Submitted by Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) has been officially released today. This Ubuntu version is supported until January 2020. For a longer supported release, use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead, which is supported until April 2023.
The new Ubuntu 19.04 ships with Linux 5.0 and the latest stable GNOME 3.32, which includes significant performance improvements, experimental fractional scaling for HiDPI screens, and other updates.
The new release also includes Tracker (file index and search) by default, allows users to install proprietary Nvidia drivers from the Ubuntu installer, and much more.
I’m using the Kubuntu variant on my desktop, and it seems pretty solid so far. The Xubuntu variant has also seen considerable work.
I installed it on my Mac laptop and I love the look but it’s irritating how difficult it is to install development libraries such as Qt5. I installed the Ubuntu software app and there was no app or section to install development libraries; for Qt5 the nearest thing was Qt Creator which I don’t use. I have OpenSUSE installed on another computer and finding development libs on YaST is easy; there are sections: Qt5 development, KDE development, Ruby development and so on. Ubuntu (and Debian) should have been taking notice of this over the past couple of decades because it’s always been this way. No doubt there’s a website somewhere telling me which packages to install to get the whole development package but it should be in the package manager.
Synaptic still works wonders over Gnome Software.
On Ubuntu you just “sudo apt install qt5-default”
Great release, especially for GNOME when compared to previous releases. All work on making GNOME faster has really come a long way and it shows.
If you’re using Kubuntu you’re probably much better with KDE Neon: https://neon.kde.org/
Ubuntu has never been better.