Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux’s bleeding edge

A disappointing trend has become clear to Linux users in recent years. Whenever Canonical offers a new Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release, it tends to be conservative in nature. (See our Ubuntu 14.04 review, which earned a “Missing the boat on big changes” headline.) Apparently no one wants to try to support a brand new, potentially buggy piece of code for half a decade.

The last few Ubuntu releases haven’t been LTS rollouts, yet Vivid Vervet (15.04) and Wily Werewolf (15.10) also short-changed users in the way of new features. So when Canonical officially released the latest Ubuntu LTS version (Ubuntu 16.04 or Xenial Xerus) this spring, similar expectations loomed. Frankly, this could potentially be the most boring Ubuntu release to date.

Thankfully, perception hasn’t matched reality this time around for Ubuntu users. Ubuntu 16.04 is in fact the most exciting release Canonical has put out in recent memory. And after using it for the last few weeks, this may even be the best release Canonical has presented to date.

That’s good news for Ubuntu fans, but it’s also good news for Canonical. The company has largely ignored its desktop in favor of mobile dreams over the last few years. Those mobile plans are still coming—Unity 8, the Mir display server, and the “convergence” those tools will enable are still a big part of Ubuntu’s future—but they aren’t part of 16.04 (not in stable form anyway).

Instead, 16.04 largely focuses on improvement to the desktop. But perhaps the biggest change comes from Ubuntu’s experience on the server-side, namely the container packaging system Canonical calls Snap packages. The result is that, for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu’s desktop release feels like an actual release rather than something the organization feels obligated to push out every six months. / At first glance not much has changed in 16.04. Ubuntu’s major changes are under the hood. Ubuntu 16.04—now with 100% less “spyware”

For all the new stuff in 16.04, let’s start with the biggest headline grabbing omission: online search results. This “feature” debuted back in the autumn of 2012 with Ubuntu 12.10, and what made it controversial was the decision to leave the setting on by default. As such, everything you searched for in the dash was initially sent to Canonical’s servers and from there to Canonical’s partners. This setup was enough for the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman to brand Ubuntu “spyware.”

Even if Canonical getting a record of your search terms didn’t bother you, the feature could still be annoying for its habit of returning totally irrelevant search results. Worse, it often highlighted potentially NSFW results. One frequently cited example was searches of “Bra” to launch the Brasero CD burning application also returned Amazon results for bras.

Canonical dug itself an even deeper hole when it went after a site critical of the search feature for trademark violations. FixUbuntu.com, which showed users how to disable the search features, was asked to “remove the Ubuntu word from your domain name and Ubuntu logo from the website.” Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth later called the letter a mistake in his blog. “Someone at Canonical made a mistake in sending the wrong response to a trademark issue,” he wrote. Whatever Shuttleworth’s intentions, it merely furthered the PR disaster.

Search lens is finally off by default, which is good for most users. Still, the damage it did to Canonical’s image and standing in the free software world is unlikely to be undone swiftly. In the end, Canonical managed to generate a tremendous amount of ill will for a feature the majority of its users didn’t seem to want and which in all likelihood generated a negligible amount of profit for the company.

If by chance you found the search results helpful, however, you can turn them back on in 16.04 by heading to the system settings app. What’s new in Ubuntu 16.04

Perhaps the biggest change for anyone upgrading from Ubuntu’s previous LTS release (the two-year-old 14.04) is that Ubuntu now uses the systemd init system rather than its homegrown Upstart init system. As with several other of Ubuntu’s attempts to go its own way, the group has abandoned its efforts in this area in favor of upstream tools. The work of stripping systemd out of Debian to put in Upstart was evidently deemed more effort than it was worth.

Systemd will be old news for many, and you can find a lengthier explanation in our review of Debian 8. But for anyone who sticks with LTS releases, one of the last ways to avoid systemd is now gone.

In practical terms, the move from Upstart to systemd is not particularly difficult. It’s certainly nothing like upgrading straight from an older init system like System V. Still, this remains a significant change to be aware of, particularly on servers where Ubuntu’s LTS release is incredibly popular.

A more visual change in 16.04 is the ability to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen. This long requested tweak has actually been possible via third-party tools for some time, but there were always some inconsistencies and odd behavior. Thanks to the work of the Ubuntu Kylin developers, it’s now an officially sanctioned option (in fact it’s the default layout for Ubuntu Kylin, the official Chinese version of Ubuntu). / Ubuntu with the launcher along the bottom of the screen. Scott Gilbertson

That said, this feature does require installing the dconf editor and diving into the options a bit to turn it on. Once you’ve installed dconf-editor, navigate to com > canonical > unity > launcher > launcher-position to find the option to switch the launcher position (alternately, the third-party Unity-tweak-tool supports it as well).

