I’ve upgraded three computers to Ubuntu 18.04. Although I appreciate the modern software (including LibreOffice), each upgrade has had different issues.
Lenovo Server: upgrade was rocky because the root partition ran out of space part way through the upgrade. I hand-recovered and managed to get it to finish. Later, the journal (systemd journal) went nuts and filled up my root partition (which is shared with /var) with log messages — causing so much I/O that it was quite slow to log in to my computer. Once I figured out how to vacuum the journal, I recovered space, and set the journal size smaller. Now it seems to be working well.
System76 Galego Ultrapro: upgraded without a hitch. However, power management is less-than stellar. It won’t go to sleep when I want it to, and it comes out of sleep when I don’t want it to. Update: Later updates fixed the problem.
Lenovo P50 with NVidia graphics card: It worked better at driving two external monitors with Ubuntu 16.04. It mostly works with 18.04, but it’s more temperamental. The upgrade didn’t go smoothly, aborted early, and I had to hand-recover, which, fortunately, worked out. I needed a new version of VMWare Workstation. The screen brightness buttons don’t work, even after trying various proposed solutions.
Later, I found out that I was missing a package that allowed me to mount external encrypted drives. This post had a solution: https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/163
sudo apt install libblockdev-crypto2
systemctl restart udisks2.service
Things I appreciate about Gnome 3 (Ubuntu 18.04):
- Keyboard shortcuts, including WINDOWS + left-click-window + drag
- Window snapping: WINDOWS-LEFT, WINDOWS-RIGHT, etc. Very similar to Windows
- High-DPI support works well, which is excellent for my Lenovo P50 with a 4K display (4K is too much resolution for a laptop screen, but it was the only option with the Xeon processors).
- Looks great
Things I dislike about Gnome 3 (Ubuntu 18.04):
- Clock doesn’t include day of month by default. Requires gnome-tweak tool to enable. Sloppy and difficult.
- Too many clicks to get to network settings, including VPN. It used to be easier.
- Can’t share my connection with wired-via-USB-cable computers anymore. Th reported workaround, which doesn’t work at all for me: launch nm-connection-editor.
- Login screen shows a background instead of a list of users, until I press a button or swipe. Please don’t follow Windows here. It’s dumb.
- When I zoom in on a folder in Nautilus, it zooms all other folders, including my desktop icons.
Other things I dislike with Gnome — longstanding issues that existed before Gnome 3:
- Nautilus uses too much white space between images when zooming in on icon view. It should be proportional — like windows Explorer does. I.e. when the images are 0.5×0.5 inches, it’s fine to have 0.5 inches between icons. But when the icons are 3″x3″, I don’t want or need 3″ of white space between icons! (This isn’t an issue with Gnome 3 — it’s a long-standing issue with Nautilus)
- Nautilus doesn’t show image meta-data such as camera model for images — I like to sort by camera model.
- Lack of a photo screensaver. I live without it, but it still frustrates me that Gnome is the only desktop, which, by default, doesn’t include one. Windows, Mac and KDE are much better in this regard.
I love using Linux, but Windows is squarely better at some things.