Ubuntu 19.10 is unusual for an October Ubuntu release in that I would call it a must-have upgrade. While it retains some of the experimental elements Ubuntu’s fall releases have always been known for, the speed boosts to GNOME alone make this release well worth your time. If you prefer to stick with more stable releases, most of what’s new in 19.10 will eventually be backported to 19.04 and possibly even the last LTS release, 18.04.
Still, unless you’re unflinchingly committed to the stability of LTS releases, I see no reason not to upgrade. As I said at the start, Ubuntu 19.10 is quite possibly the best release of Ubuntu Canonical has ever delivered. It’s well worth upgrading if you’re already an Ubuntu user, and it’s well worth trying even if you’re not.
The speed improvements to GNOME are incredibly enticing. I’m a Mint/Cinnamon user, but this is definitely intriguing me.
Some poor soul is going to install this on his/her netbook only to realise power management is crap and having their hopes dashed, negating any usability benefits from the extra speed and then some more…
I actually want to put this on a USB stick for my Eee PC I just got recently. I don’t expect it to run like a modern machine, nor have the best battery life ever. I just want it to be usable for taking notes, basic web browsing, and simpler tasks.
If it can sleep/resume from sleep, and last an hour or two on battery, then I’m not really concerned about power management otherwise.
For most things, I’ll be on a Core i7 + 16GB RAM + SSD (Sata 3) machine or my phone anyways.
So, I welcome such improvements, even if they’re not optimal as of yet.
I have a Eee PC (1215b) and..yeah you aren’t gonna like Ubuntu on a Eee PC. The problem is with netbooks you HAVE to have hardware decode working because the CPUs are weak and when it comes to Linux? As Thom found out on his laptop it can be a royal PITA to get working.
I ended up giving up and going to Win 10 as while I’m not the greatest fan of Win 10 the hardware decode works and I can watch streaming video without the netbook cooking my lap and the fans maxed out.
I’ll give it a crack on an old laptop of the Core Duo variety, I’ve been trying to up-cycle hardware over the last few years to find new applications for machines that are mostly obsolete due to performance issues but otherwise working perfectly.
Actually, we’ve also found Win 10 to be a significant improvement over earlier versions of Windows on the old hardware, the main issue we run across is security problems on old network or USB hardware. I was hoping newer versions of MacOS would do the same for old Macbooks but alas I found the opposite, so some have been re-task using a linux or BSD flavour.
In my case most are no longer used as portable devices so battery life is a non-issue when rescuing ancient hardware. Most are being deployed to collect and deliver data in environments you wouldn’t normally leave a laptop and have to use an expensive industrial PC. We don’t care about the risks or reliability because they are effectively free!
“speed improvements to GNOME”
What Gnome are you talking about?!?
The same Gnome that can barely fuction on a 32-bit processor that’s fully capable of running Windows XP,Gnome 2, and Windows 7 with little or no problems?
*THAT* GNOME?!?
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
To be fair KDE is just as bad…. software since around 2000 has gotten exponentially bad.
I mean it shouldn’t take an act of congress to slap some pixels on the screen…
No, KDE is nowhere near as slow as GNOME. For one thing, sddm doesn’t run a full copy of the KDE stack, and then *keep it around* for the entirety of a login. KDE runs fine on my ThinkPad E550, but GNOME has run like a dog on everything I’ve been daft enough to try it on.
Your experience is old. KDE is hella fast now – very nearly as fast as XFCE, (which admittedly is a bit slower now that it’s GTK3).
Oh lets boot up KDE on a system without opengl acceleration and see how “fast” it is… none of the modern desktop environments are either fast or lightweight compared to the provided features.
XFCE use to be under 5MB installed… then it ballooned up into the tens of MB with no additional features.
Consider for a moment that modern PCs are fast enough to run old fully featured desktops purely in software emulation extremely fast, and then consider the slowdowns you experience on a day to day basis…..
I use XFCE (Xubuntu), so who gives a flip if Gnome is faster. 😛 Actually, part of the reason I use XFCE is because Gnome was so slow. Only part, though. I still have no intention of going back.