Systemd isn’t the only upstream project replacing one of Canonical’s own with 16.04. The Ubuntu Software Center sees a similar makeover, though in this case the replacement is a bit closer: GNOME Software.

Scott Gilbertson

Ubuntu’s new Software Center comes courtesy of GNOME Software.

The Ubuntu Software Center has been largely abandoned for some time. GNOME on the other hand has been pouring considerable effort into its own software app, so the move makes sense for Ubuntu. It’s just upstream and it’s flexible enough that Canonical can customize it, but the organization doesn’t have to maintain it directly. If you’re already familiar with both apps, the first thing you’ll notice is that Canonical appears to have mashed the two together. To my eye, the result is not quite as nice as GNOME Software on its own. However, this implementation does bring in all the reviews and content of the old Ubuntu Software Center (which, incidentally, is still in the repos if you want it).

Ubuntu’s version of GNOME Software also gets some of the nice new upstream features like support for firmware updates via the Software Center. Provided your firmware is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, you’ll be able to update your devices with a single click in the Software Center.

If you eschew graphical software apps for the simplicity of the command line, be aware that Ubuntu 16.04 supports the simpler apt command alongside apt-get. In addition to marginally less typing, apt nicely unifies a bunch of apt- commands with better documentation and support for progress bars.

Listing image by Scott Gilbertson

Snap packages

Ubuntu 16.04’s biggest change looks quite innocuous at first glance. There’s not a graphical component to it, but this new release brings Ubuntu Snappy to the desktop. With that, it’s possible to completely change the way you install and maintain software on Ubuntu (and Linux more broadly).

Ubuntu server users have likely already encountered Snappy through the distro’s various container deployment options, but this is the first time Snappy has been integrated into the desktop.

To understand what Snap applications are, it helps to first understand how applications are installed in Ubuntu. When you select an application to install in the Software Center, it doesn’t just install itself. Generally, any application also installs other applications (in this context, applications become referred to as “packages”) that it needs.

Some applications you install might need only one or two other packages to work. Others may use hundreds. Application packaging systems like APT do a reasonably good job at working out which additional packages you need along with the application you actually want, so users typically don’t need to worry. APT also does a reasonably good job of making sure that you get the right version of the packages in question. But what happens when one application you have installed needs package X version 1.1 and another needs package X version 1.2? With APT you’ve got yourself a potentially system-breaking problem.

Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages. With Snap packages, applications are installed in their own container, and all the third-party applications are installed with them so there are no version conflicts. Snap packages are also smart enough to not install a package more than once, meaning applications installed via Snappy don’t take any more disk space than regular applications.

You’re probably wondering why this matters and how it’s going to change Ubuntu for the better. The answer is that Snap packages make it possible to install the latest and greatest software without worrying about whether or not Ubuntu has updated every component package you might need. For example, I like to run the bleeding edge release of Darktable, which is typically at least a point version ahead of what’s in the Ubuntu repos. Right now there’s a deb maintained by a Darktable developer who does his best to make sure nothing breaks, but essentially one person putting in a ton of effort is all that keeps Darktable from potentially breaking the rest of my system. It works and I’ve never had a problem, but it’s hardly ideal.

With Snap packages, there would be no danger of accidentally breaking your system with an application update. Instead, the application is completely self-contained. This means you could run a very conservative release, like an Ubuntu LTS, and still have the latest versions of all your favorite applications. It’s essentially the best of both worlds—a stable system running the latest userland software.

All of this is supported in Ubuntu 16.04, but so far there are very few Snappy versions of desktop applications available. That will likely change in the very near future. Mozilla has already announced that Firefox will be available as a Snap package soon (and Web browsers are a great use case for Snap packages since they update frequently). We expect other big projects to likewise embrace Snap package now that 16.04 has launched.

As nice as Snap package is, it does have one problem. Once again, Canonical is rolling its own solution when there are several upstream possibilities it could have elected to use instead. Both GNOME’s xdg-app and the cross-distro app-image system do exactly what Snap packages do, but they’re not just for Ubuntu.

While something like Snap packages have the potential to completely change the way distros work, it remains to be seen if Snap specifically will be what ends up reaching critical mass. It’s certainly possible that Snap may prove popular enough to warrant other distros incorporating it, but it’s also possible that there may end up being more than one way to handle self-contained packages. Looking at Canonical’s track record does not inspire confidence. Upstart gave way to systemd, the software center gave way to GNOME Software, and even simple things like scrollbars get abandoned for upstream solutions. How Snap packages end up over the long term will be fascinating for Ubuntu users to watch, but even in the worst-case scenario, fans shouldn’t have anything to worry about. If one day Ubuntu does abandon Snap in favor of another system, all the changes will likely be behind the scenes.

