 I don't know. I feel bad I pressed the button twice. Third time's a charm, maybe? It's a countdown. That looks ominous. I threatened to do this talk without slides, but it's better with... That is not mine. That's not me. Press the button again. Oh, nope. As soon as I push the button. I'll try one more time. Oh, there we go. Nope. I'm on HDMI, but it's like some... It says it's like a VGA horrible adapter thing. That's from Scal. That should be rotating through their webpage when there is no one attached. Yes, well, yes when I press the button. There's like 15 adapters. It's really scary. There's one small cable down here and then it's just adapters all the way down. Oh, okay. So, is that squished? I can't tell. I'm going to set it to what they asked for and if it goes blank, then we know what the problem is. All right, so we've heard great. Okay. Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you for your patience, and thank you for coming to my talk. The Ubuntu is my favorite operating system, and it has been for a very, very long time. And so, one of the neat things about Ubuntu is that it's always just, you know, there's a lot of things you need to know about Ubuntu, but it's always just a long time. And so, one of the neat things about Ubuntu is that it's always changing. It's always getting better and improving. And there's some really big improvements and changes in this next cycle. So, you may have seen them in October for Ubuntu 17.10, and you might be on the LTS release and happy with 16.04 and wondering what's in store. In 18.04, you will have heard that the interface, everything changed, and you may be wondering why. And that's what I'm here to talk about is the changing face of Ubuntu. Now, me, myself, my name is Nathan Haynes. I'm an author. You may know me from such books as beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac users. Thank you. Or such books as beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac users, second edition. And so, having started with 14.04 and now 16.04, and I don't know that's 18.04 yet. That's a publisher decision. I was really there for the last bits, dug in, and now everything's different and changed. So, I'm not looking forward to that. I have to rewrite my book for just the interface, redo all the screenshots. I'm an Ubuntu member, the leader of the Ubuntu California local team, and I'm a leader enthusiast. So, I followed Linux for a very, very long time. Back when I was doing dial-up BBSs and playing with DOS and my Windows 3.0 file, and I remember those old Linux-y things. So, what I want to talk about today is where Ubuntu's been and where it's going. Now, Ubuntu, like I said, has changed over the years. We're actually at the beginning of a big change right now. Ubuntu started off with GNOME 2, which is a very classic interface. And then, in 2011, changed to Unity, which got bigger and better and more powerful and more streamlined. And so 16.04 was really kind of the pinnacle of Unity on the desktop. When it came time to... So, Ubuntu was about 11 and a half years old when 16.04 came out. And with the release of 17.04, that was the last release that shipped with Unity, a very beautiful release that was not too bad now. So, from that transition to Ubuntu being about 12 and a half years old to 17.10 was the 13th anniversary of the Ubuntu release. And at 13 years old, everything changed. Things looked different. The textures on the long screen were a bit different. Everything was kind of familiar, but it was a little crankier, a little buggy because of the big transition and suddenly strange new features were popping up in places where there weren't features before. And so for that 13th anniversary, birthday of Ubuntu, things have changed. And so we see it 17.10 was a very, very, very big change. So I want to talk about where Ubuntu began and how Ubuntu started, what the purpose of the project was, and how those changes have sort of come about because I think it's sort of an interesting story. In the beginning was not Ubuntu. Now, the world of Unix really stretches back to about 1968 or nine. I'm not going to go back that far. Unix started in September 1991. I'm not going to go back quite that far. Although if we look back, there we have a really cool Unix-like kernel for the 386. At the time, a lot of people who were working on computers at universities were using some sort of Unix-like OS on a Vax or a PDP or something similar. And if you're programming and you're working on computers, you want something very, very similar. At the time, we did a BSD, which for various licensing reasons. It wasn't quite sure if you could redistribute it. And so when Linus Torvalts, university student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, said, I'm going to write my own kernel and just for fun, it will never be anything really big, but I just want to do it. And meanwhile, the new project had been trying to reimplement Unix from the user space out and working inwards towards the kernel. Still working on that kernel. Everything came into place at the right time. And so we had this really great ecosystem where we had this free software user space. We had suddenly from nowhere this Unix-like kernel, the free software guys jumped in and said, you know what's the best license ever is the Unix-like kernel. Linus Torvalts says, I don't really care. I just want people to be able to share it and use it and improve it if it's useful for them, because that's what I'm doing. And boom, suddenly we had Linux. Now, Linux back then was literally you had FTP sites with source code with all the utilities. And you had the Linux kernel that you could go and compile. And so to be useful, Linux wasn't useful. It was just a kernel. You had to get everything else. And so different groups, because everything was free to redistribute, were able to take this. And so we had this soft landing system, which was the first Linux distro. Slackware showed up very, very soon thereafter. Debian showed up about three months later. And I think 92, I want to say. And so Debian came around and said, we want to be a completely free operating system. And we want to have lots of utilities and be very, very useful. Now, so between these different distros, Slackware and Debian and Red Hat kind of came about as well around the same time, we were able to actually go in and get a bunch of files and burn them to a disk and boot off of it and make it boot floppy. And for as little or for as