, haven't added that one yet! It's
coming.)

Blatant nastiness is easier to do something about because it's so obvious. But
when people degrade discussion by replying to the worst about each other, the
frog boils more subtly.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
msla
Would you please moderate hateful and bigoted statements on HN, then?

------
dis-sys
10+ years full time Ubuntu user here, I have to say that although I am happy
for the fact that Unity is gone, it is too late as I have moved to xfce4.

The decision to move to Unity was bad, users choose Linux desktop because they
want something simple, something more under their control. The whole unity
desktop experience together with that everything is searchable promise is just
not the right selling point for that audience.

Now many many years in xfce4, that is the exact desktop environment I want. no
over engineering rubbish, no forced features, no fancy UI pretending to be
cool/smart, just the essential stuff that actually work. If I am going to
spend most of time in terminals + chrome, why forcing me to have a fat desktop
environment? gnome seems to be fine, used it for many many years before the
Unity joke/xfce4, but it is still too fat and it is too late.

~~~
stubish
Unity was never there to stop you using xfce4, so I'm not sure why removing it
is 'too late'. Xubuntu predated Unity by several years. The various desktop
flavours are alternatives, not competing forks, even if the one you prefer
isn't the default. One of the reasons Ubuntu succeeded is that it supported
both Gnome and KDE, even if Gnome happened to be the default, and Xubuntu
brought even more users.

------
zachruss92
This is exciting! Coincidentally I have been messing with 17.10 the past few
days, and I think it'll solve my display issues with a 3 monitor setup (with
one 4k in the middle). That means I can finally be done with SSHing into a
linux VM from windows when I want to do development on my gaming PC :)

~~~
hnarn
I understand that you can't demand the same things from a non-profit ecosystem
like Linux like you can from Windows or MacOS, but that being said the lack of
good support for multiple monitor setups is infuriating. I've tried to get a
"Laptop HTPC" setup working several times and it always takes a bunch of ugly
hacks to even make it usable -- and you can forget about doing any of it in
any kind of GUI, most of the time that will even make things worse.

~~~
dis-sys
multiple monitor support? you mean like 6-8 monitors? or just 2-3? I have been
using ubuntu for 2-3 monitors setup for 10 years, never had any real problem.

~~~
bryanlarsen
X11 has supported multiple monitors for 30 years

~~~
orf
Yes, it supports multiple monitors in limitless arbitrary positions. If you
want a monitor to the right hand side, one mounted behind you and one above
you then you can configure this.

However if you want three monitors lined up side by side, this seems to be
ridiculously hard to configure at least in Ubuntu. The monitor drag-drop
interface in Ubuntu is the worst I have ever seen. We recently had three new
hires and had to go through the traumatic experience of setting this up for
each of them.

~~~
afghanPower
man xrandr

~~~
vosper
To expand on this, you can easily do something like:

xranrdr -d :0 --output VGA-2 --right-of VGA-1

xranrdr -d :0 --output VGA-3 --right-of VGA-2

That would line up your three monitors in a row. I've been using it to
automate testing of a multi-window Electron app and it works very well. You
can do grids, columns, a cross - whatever...

------
teekert
For those attached to Unity, the (Ubuntu) Mate desktop now contains a panel
layout called "Mutiny", it very much like Unity. Turn on Compiz for window
management and you will almost feel like nothing has changed... Almost...

~~~
piotrkubisa
I am curious, what is the unique selling point of Unity which makes people
stick to it? Is it a global menu[1]? Dock? Support of legacy indicators?

[1]: GNOME3 has command pallete (ctrl+p) known from Sublime Text -
[https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus](https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus)

edit: Also [https://github.com/lestcape/Gnome-Global-
AppMenu](https://github.com/lestcape/Gnome-Global-AppMenu)

~~~
jsgo
For me, it is possibly the menu/dock aspect, but for whatever reason it grew
on me. I personally don't like the (Windows here) "click start -> hover
applications -> drill down" method.

In the grand scheme of things, it is really just a taskbar in a vertical
orientation, but I dunno, I just liked it after a while.

I understand the motivation of getting rid of it (the dislike of it from a lot
of the user base, the development needs being able to be applied elsewhere,
etc.) so I'm not going crazy over it or anything. Will miss it though.

