Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME

If you've been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of "convergence"—a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops.

And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.

In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases—you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure, there have been a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood. But by and large, Ubuntu's Unity 7 desktop has been in maintenance mode for several years.

That period of stagnation turned Ubuntu from one of the more interesting operating systems around into just another Linux distro barely worthy of mention.

This trend changes with 17.10. There are big changes—an entirely new default desktop in fact—but this release feels different not because the desktop has changed, but because Ubuntu feels like it once again has a sense of focus and direction. Even Canonical's letter-based naming scheme has arrived at a starting over point: "Artful Aardvark" is 17.10's nickname.

Desktop despondency

Desktop users paying close attention to Ubuntu may not like the renewed sense of focus and direction since much of the chatter, features, and tools coming out of Canonical right now are geared toward the server, container, and what the kids call the Internet of things (IoT) releases. While it's true that's where Canonical's bottom line lies (and without giving some attention to its paying customers there won't be a Canonical), that ignores the fact that Canonical put tremendous effort into transitioning away from Unity and building a replacement desktop out of GNOME. If Canonical really didn't care about the desktop, it wouldn't have put in any effort at all. It would have been much easier to just get rid of the desktop entirely, but that's not what happened.

In a blog post announcing 17.10, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth encourages users to "pick a desktop."

"We're using GNOME," he writes, "but we're the space where KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others come together to give users real and easy choice of desktops. And if you're feeling boned by the lack of Unity in open source, you might want to hop onto the channel and join those who are updating Unity7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 18.04."

That last bit hints at the future of desktop Ubuntu; so does a recent call for community input on a new Ubuntu desktop theme. These messages point to a new Ubuntu desktop, one that's much more community-centric. Canonical got rid of most of its design team, so in one sense it has no choice but to farm these things out to the community. But that's not the entire story here. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think Canonical's course reversal on "convergence" goes much deeper than just abandoning Unity. Canonical shows signs of also abandoning its sometimes rather rigid belief system as well. Gone are the days when feature requests were dismissed as "won't fix" simply because they conflicted with some designer's vision of how the desktop should work.

Instead, I believe that Ubuntu realized its mistake wasn't just pursuing convergence, but that convergence wasn't what its users wanted. I believe that the new Canonical, the new Ubuntu, is going to listen more closely to its community. I also think that the desktop release will eventually be spun off as a community-driven product only loosely affiliated with Canonical. Shuttleworth has already said Canonical is prepping for an IPO, hence the focus on money-making uses of Ubuntu (embedded, server, etc.). If that happens, the desktop will very likely slide to the side. There's plenty of prior art here—think Fedora and Red Hat, OpenSUSE and SUSE—and that's not necessarily at bad thing. In fact, it can be good. Keeping things separate allows the desktop to develop and grow largely independent of Canonical's bottom line.

So 17.10 is a major release for Ubuntu not just because it's a brand-new desktop experience for users, but also because it's likely a preview of what's coming in the next Long Term Support release (Ubuntu 18.04, coming April 2018).

Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME

The Unity desktop is gone, rather it's "available in the archives," which is to say it's gone for all but the diehard fans looking for an obscure cause to get behind. Instead Ubuntu 17.10 boots into GNOME Shell by default.

The first time you log in to 17.10, you'll notice that it doesn't look all that different from the last release. Ubuntu's developers have put considerable effort into making GNOME cosmetically similar to Unity. Unfortunately, in some important ways, the similarities are only skin deep. Much of Unity's appeal was in the small things that greatly improved its usability relative GNOME, for example the keyboard-driven HUD, the global menu, the nice notification system, and several other innovations present in Unity are also "available in the archives," which is to say, they're gone.

How much this matters to your experience with Ubuntu 17.10 depends on how much you used any of these things and how well GNOME plugins can mimic them.

