Switching to Gnome

On release day, Ubuntu 18.04 ships with Gnome 3.28 and drops Unity for not being a sustainable investment in Canonical’s path to an IPO.

“Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable” — Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical

A moment of silence for every Unity 8 dev.

Installer

The new installer greets the user with a spanking new feature to pick b/w a normal installation and a minimal installation. The minimal install removes ~80 packages (libreoffice, thunderbird etc.) from the build and uses ~500 MB lesser.

First Boot

The Gnome environment manages to preserve the Ubuntu ardor by keeping the side launcher but adds an Application viewer (bottom-left) and an Activities view (top-left). Looks pretty damn neat to me.