~~~
Too
It hasn't been necessary to drill down the applications in the start menu
since windows 7. Just start, type search, enter. Then pin your frequent apps
to the task bar.

~~~
jsgo
Not necessary, but I'd argue it was still the predominant method for 7 and
even 8 (from what I've seen people use, anyway). I do find myself personally
with 10 using search a lot more (haven't had to observe others, so no idea
about others usage), but sometimes I've had to shift over to the Win10
equivalent of the start menu -> applications method if I can't remember the
name of the application outright (this was a bigger problem for me prior to
Curse becoming part of Twitch, admittedly. They had two different clients and
one of them was a bit more vague in naming).

I was more alluding to the gnome method which last I used it has a similar
menu with the tiered folder structure. Maybe they have added search as well,
but my memory of GNOME is too fuzzy so I had to go with the fresher (for me)
Windows equivalent (granted, with Windows 10 the applications folder
essentially hangs out to the left of the Windows 8 start screen-esque area so
calling it Applications folder would be a misnomer on my part).

------
mixmastamyk
Yeah, Python 3.6 is the default 3.x! Been waiting for that for years.

~~~
teekert
That is already the case on 16.04 afaik, perhaps even earlier.

~~~
mixmastamyk
No, you’ve been able to install it along side 3.5 for a while, but not as
python3. I’m on zesty now with 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6.

------
symlinkk
How’s the GNOME experience on Ubuntu?

~~~
jacek
IMO it is great. The Ubuntu dock is an improvement, also Ubuntu Gnome will
support old style tray icons out of the box. Canonical is making Gnome more
usable and attractive to an average user. They are fixing mistakes that Gnome
developers are making. Of course that is subjective and controversial opinion,
but it seems like Gnome developers are removing useful features and adding
useless apps like gnome-recipes instead.

Unfortunately, real fractional scaling did not make it to this release (you
can test it though). I can't wait for 18.04 which will probably have
fractional scaling and will be an LTS release.

~~~
Vinnl
As a Unity fan, the way GNOME's setup now allows me to keep pretty much my
entire workflow as I was used to it.

~~~
pkaye
Have you found a replacement clock like the old Unity? Only thing I miss.

~~~
Vinnl
Clock? As in, the display of the time and date in the top bar? It's moved to
the center of the bar with GNOME, but otherwise it's equivalent as far as I
know? (And there's an extension to move it to the right.)

------
unicornporn
Should one be able to upgrade to 17.10 stable when it's out (without too much
trouble), or are you stuck in beta “ring” if you install this?

~~~
jacek
It will upgrade to stable 17.10.

~~~
denisw
To expand on that, there is no “beta“ channel, just a channel per release. If
you install 17.10 beta, you‘ll get 17.10 package updates until the day of
release, at which point you have the set of package versions that are
considered the „stable“ release. After that, the 17.10 channel gets post-
release bug and security fixes only.

------
clircle
What is going to happen to my Ubuntu GNOME desktop when I upgrade? Is it going
to stay vanilla or will I have the Ubuntu-ified version of GNOME available in
GDM?

~~~
kbumsik
I am wondering too. There is even no Ubuntu GNOME on the update list. Is it
going to be discontinued?

~~~
pkaye
Yes Ubuntu GNOME will be discontinued as determined by the developers. They
decided it was better time to contribute to making Gnome better in the Ubuntu
distribution itself. There will an additional package you can install to
enable standard GNOME configuration.

------
amirouche
This might be a little off-topic, but anyone knows whether gentoo's USE flags
will come to debian derivatives?

~~~
thomasfortes
Probably not, gentoo compiles everything, building deb packages for every
possible combination of flags would be almost impossible, and if you add the
fact that you can change the flags for a single package then you will get
something impossible to do.

USE flags and equivalents are a thing that only comes with systems that
compile most of the software instead of relying in binaries.

~~~
amirouche
I don't want debian to compile every combination of use flags. I just want to
be able to opt-in to use softwares compiled and optimized by me.

------
zeep
I wish Gnome would adopt the Dolphin file manager...

~~~
digi_owl
Or we could perhaps abandon the notion of DEs and let people assemble the
tools they want to use for themselves...

~~~
unethical_ban
The number of people who want to do that, that are not doing so now, is
approximately the population of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Apple is nearly a trillion dollar company. People want cloud backup,
consistent and beautiful UI, and usable, "just works" tools. They're doing
something correctly.

Sincerely,

Someone who owns a Windows PC, an Ubuntu laptop, a Fedora server, an Android
personal phone, and an iPhone work phone.

~~~
digi_owl
Apple didn't sell much until they could halo ipod and iphone. And even then
what really got ipod etc rolling was itunes and itms for Windows.

Beyond that what sold OSX better was a unix cli in a off the shelf hardware
package with a support contract.

And frankly what people want can be so easily manipulated by marketing that is
a real worry.