few as eight floppies, boot floppy, root floppy and then package floppies, you too could have a Linux system at home on your IBM PC. So it was a really, really cool thing. And you boot from it, you switch back and forth, you enter to not the floppy or you get a kernel panic on the good old days. And you'd have an installation screen and you'd have categories, accessories, communications, engineering, science, math, documentation, programming, compilers, text editors, graphics, games. And you go through and you'd have maybe, depending on the release, you'd have maybe anywhere from 200 to 2000 to maybe 5000 packages that you could during install, you'd be prompted to pick the packages you wanted to install to have a working system. You had a good default selection. It was up to you to not uncheck things that you needed to install like drivers and the kernel and X and bash. Or TC shell or whatever else you were using at the time. As free software gained momentum and Linux became more popular, this grew and grew and suddenly we had CD-ROMs. I remember when I got back into Linux after the old, old, old days, my first experience with Linux was a dial-up shell as a BBS. And when I wanted to do it myself, friend's dad was an engineer. And so he gave me a 5 CD collection. And my first experience with installing locally was Debian 1.0. And if you check Wikipedia, there is no Debian 1.0 because InfoMagic took Debian 0.93 release 6 between the 8 out to elf transition where the way binaries were compiled was completely different. Through that on CD and said Debian 1.0 and it didn't work and I said, well, Debian is not so good. I'll maybe use Slack or Red Hat. Debian was fine. That was not what we got. So the first Debian release is 1.1. But that was still a 5 CD set full of different software. And when I got back into in 2003, it was like 4 or 5 CDs. And you download all the CDs and you get a nice easy text installer or graphical installer depending on the distro. And you can then choose from like 3,000 installs, any of your favorite of 50 different text editors and so on. And then you would have you swap out disks and you wouldn't use every disk. You would have to download all the disks because you didn't know what packages you had and what disks they were on. So back in the days you'd spend maybe a day and a half downloading like five, six, seven CDs and then you'd use like two of them, maybe like the last one and then you're, because the printer drivers like on Windows was always like on the last disk. And so things were really complex. You could have any system you want. You want it, but if you were an engineer programmer and had a lot of Unix experience, you could have the perfect system. But if you were like me and you were just getting started, you could wind your way through, but it was kind of really tricky. It was kind of really scary. So things changed. In 2004, a Debian developer named Mark Sodowar said, you know, I'm going to, I think we can do better. Free Software is the future. He had built his own company named Thought out of Free Software because he came from Hummel Beginnings, made it really big. We're on the first, when you go to websites and they have SSL certificates, that's what Thought did just back before Verisign, sold to Verisign, made a ton of money, traveled up to the space station on his own dime and was on the mirror for a week doing cool Japanese space agency experiments and probably drinking vodka. Americans don't drink in space. It's completely wrong and horrible because alcohol is bad. The Russians hide vodka. They get sent away with their shipments. So they don't drink constantly, but you know, you're off your shift. It's a holiday. You know, I'm sure New Year's is a blast on the Russian module. He went up and he did that. So he gave it back. How can I give back? Free Software gave me all this. I want to do philanthropy. So he said, let's really take Free Software and let's just, let's showcase it. He can be bigger and better. And so the idea of, I described Linux for engineers was really, really great and really cool and fun to play with because I love DOS and all those codes and had the time because I was 15, 16 to play with it, but he had the idea of Linux for human beings. And so the concept was let's take, let's get everything together and let's have one CD that you can download. Let's make sure it fits in a no more than a 650 megabyte disk because the 700 megs were not rare anymore but still more expensive. And let's get one disk that you put in and you install and installs in 30 minutes. Doesn't ask you any questions. You get one best of class desktop environment, you get one good Office Suite, one good web browser, one good instant messenger and you just have everything there. And so Ubuntu 4.10 looked like this. It was very simple, very brown, very GNOME 2. And it wasn't so bad actually. I remember hearing the release on FlashDot and I was thinking, so of course this is based on Debian. Let's take Debian every six months. Debian is going between two and three years every release. The stable version had all added-aid software. So let's take Debian and stable and every six months we're going to freeze it, polish it, knock all the bugs, just pick specific software that we can really showcase and make it really better, contribute upstream and we're going to showcase this. Now when this first was released, I read it on FlashDot, which is what I read at the time, now it's Reddit, but FlashDot and I said, oh, I read the article and said some self-made millionaire is making himself a vanity distro and it's going to be all around community, I'm in my community, I'll pass. Six months later when 504 came out, the new release was coming on FlashDot, there was a ton of buzz and I said, well, it's free, there wouldn't still be buzz if there wasn't something to this. So I said, I'm going to try it out and I did and it was amazing because everything just worked and I didn't have like five text editors and like three versions of Solitaire and you know everything, so like this is pretty cool actually and of course I, at that time I could go in and install everything and start tweaking text files and changing, I should have the XKCD in here, like changing X386 config at the time, but I don't, I never really wanted to do those things, I just wanted to get to work, so I had a PDF viewer, everything installed, so it was really, really, really great and on the community side, at the time, it's