It’s been a heck of a month for Canonical, Ubuntu Linux‘s parent company.
The company dropped its smartphone and tablet plans. This, in turn, ended to its plans to make Unity its universal default interface. Instead, Gnome will become Ubuntu’s once and future desktop. Days later, long-time CEO Jane Silber resigned in favor of the company’s founder Mark Shuttleworth.
Despite all that, Canonical hit its mark for delivering the latest release of its flagship operating system: Ubuntu 17.04.
Let’s start with the desktop. For now, Unity 7 remains Ubuntu’s default desktop. You can, of course, run it with your choice of other desktops. Canonical officially supports Budgie with Ubuntu Budgie; KDE with Kubuntu; LXDE with Lubuntu; MATE with Ubuntu MATE; and Xfce with Xubuntu.
Unity 8, which was to be Ubuntu’s master display, has been retired. You can still run it. It works best with a touch screen. Enjoy it while you can. It will never be Ubuntu’s desktop.
Either way, the default Unity 7 or the incompletely realized Unity 8, Ubuntu 17.04 remains an excellent desktop. It comes, as ever, with the latest open-source end-user programs. These include: Firefox 52 for web browsing; Thunderbird 45 for e-mail; LibreOffice 5.3 for an office suite; and Rhythmbox 3.4.1 for music.
I tested Ubuntu 17.04 in an Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) on my main Linux Mint system. I also installed it on my primary Ubuntu PC. This is an ASUS desktop with an 3.4GHz third-generation i7 3770 processor, and 8GBs of RAM. Ubuntu runs like a champ on this box.
Under the hood, this edition of Ubuntu uses the Linux 4.10 kernel. This means it supports the AMD Ryzen and Intel Kaby Lake processors. Microsoft, in stark comparison, won’t fully support Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on either high-end CPU.
This Ubuntu version has also replaced Unix/Linux’s ancient swap partition with a swap file. The net effect should be to make Ubuntu a bit faster in situations where the system is overburdened with applications and has to resort to using drive space in place of memory.