DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 684, 24 October 2016

Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm)

Ubuntu 16.10 Review



The list of major new features in Ubuntu 16.10 is impressive and interesting, but only if you are using the server product. Very little has changed on the desktop side of things other than the included packages being slightly newer. In fact, other than touting the number of applications available as Snaps, the only desktop-focused feature in the release announcement is a developer preview of Unity 8 desktop.



To see what the desktop version of Ubuntu 16.10 has to offer compared to the previous 16.04 LTS release, I downloaded the 1.48GB ISO and gave it a try. Below, I take a look at what is new and different. I also take a look at the Unity 8 developer preview.





Ubuntu 16.10 -- The Ubiquity system installer

(full image size: 239kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



At first glance, little has changed in Ubuntu 16.10. It looks almost exactly like every other recent release of Ubuntu and the included applications are the same ones one would expect to see. There is a newer Linux kernel, version 4.8, and Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and the rest of the applications one expects to find are present and newer than what Ubuntu 16.04 LTS shipped with. Because all of my computers have Intel graphics, I cannot personally test to see if the updated packages in 16.10 fix or improve the issue with AMD graphics that are present in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.





Ubuntu 16.10 -- The default file manager

(full image size: 252kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



The biggest change comes from the update to using GNOME 3.20 applications. The new version of Ubuntu Software, which is GNOME Software 3.20 rebranded, provides a much snappier experience for installing software. The switch to the 3.20 release of GNOME Files (a.k.a. Nautilus) also brings many changes, many of which are far more noticeable than the improvements to GNOME Software. Files now uses the single global menu featured in modern GNOME applications. In 16.04 LTS, Files has multiple menus, but in 16.10 there is just a "Files" menu with only a handful of options. Personally, I like GNOME's way of doing things, but only when using GNOME. A consistent set of behaviours is important for a good user experience, so Ubuntu having some applications behaving one way with full menus while others do something different is less than ideal, especially for an application used as frequently as the file manger.



While the lack of major changes might be a little boring, the fact is that recent releases of Ubuntu are polished enough that there is little need for more than incremental refinements. Installing Ubuntu 16.10 provides a fully functional system that users can use to browse the web, watch videos, or write a paper without having to install any extra software or tweak any settings. Of course, major changes are coming at some point, but right now those changes are only available in the preview of the Unity 8 desktop.



The Unity 8 desktop



It is best to begin by stating that there is a good reason why the Unity 8 desktop is a developer preview; it is barely functional. Even following all the suggestions made in an Ubuntu Insights blog post does not result in a desktop that is suited for daily use. It is reasonably stable, but there is so much still missing that it is impossible to get any real work done using it. To give one example, the list of shortcuts that show up when holding down the Windows key on the keyboard has screen shots listed as an option, but I could not get the system to successfully take a screen shot. Pressing the "print screen" key on my keyboard would create a Screenshots folder, but not actually save the screen shots. The Unity 8 screen shots in this review were actually taken by running Ubuntu 16.10 in a virtual machine and using the host operating system's screen shot functionality.





Ubuntu 16.10 -- Unity 8 scopes

(full image size: 105kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)



What Unity 8 comes with by default is minimal, very minimal. The Scopes window, which is opened when the desktop loads, has icons for Ubuntu's Browser app, System Settings, Terminal, and the Checkbox application for testing system hardware. That is it. Clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the Scopes window displays a few additional scopes that can be added, but those are web apps for doing things like viewing books from the Open Library. Even after installing everything suggested in the Ubuntu Insights post, it is still not enough to classify Unity 8 as a complete, functional desktop environment.



Unity 8 is not on par with Unity 7 for even basic desktop options and system settings. When holding down the Windows key on the keyboard to bring up the shortcuts overview, Unity 8 has a much shorter list of items, and that list includes things that do not always work correctly, like the screen shot issue mentioned above. The Systems Settings control panel is clean and well organized, but even that is missing things from the traditional Ubuntu System Settings.





