Ubuntu 18.04 LTS → First Impressions

The release we’ve all been waiting for. Codenamed “Bionic Beaver”, this release marks one of the most iconic events in Ubuntu history.

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.

I think they’re trying to show us a “Bionic Beaver” in the default wallpaper but this is really really weird, and cute. I’m not sure.

The Settings panel and the Files application now sport this sweet new look with in-line icons.

Acquiring some sweet Gnome Features

Night Light
An inbuilt blue light filter that ships with GNOME and provides a neat alternative to redshift-gtk/flux.

Notifications
Clicking the Date on the Top Bar opens up a combined Calendar + Notification Area.
Unifying the two is an improvement, IMO.

Wayland/X.org picker
The much-improved login screen lets us pick between Wayland and X.org.
Yes, BOTH. Hide your pitchforks everyone!

Linux 4.15 gains

AMDGPU DC
Stellar news for all AMD users, the new display stack has been merged.
Huge performance and compatibility gains.

Intel Coffee Lake Compatibility
These CPU’s are now considered completely stable on Linux 4.15.
Well, it’s 2018 and we need this.

Other 18.04 LTS improvements

• Thunderbolt 3 support (wow)
• Python 3.6
• Snap apps (default)

Perfomance

A usual sentiment thrown around with the word GNOME is ‘ugh, so laggy’ but this isn’t always the case and certainly isn’t an issue with Ubuntu 18.04.
On my ULV i5, the DE is fast and responsive but I’m not a fan of GNOME animations.

A tip for people like me. The DE feels incredibly rapid with Animations disabled, at-least for me. So you could disable animations from the Tweaks app if you prefer instant transitions.

sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool

The tweak tool lets you fine-tune every aspect of your new Ubuntu install.

Verdict

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has pleasantly surprised me and surpassed my expectations.

• It certainly has more polish in comparison to previous Unity variants and looks much better out of the box even with the default Advaita theme. Not only is the UI better, but serious thought has also been given to improving the Installer and the Help Wizard.
• It brings performance improvements under the hood, better AMD and NVIDIA support, Linux 4.15, Livepatch, an emoji picker (lol), Snap support and ships with newer software.

So, should you install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS?

Yes.