Ubuntu 16.04: A desktop for Linux diehards

Every two years a release of Ubuntu is designated Long-Term Support (LTS). Ubuntu 16.04, code-named Xenial Xerus, is the latest in that line. LTS releases are supported for five years instead of the usual nine months, but they also have less obvious implications. LTS releases are usually geared toward the enterprise, which means they generally include fewer new features and more testing. Both qualities are attractive to risk-averse companies running production software on Ubuntu servers, but provide comparatively little to the desktop user.

However, Xenial Xerus bucks this trend with a handful of new features and some welcome improvements. With the new app store, the stand-alone calendar, and the movable Launcher, Xenial might be one of the more feature-rich releases in a few years. In this review, I’ll start by walking through these new pieces and improvements, and end with a look at how Ubuntu stacks up — in terms of installation, ease, features, and so on — against other desktop operating systems you might be familiar with.

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GNOME Software Center

Not so long ago, the Ubuntu story for software installations was far from clear. If you wanted a GUI to install new software, you could choose from one of at least seven options that came by default. If you think that’s a lot, you’re right.

Ubuntu engineers recognized this was a problem and began rolling out Ubuntu Software Center in late 2009. New features and improvements were incrementally released, but active development started to lose steam. As a result, a flavor of Ubuntu called Ubuntu MATE (as in “yerba mate,” the plant) dropped Ubuntu Software Center from its release late last year. This brought up questions of what would happen to Ubuntu Software Center upstream. Soon after, it was announced that Ubuntu Software Center would be dropped from Ubuntu in favor of GNOME Software Center.

GNOME Software Center has a relatively clean UI and certainly gets the job done. A landing page offers featured software, browsing by category, and a search bar. When viewing an app, you can see ratings and reviews, but you’re not able to sort reviews at all and the default ordering isn’t clear. There also isn’t any persistent navigation other than a Back button, which means there’s no “going home,” only “going back.” If you’ve clicked around a bit and want to get back to the landing page, there isn’t a reliable, one-click path.

Still, if you choose to run Linux on your desktop machine, there’s a good chance you’ll spend a considerable amount of time installing software from the terminal. The drawbacks of the GNOME Software Center might even go unnoticed.

Dash “spyware” off by default

For years, Ubuntu’s Launcher has included Dash, a search tool. Dash has been controversial since 2012 because, in addition to searching locally and in the software center, it would also bring up search results from Amazon and other retailers. This spurred a lot of debate in the community because it effectively armed third parties with any search terms you typed when using Dash. All search terms were anonymized by proxying through Canonical’s servers. Nevertheless, the feature was dubbed “spyware” by Richard Stallman, and many community members remained concerned.

In Xenial, this controversial feature is still available but is off by default. If you want to be able to get results from Amazon and other third parties in your Dash search, simply open System Settings and click on Security & Privacy. You’ll see the option to enable online search results in the search tab.

Movable Launcher

Historically, Ubuntu’s Launcher has been presented as a vertical bar on the left of the screen. After years of requests, the Launcher can finally be moved to the bottom of the screen, à la OS X and Windows. This might seem like a basic feature — it is. But it’s also a big deal, considering the request has been an open issue for more than five years.

Unfortunately, relocating the Launcher currently isn’t configurable from the System Settings GUI. Instead, you’ll have to jump into the terminal or download software like dconf Editor to change the setting. Lack of GUI-level support is also evident if you use the autohide feature of the Launcher. The only options are still the left side of the screen and the upper-left corner.

Native calendar

While a calendar application has been included in Ubuntu as a part of other apps (such as the Evolution mail client), Xenial marks the first release that ships with a stand-alone calendar. The decision was made in part because so many users rely on Web-based mail and don’t need an integrated solution like Evolution.

Ubuntu chose gnome-calendar, which is a Spartan application with minimal functionality. The application has only month and year views, but not the hour view common to many other calendar apps. Due to this coarse granularity, adding new events requires a user to explicitly type in times, as opposed to selecting a time-range in a day and adding a name to it.