Ubuntu 16.10 -- System Settings and Time & Date panel

(full image size: 139kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)



Despite the long list of still missing and not on par features, Unity 8 does provide some nice polish beyond the current Ubuntu desktop. The Sound, Battery, Time & Date, and System panels are cleaner and are nice improvements over their equivalents in Unity 7. If the rest of the desktop reaches, or exceeds, the polish of these panels, an Ubuntu release with Unity 8 as the primary desktop will be nice, but that day is not yet here.



Unity 8 has a lot of potential. I enjoyed trying it out, and I do hope that Unity 8 is ready for the next LTS release of Ubuntu because it does have a lot to offer. However, the developer preview included in Ubuntu 16.10 is so far from being ready that I almost suspect that the only reason it was included by default in this release was so there would actually be a desktop-focused new feature in the release announcement.



Final thoughts



Ubuntu 16.10 is a solid, polished, usable Linux distribution. However, there is very little reason to recommend it over the previous 16.04 LTS release. There are a few tweaks and some slightly newer software packages, but nothing world shattering. The only compelling reason to upgrade is if Ubuntu 16.10 fixes an issue you were having with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That said, there are no major issues with Ubuntu 16.10, so if you are the kind of person who always wants to have the latest packages possible, go ahead and upgrade. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Ideapad 100-15IBD laptop with the following specifications: Processor: 2.2GHz Intel Core i3-5020U CPU

Storage: Seagate 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8723BE 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter

Display: Intel HD Graphics 5500

Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Ubuntu offers live kernel updates, Fedora runs on the Raspberry Pi, Debian working on Secure Boot, KDE 1 on Fedora 25



Dustin Kirkland has announced Canonical is rolling out a live kernel update feature for Ubuntu users. The new feature, called kernel live patching, will allow Ubuntu users to upgrade their running kernels without rebooting their computer. " Kernel live patching enables runtime correction of critical security issues in your kernel without rebooting. It's the best way to ensure that machines are safe at the kernel level, while guaranteeing uptime, especially for container hosts where a single machine may be running thousands of different workloads. We're very pleased to announce that this new enterprise, commercial service from Canonical will also be available free of charge to the Ubuntu community. The Canonical Livepatch Service is an authenticated, encrypted, signed stream of livepatch kernel modules for Ubuntu servers, virtual machines and desktops. " Details on how to enable kernel live patching can be found in Kirkland's mailing list post. * * * * * Support for Raspberry Pi single board computers has landed in the Fedora distribution. Support for the minimal ARM-based devices has taken a while to arrive in Fedora due to missing upstream support and driver/firmware licensing, but now Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 computers will be supported by Fedora directly, removing the requirement for Fedora users to use a derivative like Pidora. " We support everything you'd expect from a device supported by Fedora. We have a proper Fedora supported upstream userspace and kernel, with all the standard Fedora features like SELinux support. It receives the usual array of updates so no need to exclude kernel updates! The kernel supports all the drivers you'd expect, like various USB WiFi dongles, etc. You can run whichever desktop you like (more on those below) or Docker/Kubernetes/Ceph/Gluster as a group of devices - albeit slowly over a single shared USB bus! " Fedora magazine has further information on the new support for Raspberry Pi computers. * * * * * The Debian distribution tends to be conservative in nature and the project takes its time when adopting new features. The Debian developers have been considering support for UEFI's Secure Boot feature for a while now. Secure Boot is designed to prevent untrusted software from loading on the system at boot time and requires low-level software to be signed by a trusted authority. " The commonly-used approach of signing the kernel image creates some problems for Debian, though. The project's practice with signatures has been to sign metadata describing software, never the code itself. Debian does not want to put signing keys onto its 'buildd' systems; those systems are distributed around the globe and present any number of ways in which the keys could be exposed. Debian is also committed to reproducible builds, which cannot depend on secrets (or they would no longer be reproducible). As a result, Debian cannot automatically build signed kernel binaries in a single step. " This LWN article goes into the issues Debian faces when implementing Secure Boot support and how the project is dealing with the challenges. * * * * * The KDE project turned 20 years old this month and fans of the desktop environment have been celebrating in various ways. One developer decided to look back to the early days of KDE and tried to get version 1 of the desktop environment running on a modern Linux distribution. The result is KDE 1 running on the latest beta release of the Fedora distribution: " If you look on the screen shots, they are made with Spectacle, the new screen shot tool, running inside Fedora 25 Beta, from KDE 1... " A write-up of the developer's work, along with screen shots of the classic desktop environment running on Fedora, can be found in this blog post. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Differences in popularity



Looking-for-Linux-everywhere asks: Why do you think Linux is dominant everywhere expect the desktop? It's at the heart of most cell phones and tablets, but never took off on the desktop.



