Sign in / up

back to article Ubuntu 17.04 inches closer to production

Ubuntu's final beta for version 17.04 has landed. Zesty Zapus covers Ubuntu desktop, server and cloud editions, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, MATE, Studio and Xubuntu flavours. It's not a huge feature boost, but the release is using the Linux 4.10 kernel, useful if your iron runs Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Ryzen silicon. If …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. Youngone Silver badge

    Swings and those other things

    One the one hand, not having to deal with CUPS would be nice, but on the other hand, it's not an LTS release, so is probably not for me.

    I would also be interested in how many people stick with the default Ubuntu desktop.

    0 0 Reply
    1. thames
      Reply Icon

      Re: Swings and those other things

      I've never had problems with CUPS or printer drivers. I've always just plugged the printer in and hit print and it printed. No installing drivers, no selecting drivers, nothing like that. Somehow, it always just knew what the printer was and did everything needed without having to ask me.

      With regards to how many people stick with the default Ubuntu desktop, from the data that I've seen, the overwhelming majority of them do. I used to collect user agent data from various public sources to analyse how usage versions of various Linux distros changed over time. There was virtually no correlation between actual usage and how often any distro or flavour was mentioned in various forum posts.

      It is very likely that the average Linux user doesn't spend much time commenting on his or her distro in on-line forums. They just want to focus on their real interests, which isn't centred around Linux for its own sake. They would be the sort of person who would stick with the major distros and accept the defaults while they got on with doing what it was they got a computer for in the first place.

      On the other hand, the sort of person who is interested in Linux for the sake of itself is also likely the sort who is motivated to try out various more obscure distros or flavours or desktops, spend the time to debug, configure, and learn about them, and then talk about them in on line forums.

      I know several Linux users personally, and doubt that most of them are aware that other Linux desktops even exist. Those ones all use Ubuntu (Unity) by the way. They're just average people who got fed up with Windows Vista or Norton Anti-Virus and got a friend to install Ubuntu for them so they can browse the Internet and do their email without aggravation. Of course they're the sort of person whose never even heard of The Register, let alone comment here. I know of at least one person who I'm pretty sure is still convinced that she's got a pirate copy of Ubuntu because she didn't pay for it.

      The few people who use Fedora or Suse something like that at home are all in the IT business and use RHEL on servers at work. I've never met anyone who uses Mint, despite reading posts about it all the time.

      18 3 Reply
      1. Barry Rueger
        Reply Icon

        Re: Swings and those other things

        I've never met anyone who uses Mint, despite reading posts about it all the time.

        Pleased to meet you! I'm the guy who moved from Windows to Ubuntu, but wound up with Mint because I really disliked Unity.

        I've had no reason to look elsewhere because Mint out of the box Just Works for me.

        This isn't about Linux, it's about the 98% of people who just want to get work done without mucking about.

        9 0 Reply
        1. thames
          Reply Icon

          Re: Swings and those other things

          @Barry Rueger - I started with KDE on Mandrake, then switched to Gnome on Ubuntu when Mandrake/Mandriva started circling the drain, and then the Unity desktop on Ubuntu when they finally dropped Gnome 2.

          I used KDE on Mandrake because that was the default desktop. When I had to switch away from Mandrake (important bugs weren't getting fixed) I tried to find another distro who did a decent KDE, but none of them were up to the quality of Mandriva (as Mandrake had become after the merger with Connectiva).

          Gnome was the default on Ubuntu however, and I was struck by how very, very, polished the complete system was. Their KDE version (I can't recall if it was called Kubuntu at that time) however was a bit crap compared to Mandriva's. The same was true for Debian's KDE (the menu structure at the time was mind bogglingly large and complex).

          When Ubuntu switched to Unity, I hung onto the last Gnome LTS version until they dropped support for it altogether. I thought I was going to hate Unity, but I downloaded it and tried it out so that I could write a blog post on how crap it was.

