Gnome desktop coming to Ubuntu :-(

Unity vs Gnome

I hate to think of myself as a tech Luddite.  Being an Ubuntu Linux fan has caused familiarization with the Unity desktop.  Recently, I have been playing with 17.10 to see what is coming in 18.04 LTS.  I never thought I would defend the Unity desktop as my earliest Linux days were split between the Gnome and KDE desktops.  But I wish I had my old Unity back. Yes, I know I can return to it in 17.10 – but it is becoming mostly unsupported.  Incremental scaling is essential with today’s 4K monitors.  Or I need Lasik.  Uber-Lasik in my case.

Why I like LTS.1

I never actually run the first point release of an LTS version.  I waited for 16.04.1 to get anything real live on 16.04 LTS.  It seems the Gnome desktop has a big memory leak and it likely will not be fixed in the 18.04 LTS initial release in April.

OK, scratch moving to 18.04 LTS in April on anything I need.  I already am a desktop memory hog as it is and finally upgraded my new desktop machine to 32GB of RAM.

A Gnome future in Ubuntu

I know this is all for the good.  That change thing.  Moving to Gnome in this case.  It is far more widely supported and used across more variants of Linux.   I used to be a CentOS champion as I loosened the evil grip of RedHat subscription fees back in my AOL cost cutting days.  I have since become almost an exclusive Ubuntu home data center.  Seems I will be straddling Gnome and Unity for a year or so.  One other word of caution, the Gnome 3.26 desktop (used in 17.10) does not truly support incremental UI scaling yet.  This is a problem for people like me with a 4K laptop screen or large 4K desktops.  There is a workaround.   However, it is not clear if fractional scaling will make it into Gnome 3.28 which ships with  18.04 LTS.

Happy times.  It is really hard to see my shell windows in a non-scaled up Gnome desktop on a 4K laptop screen.

Ted Cahall