On the other hand, you can connect external calendars, like your Google calendar, into gnome-calendar. This by itself isn’t groundbreaking, but when you pair it with the integration into the Unity top panel, it gets interesting. The Unity top panel is where program menus exist, as well as the time, networking, and other system-level menus. When you click on the time, a drop-down appears with a condensed calendar view and a list of upcoming events. I can easily imagine using the gnome-calendar as a predominantly read-only application almost exclusively from the top panel.

My only qualm is that (as of the final beta version I’ve been test-driving) the Google integration doesn’t work. The UI for adding an online account still references Evolution, the all-in-one mail app that used to ship with Ubuntu but isn’t present in Xenial. This may be resolved by the time Xenial becomes generally available, or we may be waiting for a patch release.

With the new features covered and out of the way, let’s take a look at Xenial holistically.

Installation and setup

Canonical recommends installing Xenial from a CD, but fewer and fewer laptops ship with optical drives these days. There are alternatives for setting up a bootable USB drive on both Mac OS X and Windows, but both require installing custom software or spending time in the terminal.

After taking an optional test-drive of the OS from the bootable CD/USB, the installation is fairly straightforward. After installing Ubuntu, you’ll want to download proprietary graphics drivers, depending on your system. If you run Xenial on a Mac, you may need to get Wi-Fi working. That can be problematic because it will require downloading content from the network and you might not have an Ethernet connection or the adapter handy. There are ways of sneakernetting the required drivers via a thumb drive, but either way be prepared to jump headfirst into the world of Linux on a desktop.

Ease of use

Ubuntu does well in basic usability. The user interface elements are close enough to Windows and OS X in appearance and behavior that first-timers should be able to intuit numerous daily tasks.

The dock on the left holds many needed applications by default and includes a button to search for documents, applications, and more (such as Dash, mentioned earlier). The application menus are at the top of the screen to the left, similar to OS X. As with several settings in Ubuntu, if you prefer to have your menus in the window they correspond to, you’re only a few clicks away from making the change. Time, calendar, and user management utilities are on the top-right screen, continuing the parallels to OS X. These user interface metaphors are almost universal and will be easy to follow by Windows and Mac users.

When it comes to adding features or changing behavior that isn’t represented in a settings panel, Xenial does little to prevent you from getting your hands dirty in the terminal. It also does little to help you. Advanced tuning and configuration is not going to be an experience with training wheels. If you muck around with settings and configuration on the command line, you run the risk of breaking things. This isn’t much different than playing around in the Windows registry, for example, but you’ll probably need to delve into this level of computing more frequently than you ever thought to in Windows.

This by itself shouldn’t deter you, especially if you load Xenial on Ubuntu Certified hardware. A lot of the pain I experienced with previous versions of Ubuntu had to do with running it on uncertified hardware, but that was a deliberate choice by my employer: If you can get it to work on an uncertified laptop, you can get it to work anywhere.

Features

While there are nearly infinite possibilities for augmenting the operating system in open source offerings like Ubuntu, I’m going to restrict the discussion to features available out of the box. These are the system-provided applications and interactions that the OS designers felt should be required, knowing that customizability is close at hand. You should also understand that the pre-installed software is often a patchwork of packages widely available to any distribution.

Like Windows and OS X, Xenial ships with a typical collection of default applications, including a media player, photo management and photo editing software, and small games. Unlike Windows, Xenial also ships with a default productivity suite, LibreOffice. With Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, and Impress for presentations, LibreOffice is a fair imitation of Microsoft Office without the price tag.

Some LibreOffice features lag behind their Microsoft counterparts. Mail merge, for example, began supporting spreadsheets as a data source in only the most recent version. If you share documents with Microsoft users who rely on advanced features, LibreOffice may not be up to the task.

As for nonapplication interactions, a few are worth mentioning. First is multitouch support. Many users have come to embrace the broader range of interaction possible with multitouch, and Xenial delivers plenty of multitouch shortcuts. The shortcuts are mostly related to window navigation and are superhandy once you get used to them. Two shortcuts I use regularly: Double-tap with three fingers to switch to the previous window, and four-finger tap to show Dash.