          After working with it for about 20 minutes however, I decided rather liked it. It had fixed a lot of the design problems with Gnome 2 while being less of a radical departure than Gnome 3 was. After a few days I decided there was no way I wanted to go back to Gnome 2.

          The lesson that I draw from all this is that how polished a distro is matters a lot more than which actual desktop they use. The other is that size of the user base and the stability of the organisation behind the distro are very important if you just want to be able to use your PC on a daily basis without worrying about the care and feeding of it (as when Mandriva started circling the drain).

          There are people who just want their computer to work so they can do stuff with it. The desktop for them is just something to launch and handle their applications. That's the category that I fall into. I stick with the defaults except to change the wallpaper and some of the launcher icons. I do like the Unity keyboard short cuts and probably at least 90% of the application launching I do on a daily basis is done that way.

          Other people want to play with their OS, change stuff, try different things, customise it, etc. They're more interested in the computer and OS as an end in itself rather than simply as a means to get other things done. Some of them switch distros and desktops like they were changing their socks.

          For people who are just starting out in Linux however, all I can suggest is to start with the mainstream and stick with something that is expected to work as is out of the box without any twiddling. If you want to experiment and try some esoteric things out, do that after you've got a good foundation in the boring and common ones.

          0 0 Reply
  2. frank ly

    Try the next Debian

    After four years with Linuxmint, I got Debian 9 RC2 about two weeks ago and it's what I use now. I had to track down and install a few things (not difficult) and do a bit of wrangling here and there but it looks good and works well. For any of you who use Ubuntu or Linuxmint, I'd recommend giving it a test drive. You can keep it updated to the current standard and the final release standard as time goes by.

    0 0 Reply
    1. wolfetone Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Try the next Debian

      100% agree with this.

      Why bother drinking Skimmed Milk when you can have Whole Milk for the same price?

      2 4 Reply
    2. DropBear
      Reply Icon

      Re: Try the next Debian

      I AM using Debian at work, and it's definitely a thousand papercuts type affair for me - I can only hope Mint at home (when I _finally_ get around to it) will be delivering me from that...

      0 0 Reply
      1. davidp231
        Reply Icon

        Re: Try the next Debian

        Well Mint is just Ubuntu with the cack taken out, and Ubuntu is a more user friendly derivative of Debian. And LMDE is Mint on Debian, with no Ubuntu at all.

        1 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Systemd, wayland, unity...

    ... yes, who wouldn't want Ubuntu on their computer! *cough*

    If you want to be a guinea pig for unfinished/broken/badly designed/moving towards proprietary software then knock yourself out, but there are plenty of other distros that arn't trying to remove the unix from linux and work just as well.

    6 2 Reply
  4. Alumoi Silver badge
    Happy

    Wake me up when it's .1" from production

    17.04" closer to production is still waaay too far.

    BTW, we need a new conversion table. I'd say 20" should be called alpha, 10" beta, 5" finished product and 0" service pack 1.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Hans 1
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Wake me up when it's .1" from production

      >BTW, we need a new conversion table. I'd say 20" should be called alpha, 10" beta, 5" finished product and 0" service pack 1.

      Huh?

      Ubuntu 5.10 to 10.4 were production ready!

      Version numbers mean nothing ...

      Look, even Mozilla f'ed up with Firefox 52, it just stalls regularly ... several times an hour ... happens, nothing to do with version numbers ... more like silly bugs.

      Anyway, I should probably have a look at Unity ...maybe it works, now ?

      For the record, my Dev rules:

      1. Don't change what DOESN'T need changing

      2. cf 1.

      3. cf 1.

      ...

      999999999999999999999999999999999999999999. cf 1.

      1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. Adhere to principle of least surprise

      1000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. Do your dev on the dev branch

      1000000000000000000000000000000000000000002. Do your testing on the testing branch, IT MUST BE feature complete before it reaches mainstream.