JLF65,
I use XFCE too, mostly because I appreciate it’s minimalism, but it does seem to lack refinements and can be buggy at times, some widgets don’t work flawlessly, etc. One thing on my wish list for it is application menu searching. I wouldn’t say I’ve really found a clear winner and it can be quite a dilemma, haha. I find myself bouncing between them, I’ll likely go with KDE next time.
BTW, anyone else notice that osnews going offline several times this past week? There could be a systematic problem with the host.
It does have application menu searching… there’s a big search bar right at the top of the application menu. Never ran into a bug, or a widget that gave problems. But it IS very minimalistic, and that’s by design. Just the way I like it. I don’t want my OS to entertain me, that’s what games are for. An OS does its job and keeps the hell out of my way as I do mine. If you need more functionality, that’s what widgets and applications are for, not the OS.
JLF65,
I just lost my whole desktop after trying to update the nvidia driver yesterday….grr so frustrating! I’m reinstalling with KDE.
I haven’t been as lucky as you. The minimalism is a plus, but on my system XFCE exhibits several bugs, The volume control widget and volume OSD interfere with each other where changing the volume through the widget pops up the OSD, which blocks the widget. Also when I use the volume hotkeys eventually I reach a state where the firefox volume becomes very low, and I can’t increase it without going into the volume manager to reset the volume to 100%, I have to do this every couple of days. Dismissing popup notifications doesn’t work and I have to wait for them to timeout. Rarely, but recurring XFCE places windows offscreen and they cannot be accessed via the mouse without using keyboard shortcuts to move the windows. These bugs are manageable but it lacks refinement IMHO.
I haven’t customized XFCE, these bugs are out of the box. I guess it’s possible these are debian specific. I haven’t encountered such issues under other window managers.
Fingers crossed, next time XFCE comes up in my rotation hopefully these bugs will be resolved 🙂
Hmm, that is very odd. I haven’t seen any of those problems. I don’t much like notifications, and disable them where I can, but I haven’t had issues dismissing them, or with overlapping issues like you describe. Guess I’m lucky. I stick with the LTS unless I’m forced to use something newer, like with my laptop, so it might be that. Hope you have better luck with KDE. Anything as long as you don’t go back to Windows. 😉
JLF65,
I’m up and running. I’m having tons of trouble with this damn nvidia RTX2080 GPU under linux though. Ubuntu’s had trouble with it for over a year now (I just tried today using the latest installer ISO). Boot menu works, but as soon as the linux kernel changes video modes everything goes black. I can’t even get ubuntu to work with vesa on this card (I don’t know what’s technically at fault here, this is my first UEFI system, relevant?). Nvidia’s drivers work once installed, but in order to get through the install process I have to physically change the card, install the nvidia drivers manually and only then switch over the nvidia card. This was somewhat forgivable last year when the card was new, but a year later…ugh.
Incidentally updating my system is what caused my last desktop installation to stop working (along with nvidia ppa repo breakages on debian). I managed to look at the dmesg log from a remote console, the kernel complained that the card is too new for the driver and to check the nvidia website for updates. I was hoping a totally fresh install would just work this time around, no such luck though 🙁
I’ve been happy with the computer when it works otherwise, but I lack confidence in the robustness of the nvidia driver across updates. I hate this proprietary crap. I’ve installed linux on so many computers, I’ve never had this much stress getting linux working an x86 computer before this one. My own linux distro works fine, but it’s intended for headless servers and is not a desktop OS. I’ve debated adding a small XFCE environment to it along with cuda, but it’d probably be too much work for something that would not get much use, haha.
Windows drove me away with it’s anti-consumer moves over the years. I don’t see myself going back because I value freedom as much as ever and I don’t want a corporation pushing self-serving restrictions and policy on my computer. With that said, I haven’t gotten completely away from windows for work.
As I mentioned earlier I gave it a run on an old Core Duo laptop and it’s not too bad, certainly very usable if you like Ubuntu.