Another nice interaction is easy window tiling. If you want two windows side by side, simply drag one to the right side of the screen until you see an outline. Let go and the window resizes to match the outline. Drag the other window to the left and you have a perfectly equal split. Don’t like to drag and drop? There are keyboard shortcuts for resizing windows.

The last interaction I’ll point out is searching within Unity Spread. Unity is the desktop shell that provides the look, feel, and functionality of many user interface elements in Xenial, such as the Launcher and the top menu bar, also known as the Unity Panel. Spread is a feature similar to Mission Control in OS X, where thumbnails of all open windows are tiled on the screen, so you can easily pick out a window visually.

Spread takes this a step further with two killer features. First, you have the option to view all open windows, or open only the windows for a particular application. This prefiltering is an efficient way of narrowing your search if you already know you’re looking for a browser window, for example. Second, when you view your windows in Spread, you can use text search to filter even further based on the title of the window.

Though I said I would discuss out-of-the-box features only, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to discuss application availability. While many open source alternatives are available for proprietary software, some may not do the job depending on your situation. GIMP is a powerful, free image manipulation program, but if you’re a designer living in the world of Photoshop you’re going to have a rough time.

The light behind the clouds here is that you can run many Windows programs using an application called Wine. Wine is an open source translation layer between Windows API calls and POSIX calls that enables users to run Windows software on Linux distributions. It’s much more performant than a virtual machine, but varies in its compatibility on an app-by-app basis. Check out Wine’s application database if you’re curious about support for an app you can’t live without. If all else fails, you can always spin up a virtual machine running Windows, but you’ll suffer the customary performance hit.

Manageability

While perhaps unconventional, it’s not impossible to find a whole company or division that uses Ubuntu Desktop. Canonical offers a package called Ubuntu Advantage, a bundling of professional support and a systems management tool called Landscape. Landscape provides features that help you manage software and security updates, restrict application installation, and provide custom or private software repositories to your fleet of machines (both desktops and servers). Groups and tags help manage large deployments easily through the use of different profiles. The monitoring feature lets you see trends in system metrics, like memory usage over time, both by single users or aggregates.

Security

When it comes to any Linux distribution, security is an easy A because viruses are virtually nonexistent on Linux systems. Many factors play into this benefit, from the user permissions model to the manner in which software is installed from trusted repositories. That said, as a desktop user you can still do your part to protect those around you by installing antivirus software to scan email attachments before you forward them. You also might want to scan Windows applications you run with Wine. Luckily, there are plenty of free and open source antivirus utilities.

For data security, Xenial ships with Backups, a simple-to-use graphical tool that does what you might expect. It can be configured to back up all or part of your system on a scheduled basis. A tremendously useful feature of Backups is the ability to set local or remote targets. Install two extra packages on the command line (python-boto and python-cloudfiles) and those remote targets expand to include Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Rackspace Cloud Files.

Compatibility

Canonical has spent considerable effort partnering with hardware providers to ensure a positive experience with hardware compatibility. You can find hundreds of desktops and laptops preloaded with Ubuntu and factory certified. For a smooth first experience, this is definitely the way to go, but many noncertified machines will run Ubuntu fine, too. Xenial is so fresh that the list of certified machines for it doesn’t exist yet, but you can check here for updates and to get a taste of the certified machines for prior LTS releases.

Xenial performs well with peripheral devices. Many basic devices like printers, scanners, and webcams are simply plug and play. Xenial also ships with a system settings panel for configuring Wacom tablets. I’ve hooked up mine and used it in GIMP with no problem. It doesn’t have the nice-looking cheat-sheet overlay I’m used to with OS X, but the actual tablet interactions work well. If connecting more specialized peripherals is mission critical, I’d search for Xenial compatibility first.

All in all, there are a lot more updates to Xenial Xerus than Ubuntu users may have expected from an LTS release. Even more surprising is the nature of some updates, particularly the requests that have been pending for half a decade (moving the Launcher and removing third-party searches). As a total package, Xenial is a compelling, powerful operating system — even before you factor in that it’s free and open source.

If you’re used to Windows or OS X operating system updates, you may be underwhelmed, but die-hard Ubuntu users will know that Xenial is special.