“Ubuntu switches from swap partitions to using swap files by default. This means a simpler partition layouts during installation, disk space savings and easier adjustment of swap size” -- interesting, was always unclear about the performance difference between a partition and a swap file.<p>the LXD and Snap are fun to watch, Canonical always does things a bit different here and there.
The new Budgie flavor looks really tempting:
<a href="https://ubuntubudgie.org/features" rel="nofollow">https://ubuntubudgie.org/features</a>
I'm sure this is a good release, but Ubuntu itself is going through some serious turmoil at the moment. Seems to me like there's a good chance it's going to wither on the vine in the next five years. What's worse, there don't seem to be many alternatives if you're looking for a "just works" desktop experience.
The mention of containers and Snaps in this release makes me wonder if Ubuntu isn't moving in the direction of general containerization of the system - server or desktop. It's certainly possible to run containers on the desktop, as this experiment shows:<p><a href="https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...</a><p>Her system was an early experiment, though, and seems like it had a more than a bit of admin needs - in other words, it was meant for general users. But she made some good points on why containers on the desktop could be useful, and from what I understand, Snaps is a part of this kind of idea.<p>Maybe I'm wrong - but if I'm right, this could be a big deal, though hopefully it's so transparent as to be something you don't really notice.
This release tells me that Ubuntu has completely given up on being a desktop Linux distribution. There's mention of only one thing: containers. Containers, containers, containers. No shell improvements, no application improvements, nothing else. So... I guess I'm glad I've moved over to Fedora.
Didn't look much at the features because I was taken aback by the most important point - they've reached the Z in their naming scheme already!<p>What comes next, three A's, or maybe something else?
I just had a random thought. If ubuntu really wanted to push the desktop forward they would focus on web developers and some first class tooling around react (preloaded extensions or editor support).
Unfortunately (and this is more general for the Linux world) the filesystem in use is still ext4, which has been part of Linux since 2008 (almost 10 years now!). ZFS is more an more usable in Linux ( apt install -y zfs ) but it would be really good to have it by default and available for the root partition.<p>Just moments ago I set up fusecompress in a DigitalOcean droplet to compress an .rbenv/versions and node_modules directory. It would be better if the filesystem supported transparent compression by default (zfs does, and I think brtfs)