This week we’ve been battling baloon fighting robots, discuss the Ubuntu 17.10 release, bring you some command line lurve and go over your feedback.
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It’s Season Ten Episode Thirty-Four of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
In this week’s show:
- We discuss what we’ve been up to recently:
- Mark has been battling baloon fighting micro:bit powered robots.
- We discuss the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release.
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We share a Command Line Lurve:
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ubuntu-drivers– List/install driver packages for Ubuntu.
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ubuntu-drivers list # Show all driver packages which apply to the current system.
ubuntu-drivers devices # Show all devices which need drivers, and which packages apply to them.
ubuntu-drivers autoinstall # Install drivers that are appropriate for automatic installation.
ubuntu-drivers debug # Print all available information and debug data about drivers.
- And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!
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This weeks cover image is taken from Wikimedia.
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That’s all for this week! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.
- Join us in the Ubuntu Podcast Chatter group on Telegram
I never was a big fan of Unity – and that’s an understatement 🙂 – so I was not sad to see the dash go away in Ubuntu 17.10. The annoying left side dock/launcher has become less annoying since I moved it to the bottom of the screen. Now, if only those icons could be centred …
Anyway, everyone will have their personal opinion about the desktop so let’s not start a “it was better before ! / no it’s better now !” war.
I have tried a few things and installed my regular pack of programs for my daily use, and so far I had no problems with Wayland. I will try and install more exotic software but I don’t expect much problem based on what I’ve seen so far.
My main complaint would be a slow boot, much slower than Ubuntu Gnome or the distro that shall not be named. But that might only be an apparent slowness, as I haven’t measured boot time with a Swiss made stop watch. However, slow boot seem to be a constant on every Ubuntu proper versions.
So to conclude, I am pleased with the desktop change, I am sure I can find extensions to fit the desktop in a way I like it ; I did not have any problem so far with the display server, and I can properly use 17.10 as my main machine so far.
Yannick, a.k.a. the French guy from Switzerland
Thank you guys for everything you provide.
I’d like to comment on the spike in Linux user base that everybody has been talking about recently.
See that spike? that was me installing Ubuntu on every machine I can put my hands on except my wife’s laptop of course 🙂
Recently, I developed the habit of running around the house with a USB stick chasing my kids threatening to install Ubuntu on them if they misbehave.
Now, seriously, I had been using Ubuntu since the daily images came out and now I’ve been on the final release since day 1. I love everything in it. However, there are a few cons in my experience on a Lenovo Thinkpad:
1- the default theme is cold and boring especially those rough window buttons and progress bars. That’s why I use the Numix or Pop themes.
2- the Ubuntu software center is deeply broken for me. It always shows a timeout error where snaps are taking too much to return results even if don’t search. Also the search rarely works and when it does snaps are mixed with debs and some results don’t show while I can see them with “apt search” and install them. The installation progress bar finishes then starts over again while it should show “downloading..” then “installing..” I think.
3- the last issue is that some times when I click on a folder in the file manager I get immediately forced to log out without any prompt to save my work. It happens less often now after an update.
I use elementary OS and had trouble getting used to those big fat header bars, but now I really love them. They are a great place to add buttons, search fields and other functionality. In a well designed application, it can actually make a better use of space. Take Nautilus, for example: navigation, search, layout options, and curren path are all in the header and effectively take up no vertical space.
I think the main problem comes with applications that don’t take advantage of their functionality and just ship ugly (and messy) menus. That said, I do think there are some types of complex applications that really don’t translate well and need menus and all that stuff.
So I say: stop worrying and learn to love fat header bars.