DistroWatch answers: I think there are a few reasons Linux has done well for itself in the mobile market. Linux is fast, flexible, stable. Plus it's free, which is a nice perk for companies who want to build on top of the Linux kernel. A company like Google can focus on building a user interface on top of Linux rather than building a new system entirely from scratch and that speeds up development.



I suspect one of the major reasons for Linux doing so well in mobile markets compared to the desktop/laptop market is timing. When smart phones and tablets came along, Linux was already a well established kernel. Developers knew Linux was reliable and time tested and they could build things with it. Companies could confidently create Linux-based products for the new-ish mobile market while there were relatively few entrenched players. Compare that to the desktop market where people had been using desktop computers and laptops for around a decade before Linux was even started. It took GNU/Linux a few years after that to catch on in technical circles and it was almost a decade after that before I could mention words like "Linux" or "Ubuntu" to non-technical peers and have people recognize the names. By that time, many people had been using Apple and Microsoft products for a few decades and a lot of software and systems relied on those proprietary operating systems.



What I think it really comes down to is: people (most people) rarely buy operating systems, they buy products. And most people will continue to use whatever software is on their devices when they buy them. Most PC retailers sell products with Windows pre-installed, most smart phones sell with Android pre-installed. As a result, those operating systems dominate their respective fields. If a new market emerges tomorrow with a new product people love and it ships with a brand new operating system, that system will become the dominate player in its market for years.



With all that being said, I feel it important to point out that while GNU/Linux has had an uphill battle against entrenched players in the desktop market, Linux has been doing well for itself. Rough estimates suggest around 2% of people run Linux on their desktop and laptop computers. That small percentage translates into tens of millions of people. Any product that has tens of millions of users should probably be considered a success. When we consider how few retailers sell computers bundled with Linux, I think it is fair to say Linux has been a very attractive option for desktop users. Tens of millions of users are switching away from the available default products to use Linux instead and that is an unusual occurrence. * * * * * For more questions and answers, visit our Questions and Answers archive.





Torrent Corner

Weekly Torrents



Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.



Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.



With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.



The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.



Operating System Torrent MD5 checksum SalentOS 1.0 SalentOS-Luppiu-1.0.1-2-amd64.iso d552d2912bb2540fba9c5849b8a7eab0 Solus 1.2.1 Solus-1.2.1.iso 1849b33d2dfeff2c542106c0712b41ce GParted Live 0.27.0 i686 gparted-live-0.27.0-1-i686.iso 5fa8118bf8828847aefec6d3c4eee194



Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.



Torrent Corner statistics:

Total torrents seeded: 249

Total data uploaded: 45.7TB

Released Last Week

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Opinion Poll

The governing of distributions



Linux distributions are governed in a wide variety of ways. Some projects have a single (often benevolent) dictator, others strive to make decisions through meritocracy. Some projects are run by commercial interests, others are essentially one-person projects and a few (like Debian) strive to maintain a democracy.



This week we would like to know which method of government, if any, you think works best. Is a top-down dictator the best choice for steering a distribution, should money and resources decide a project's direction or is a democracy the best way to produce a Linux distribution?



You can see the results of our previous poll on preferred download methods here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



The governing of distributions



I perfer a dictator with a vision: 287 (16%) I prefer a democracy for the people: 527 (30%) I prefer money/resources decides what is best: 60 (3%) I prefer a meritocracy: 406 (23%) I prefer the flexibility of one-person projects: 62 (4%) Other: 48 (3%) No preference: 355 (20%)