In the shorter term, Snap packages should be a boon to Ubuntu, allowing users to stick with a stable base system while still leaving them free to try just-released software packages without fear of wrecking the system. ZFS, Kernel, and Unity Updates

Ubuntu 16.04 is the first release to offer native support for ZFS. That said, ZFS support appears aimed primarily at server and container users. There’s no option to use ZFS in the desktop installer. In fact, you’ll actually have to install the userland components of ZFS yourself. Once you do, ZFS should work without a hitch. Note that the ZFS support is 64 bit only for now. And for full details on ZFS and how to use it with Ubuntu, check out the Ubuntu wiki. Further Reading ZFS filesystem will be built into Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by default

Resilient filesystem is a popular choice for maintaining data integrity.

Under the hood 16.04 uses the Ubuntu Linux Kernel 4.4.0-18.34, which is based on the upstream 4.4.6 Linux Kernel. There’s a ton of new hardware support if you’re updating from the last LTS release, and of particular note is the improved support for Intel Skylake chips. This should translate to better battery life in newer laptops.

There’s one spot of bad news in 16.04. The support for the Catalyst/fglrx video driver was dropped because it doesn’t support the version of XServer Ubuntu is using. Ubuntu suggests using open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu). If you relied on the fglrx drivers, it’s something to check out before you upgrade because this isn’t something you can create a backport for or even just compile yourself. It simply won’t work.

The Unity desktop gets a slew of small but welcome updates in Ubuntu 16.04 including better theme support for GNOME’s client-side decorations (AKA, menus in the toolbar). This makes things look a bit nicer, especially with the new GNOME apps like GNOME Calendar (which is now the default calendar app).

Another interesting change in Unity is the integration between the Unity launcher and the Nautilus file manager. Each item in the launcher now manages its own window. For example, if you click on the Trash icon, the Nautilus window that opens is tied to the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. That means that to bring that window to the front, you would click the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. This can be a bit maddening if you’re used to old behavior, but eventually I adjusted (I have been unable to find a way to revert to the old behavior actually).

The usual set of GNOME applications that ships with Ubuntu has been updated, though not always to the latest version available. In order to retain some file browser functionality, Nautilus remains at version 3.14. The rest of the system remains primarily at GNOME 3.18, except for newer apps like GNOME Calendar, which is at 3.20. Ubuntu Flavors

The Unity desktop isn’t the only way to run Ubuntu, and 16.04 sees quite a few of the various Ubuntu flavors turning out impressive releases. Of particular note are Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE.

Kubuntu 16.04 will mark the first time LTS users see the new KDE Plasma 5 with its completely different, flat theme. KDE users who’d like to sneak a peek even further into the future can get the KDE Neon project installed as well. / Kubuntu with the new Plasma 5 Oxygen theme. Scott Gilbertson

Despite being a relative newcomer to the Ubuntu family, Ubuntu MATE continues to be one of the best examples of the MATE desktop available. Ubuntu MATE is in fact so new to the Ubuntu family that this is the first LTS version it has released. As with most flavors, Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS comes with three years of support (rather than five). / Ubuntu MATE’s minimalist MATE desktop. Scott Gilbertson

If you’re looking for a lightweight desktop for older machines or if you just want a simple fast machine, MATE makes an excellent choice. Ubuntu MATE 16.04 even includes a MATE theme that imitates the look of the Unity desktop. There’s even an applet to move application menus into the top menu bar.

Scott Gilbertson

Ubuntu MATE’s minimalist MATE desktop.

Also of note considering the rough-around-the-edges nature of the Unity Software Center is Ubuntu MATE’s Software Boutique, possibly the best GUI software installer on any platform. Unity users take note, you can install MATE’s Software Boutique in Ubuntu as well (hat tip to the Linux Action Show for pointing this out).

Conclusion

Canonical’s roadmap for Ubuntu currently calls for some massive changes within the next year. The Mir display server and the Unity 8 desktop will likely arrive later this year, bringing with them another big, potentially bumpy transition for users. If you’re curious about that now, you can test Unity 8 in 16.04. Canonical refers to it as a “technology preview,” which means it’s still rather buggy.

Given the imminent upheaval, Canonical needed Ubuntu 16.04 to provide a stable perch from which less experimental users can wait out the changes. Thankfully, that’s exactly what Ubuntu 16.04 delivers.

To this long-time user, 16.04 looks like Ubuntu’s best release since the good old days of 10.04. And not only is Ubuntu 16.04 quite well done today, the support for the new Snap packages system means that updated software should continue to be available well into the future (provided the larger FOSS community adopts it, and right now there is every reason to think it will). With five years of support and Snap packages providing the latest versions of your favorite apps, it’s conceivable that you’ll have no real cause to update Ubuntu 16.04 until 2021. With that type of peace of mind, it’s likely worth the plunge now.