Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark released

32-bit installer images are no longer provided for Ubuntu Desktop.<p>The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity.<p>On supported systems, Wayland is now the default display server. The older display server is still available: just choose Ubuntu on Xorg from the cog on the log in screen.<p>GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager.<p>The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.<p>Window control buttons are back on the right for the first time since 2010.<p>Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6.<p>The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience.<p>Additionally, there are quite a few &quot;Known issues&quot; for Desktop that made me dare not to upgrade. I will stay with 16.04 and wait for 18.04 then.

&gt; ifupdown has been deprecated in favor of netplan and is no longer present on new installs [...]<p>&gt; Given that ifupdown is no longer installed by default, its commands will not be present: ifup and ifdown are thus unavailable, replaced by ip link set $device up and ip link set $device down.<p>Sad to see this go; I always use ifup, ifdown and ifconfig. Yes, they&#x27;re old and clunky tools but in a way they are the staple of a proper Linux installation to me.<p>Not to mention that it&#x27;s quite a handful to write out &quot;ip link set $device up&quot;.

Pay attention to the 2nd dot point under known issues. This release uses Wayland, and that has profound implications for screenshot, streaming and remote desktop-ing.<p>The Wayland protocol apparently made some bold decisions to enforce security through isolation, and apart from the compositor it is all but impossible for anything to sneak a peak at what other programs are doing visually. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see if that causes users a problem.

Wow, they&#x27;ve abandoned Unity, LightDM, and Mir (for desktop at least) in favor of Gnome, GDM, and Wayland. They must have poured unspeakable man-years of engineering into those projects, and have now abandoned them in favor of what everyone else was doing all along.<p>Does anyone know to what extent these were pure engineering decisions vs. a scaling back of ambitions (and budget?) for the Ubuntu project as a whole?

A few notes:<p><pre><code> - this is the first release supporting Surface devices out of the box (due the recent `linux-firmware` package) - people using PPA may have some troubles, since without tweaking, PPAs with obsolete keys are rejected - ack grep is not included (yet?), due to build issues with perl</code></pre>

Obviously this is significant because this is the first release with Gnome 3 instead of Unity. I actually liked Unity a lot but also like Gnome 3, what are people&#x27;s thoughts?

Release notes:<p><pre><code> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.ubuntu.com&#x2F;ArtfulAardvark&#x2F;ReleaseNotes</code></pre>

Unrelated but how does one forward apps over SSH with Wayland?

Hmm I really liked ifconfig I hate seeing it gone.

The time, labor and money spent for unity in the end went to waste.

First Ubuntu to work out of the box on the 2013 (trashcan) Mac Pro I use at work. I&#x27;m seriously impressed!

I read that Canonical didn&#x27;t like having to fiddle with lightdm to make it work and play well with GNOME shell, and thus Ubuntu 17.10 comes with gdm3. My upgrade went south, so I installed Kubuntu. It&#x27;s using sddm, which I understand is the successor to kdm. Now I find that Gnome under X just hangs. Does GNOME shell require either gdm or something hacked as Canonical did lightdm to work?

Really sad that they were bullied into getting rid of unity. No global menu in gnome is a joke. Feels like going back in time.

Congratulations on the release.<p>It&#x27;s too bad that gnupg 2.2 didn&#x27;t make the cut, at least it will be in the upcoming LTS release.

Too much noise to signal on this thread. Too many people promoting both Fedora and Wayland with cookie cutter statements about &#x27;improvement&#x27; with no supporting points. Readers can see it for themselves. This reduces the value of HN.

Thought they were gonna go with Aaronic Aardvark and then just stop updating because there are no words starting with &quot;Bb&quot;.

I wonder if Canonical will also release 17.10 as a Windows Store WSL app or stick to LTS releases and wait until 18.04 for an update.

Has anyone tried installing a window manager or another DE? I’m curious if GDM and Wayland might cause issues for X11 WMs.

No fractional scaling =&gt; no deal, better luck next time. I can&#x27;t use this on my X1 _or_ on my 4K desktop display: everything is too large at 2x and too small at 1x. Unity supported this near perfectly.