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.
