Not Bad, But if Youre Happy with 1. LTS, Stick with it After the previous 1. Long Term Release, Ubuntu has rolled out its latest short term my own naming convention for the non LTS releases version 1. Mainly, the short term releases are only supported for 9 months and usually include software applications with their recent updates. When you release a new version of your operating system within every 6 months, usually there isnt a lot of room for adding major changes. And that is the case with many GNULinux distributions these days, and Ubuntu 1. Since Unity is based on the user application set provided by GNOME desktop environment, according to the release notes, the underlying GNOME user applications have been upgraded to the version 3. GNOME currently. Libre. Office has been updated to the version 5. GTK3 menu bars, Kernel version is 4. X. org version is 1. The ISO disc image is about 1. GB in size which has grown by around 1. MB more, compared to the previous Ubuntu 1. LTS release. Unity desktop version is 7. According to the Ubuntu Insights blog, this version of Unity should perform better on lower end GPUs and on virtual environments where the guest operating system doesnt have direct access to the powerful GPU if present. This has bee achieved mainly by reducing the amount of window effects animation details when switching between applications, menus launchers and while minimizing applications. Anyway, for this review Ive compared the performance of Ubuntu 1. LTS, and Ive been using it as the main operating system for the past three days so that I can get a good sense of its stability as well. And below are the details of the laptop that I tested these two distributions Intel Core i. U, Hybrid GPU Setup Intel Broadwell HD Graphics 5. Nvidia 9. 20. M, 4. GB RAM DDR3, Hybrid Permanent Storage Setup Seagate 5. RPM, 5. 00 GB rotational disk and a Kingston 2. GB SSD, Qualcomm Atheros AR9. Wireless Adapter, Realtek RTL8. PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller, Realtek ALC3. Sound Card, LED Display 1. Ubuntu 17. 04 Review Except for the Horrible DNS Issue now fixed, a Good Release. Oh and, Farewell UnityContent Reviews Zorin OS 12 Core News Peppermint team fixes installer bug, Debian releases new installation media, Fedora changes Intel video driver, Ubuntu. FPSHZ. Its an Asus laptop F3. LJ FN0. 24. H. I installed Ubuntu 1. SSD. The rotational disk has a separate EFI partition, a boot partition, a 2. GB test partition which is where I installed Ubuntu 1. Home partition of my main operating system which is Ubuntu 1. LTS currently where all my data is permanently saved. The SSD is used as the root partition of the main operating system only it also contains another EFI partition thats only used by the main operating system, which again, played no role whatsoever concerning Ubuntu 1. The InstallerIve always loved the Ubuntus installer. Its simple, easy to use and very stable and thats something I say almost on every one of my Ubuntu reviews, and this release is no exception either. InformationWeek. com News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peertopeer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community. As far as the changes are concerned, I could see none. I couldnt notice any change in GRUB theme and the boot logo, thus I decided not to add screenshots here they are a little difficult to capture anyway. The DesktopAgain, there are no obvious major changes, except for the new default wallpaper. This time, though it still retains the Ubuntu look n feel that it had for long time, its a little bit more changed. While its true that I was never that impressed with the default set of wallpapers included in Ubuntu, this time there are couple of nice wallpapers. Apart from that, the desktop right click context menu has also changed slightly. The first screenshot is from Ubuntu 1. LTS and the second one is from Ubuntu 1. In Ubuntu 1. 6. 1. New Document item has been removed, Select All and Properties items have been added both useless on the desktop if you ask me, and the menu items arrangement is slightly changed as well. The context menu also looks quite wide because some genius over at GNOME there are too many of them over there have thought that it must be quite useful to the end user to display some of keyboard shortcuts for some of these functions. The desktop context menu change is mainly because Ubuntu 1. Files 3. 2. 0. 3 and it is Files file manager of GNOME that provides the desktop right click context menu. The file manager version is not the latest one, but it does bring few new features to the Ubuntu users for the first time. First of all, the classic menu bar of the file manager is gone. Now, I dont have any major complains over this as I rarely use functions from the menu bar of Files anyway. However, without the classic menu bar, especially in Unity where the menu bar is displayed on its top bar, things kind of look ugly Secondly, file copying progress is now displayed embedded into file managers main window. I complained about this feature back while I was reviewing Fedora 2. Files is not the latest one, even Fedora 2. In Ubuntu 1. 6. 1. Files icon on the Application Launcher, however, it only gets updated if the file manager is opened That said, when the file copy is finished, the indication disappears as it should, but there is no indication in between. Its probably a bug. When you rename a file, file manager now opens up a new pop up box. When you delete something, for a few seconds, Files gives you the ability to undo the operation without having to open the Trash as well. I also like the new search box of Files. Its much more compact and sits in the top middle of the file manager. And the other two configuration buttons right next to the search button, have also underwent some changes. Now you can change the folder zoom, sort, show hidden files, change into list mode, create new tab, create new folder, undoredo etc directly from those two buttons. Im sure there are many other subtle changes most of which are due to the 3. GNOME application set, but these are the prominent ones that I saw in applications that I most frequently use. Some of the other major applications included Libre. Office 5. 2, Firefox 4. Thunderbird 4. 5. Shotwell 0. 2. 2. Rhythmbox 3. 4. 1, Ubuntu Software center 3. Multimedia Playback, Adobe Flash Skype. As you well know, Ubuntu does not include the support for proprietary audio video codecs by default. But installing them in Ubuntu 1. Just open up a terminal window and simply enter the below command the second command is only needed if you want to install the VLC player sudo apt get install ubuntu restricted extrassudo apt get install vlc. That should do it. As for the Adobe Flash playback, since Im using Google Chrome as the default web browser yes I manually installed it, everything works with zero issues. No glitches, no crappy playback issues etc. I installed the latest Alpha version of Skype on Ubuntu 1. Video calling isnt fully implemented on the Skype Alpha for Linux and everything worked out without any issues. I didnt come up with any problems with the indicator icon on the system tray area the old version gives me issues sometimes on Ubuntu 1. LTS either. Update Im having some issues with Skype version right now. Sometimes I cant accept incoming calls, they just get dropped out. But this is most certainly an issue with Skype since its an Alpha version. Performance ComparisonAs always, it was these data that I gathered first, after I finished installing the operating system. I made sure to make as little changes to the system as possible to keep the accuracy of the data high. The only manual changes I made were among enabling user auto login, disabling the Update Manager from checking for regular updates to keep the memory usage readings accuracy high and finally added the System Monitor to the Application Launcher this as Ive explained many times, I always do in Ubuntu because if I were to open it up every time from the Dash for measuring the memory usage, that wouldve increased the memory usage by a lot because the first time you open Dash after loading the desktop it has to load few Dash related applications scopes, lenses etc to the RAM. Then I boot into the newly installed operating system 5 6 times for letting things to settle down. Only then, I started to measure the boot up times, memory usage upon loading the desktop, shutdown delay, CPU usage at idle, power usage and system responsiveness. Except for the last three tests, all the other times I took 5 samples of each test yes I rebooted the computer after taking each sample for coming up with average values.
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