Let's start with the bad news: your transition to GNOME will be painful if you were a heavy user of the HUD features in Unity. There is no GNOME plugin to pick up the slack (there are some admirable efforts underway, but in my testing none of them was ready for prime time). Worse, this is the kind of feature request that will have you hounded right off the GNOME developer mailing list, so don't even bother. GNOME will never have a HUD; undo your muscle memory and move on, or stick with Ubuntu 17.04 until it reaches end of life in January 2018. (To stick with Unity, Ubuntu 16.04 represents the most recent LTS version, as it'll reach end-of-life in April 2021.)

Users who wish to remain with Unity are better advised to use Ubuntu 16.04, the most recent LTS version, which will reach end-of-life in April, 2021.

If the HUD wasn't your go-to tool in Unity, then the transition to GNOME will be less painful. In fact, most of what Unity could do can be imitated with GNOME plugins. Want Ubuntu-style notifications and indicators? There's an extension for that. Want a Global Menu? There's an extension for that as well, but alas, it doesn't really work. Want a working Global Menu? Ubuntu 17.04 is for you.

Still, Ubuntu 17.10 is at least visually similar to its predecessors, which helps smooth the transition to GNOME somewhat. And since Unity was built on top of the same GTK libraries, GNOME components, and GNOME apps, most of the apps and interfaces you'll see and need to find in Ubuntu 17.10 are either identical or very similar to their Unity counterparts.

In some cases, however, even the familiar will feel a little strange. Files, the default GNOME file manager app, is a good example of this. For Unity 7, Ubuntu used an older version of Files and heavily patched it to add some functionality that had long since been deleted by the GNOME developers. With 17.10, Files is up to date, and those features are gone. One thing that Ubuntu did manage to hack in there is support for the desktop as a place to put stuff. The GNOME developers apparently consider the desktop just a wallpaper display tool, but with Ubuntu you can actually put launchers, folders, and files on your desktop. That should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users.

The top bar in GNOME behaves a little differently than the top bar in Unity. It has app indicators, status messages, network controls, and user sessions like Unity, but the top bar also adds a different app menu, a calendar applet in the center of the screen. There's also something like a global menu, minus the menu. When apps are maximized, the name of the app appears in the top menu along with one item menu (quit is generally your only option). A couple of apps have a few extra items in their menus—Terminal and Files for example—but it's a far cry from Unity.

There's one other thing you'll notice in this release: the window management buttons are back on the right side of each title bar. Back when Unity first arrived, Ubuntu moved the buttons to the left (or wrong) side of the window in the name of innovation. Actually, there was a pretty good reason for the change. When you made a window full screen in Unity, the buttons became part of the top bar, and you can't do that when buttons are on the right side. But with the unified top bar now a thing of the past, there's no reason to have the buttons on the left side. If you really liked them over there, you can change the setting in the GNOME Tweak tool.

Once you get past the differences with Unity, there's much to like about this release. GNOME Shell is different from Unity, but it's not necessarily worse. It's certainly a pretty desktop, especially if you swap out the default theme that ships with 17.10 for something a little sleeker (I happen to like the dark variant of the Arc theme), something Ubuntu itself is planning to do before 18.04 LTS arrives. The default GNOME apps are generally the same as what you had in 17.04, but as noted above, some are quite a bit newer (Files and Terminal are the most notable of those).

For those already well familiar with GNOME, Ubuntu 17.10 ships with GNOME 3.26, which is notable for its improved, streamlined search view, a new settings app (called Control Center rather than Settings), and full text search support for Files. There's also an interesting feature buried in the GNOME Web app: the GNOME browser no one uses. It now supports Firefox Sync, which means you can sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs between Firefox and Web. So if you want to see what Web is like, now you can at least do it and keep everything you've got set up in Firefox.

In the end, what you get with GNOME in 17.10 is close enough to Unity that it doesn't take more than a couple of days to wrap your head around the differences and get on with your work.

It's worth noting that in my testing, GNOME uses slightly more RAM and CPU than Unity on the same hardware doing the same things. The increase is only about 10 percent more on the RAM, and, let's face it, neither of them are lightweight desktops. If you want something light, try i3.