      1000000000000000000000000000000000000000003. :mainstream Release ;-)

      Gnome 3 reached 8% marketshare, down from ... 44% (Gnome 2 in 2010), it is March 2017 and Gnome 3 should ONLY JUST HAVE REACHED TESTING BRANCH, imho, when the extension API stabilized some months ago! It probably needs another 4 or 5 years dev work before it is considered production-worthy and deemed good for the masses. That is Ok, it is massive work to re-write a de, more so when the competition (Gnome 2/Mate) is perfectly functional. BTW, the most used de should be made distribution default.

      It is VERY HARD, in my experience, to convert some Windows luser to Linux with Gnome 3, exceptionally hard. Mate ? No problem ... I have tried multiple times, thought it was me ...

      What are these project managers smoking ? Why do we get 3 or 4 desktop distributions ... desktop, Gnome, Xubuntu & MATE ? You get this with Debian and Mint as well and it confuses people. What are you smoking, whatever it is stop now, it is not good for you.

      0 6 Reply
      1. Tom 38
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        Re: Wake me up when it's .1" from production

        Alumoi: (Joke about "inches" being both a verb meaning "getting closer" and a measure of distance)

        Hans 1: (Whooosh)

        10 0 Reply
        1. Alumoi Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Pint

          Re: Wake me up when it's .1" from production

          Tom 38, have one on me!

          0 0 Reply
  5. FuzzyWuzzys
    Facepalm

    Anyone else trip over that title?

    I thought for a second that Ubuntu had gone all X-rated waving it's 17" about!

    0 0 Reply
    1. Steve the Cynic
      Reply Icon

      Re: Anyone else trip over that title?

      Well I thought perhaps it was written in Headline rather than conventional English, and "inches" was replacing the more usual "Weirdword Wildanimal" format as the name of the release(1), but no, apparently it's still a weird word and the name of a wild animal.

      (1) With the Headline English missing word being "is" in between "inches" and "closer".

      0 0 Reply
      1. graeme leggett Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Anyone else trip over that title?

        I think it's because it's Monday.

        I looked at the headline and was trying to convert it to metric.

        More sleep required.

        0 0 Reply
      2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        missing word being "is" in between "inches" and "closer".

        (PUERILE)

        "Ubuntu 17.04 inches is closer to production"?

        If 17.04 inches is a reference to membrum virile then that would be quite a boast for a male human being. But as you say it's probably an animal Stupendous Stallion, perhaps, or simply Titanic Tonker. (I'm not going to find out the size of a stallion's tonker... yet.)

        And "production" I suppose means "reproduction". Or...... "market penetration".

        (Fnar.)

        However, I think the original response was meant to pretend to believe that this year's first new Ubuntu was in some sense a distance of 17.04 inches away from its... final release.

        (Once again, Fnar.)

        1 0 Reply
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But do we have a supported HFP bluetooth stack for Linux ?

    No.

    I have a laptop with a full-fat BT adapter (supports every protocol). But I can't use it as a handsfree for my mobile. Well, not without using windows. It was a showstopper for one client who wanted to use Ubuntu.

    0 0 Reply
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    17.04 inches closer...

    That might well be true...but how far is it relative to my current position? I need to know where to be to get it earlier.

    Also go metric Reg. Its 43.282cm not 17.04 inches.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Korev Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: 17.04 inches closer...

      The Register already has some superior units of measurement. It ought to be 3.09lg in sane units...

      0 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. Bluetooth

    Somewhere here I have an Intel "Draft-N" dual band card which will not work at all in Windows but runs fine in Linux.

    Never did figure out why, but seems to be something about the onboard controller as it detects use in AMD based machines and will not POST.

    I got it going on a very old Atom based netbook, in Ubuntu and also DSL amazingly enough.

    No workie on XP, 7 or 10.

    Hint: If anyone can figure out why please let me know as these are nice cards and would be handy for general purpose IoT applications.

    0 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like