hard to remember a time now when you went to a Linux forum and every, they still exist today, but every single forum you go in and you're a beginner and you don't know where to begin because everything, you saw Windows works with computers and no surprise, Unix stretches back to the fifties in heritage, the seventies in actuality and it does everything completely different because Windows had, didn't exist and VMS didn't exist and so on, so and CPM didn't exist, that's where Windows gets its inspiration, so you go online and you get asked a forum and say, well, I have some questions and they'd say, you know, they call you Noob, you'd say, they wouldn't even bother to type it out, you'd say RTFM, if anyone remembers what that stands for, for those of you who don't, it means read the fine manual and and the world is a different place back then, you were expected to start looking through source code to find your answers before you went to, went online and it's reasonable to expect to do some work for you in online, but there was no forgiveness at all whatsoever, so the Ubuntu project was founded and Ubuntu is an ancient African philosophy of humanity towards others, so what it means is that if, you know, we're all, we're all human, we're in one community and if I help you, I don't just lift you up, but I lift our whole community and lift myself up as well, which is the best, most succinct definition of free software I think I've ever heard, so when I realized that this wasn't just a line, that they really actually did expect people to be kind and polite and they lived by this philosophy on the Ubuntu forums, there was a code of conduct, I said, you know, this is something I want to be associated with, the software is wonderful, the people are great, I Google problem, put Ubuntu at the end, I get the answer, I said this is, this is great. Ubuntu got better and browner, this year is Ubuntu 6.06, after a couple releases we said, you know, everything's going great, we haven't missed any deadlines, we have really good first class desktop use, it's getting really popular, let's, no one can use it on servers or in business because it's every six months, let's take a release and let's sit down and focus on making it really super stable, and let's support it instead of just for 18 months, which is a year and a half, let's support it for longer, let's go with three years, so you can install it on a server and not incur the wrath of IT, and so we spent about six extra, six or eight extra weeks working on Ubuntu 6.04, and because the date slipped from April to June, it became Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and this was the first version, now by this time we see that things a little more shiny at the time, glossy shiny textures were the big things, so the title bar is a little shinier, a little browner, it's a little shiny, and we have two years later 804, we on time did our second LTS, and this is where Ubuntu really started, classic Ubuntu really started to take shape and got a lot of buy-in, I think we were starting to look at cloud technologies like eucalyptus, which is sort of a cool thing, and now it's all open stack, but we got in on that too, an extra release or two, and of course use Compiz, so if you took that window and you took out your mouse and shook it, the window would wobble like it was made of jelly, which is fun, but if you took two windows and moved them side by side to line them up, they'd stick, you know, so they didn't overlap for a little bit, but they would squish a little bit, so you get a little bit of feedback when you did that, I don't miss the spinning desktop cube, which was awesome, but I never really used it. Now Ubuntu at this time had really made it name for itself, and it got more popular, and so what happened was that we had had this really brown look, this really that harkened back to Africa and the desert, now humans all come, every human here, if you trace back, came out of Africa, maybe several times actually, it's really complex, but we all came from one place, we're all shared humanity, free softwares are very different. As Ubuntu came into a more professional type of a look, it was decided that Mark Schodler said it's time to rebrand and leave the brown behind a little bit, and the tans and the rich deep browns and oranges, and let's go with a brand new look, and so Ubuntu had a new look, a new sleek look that really focused on lightness and dependability and reliability, and so Ubuntu went from brown to purple and orange, mostly orange, and so we got a new look that was slightly refined, but we had a brand new look on the desktop, and that was the beginning of some major changes, now Ubuntu by itself was still going super strong, at the same time GNOME 2 that Ubuntu was built on, GNOME 2 is a fantastic desktop environment that survives a day in and I forget the other fork that is also excellent, I think it was the budgie maybe, I knew this when I got up here, but anyway, at the same time, GNOME was starting to look at its visions of the future, and it had some very strong ideas as to how it wanted that feature of computing to look and how to sort of revolutionize things, and Ubuntu and Codonical also had some really strong ideas on how they wanted computing to work, and they wanted to change things and make things faster and more connected. Now as it turned out, at the time, GNOME has always had strong opinions, and Ubuntu was founded, let's take Debian and make some very strong opinions, so that you have, we had to ship VI as a text editor, for example, because if you don't, then you get your Linux license taken away, and of course, it's shipped with Nano, which is the best text editor ever. Thank you. Nano is a new ed, if you ask me. Who here uses VI? Keep your hand up, it's because you tried it years ago, and you still can't figure out how to quit. Yeah. VI has two modes, beep repeatedly, break everything. Emacs, of course, wasn't shipped with it, because it's giant and huge. Emacs stands for Escape Meta All Control Shift. But the philosophy was we'd make one good choice, VI is on everything, Nano is good for beginners, we'll ship that. But if you want Emacs, you can go get it. Super easy, one command is you have it, you make your best system. And so Ubuntu was founded on strong choices, and GNOME also had strong choices. The problem is, Ubuntu said, we've been lost up, we're shipping the newest version of GNOME, GNOME comes out in March, and we come out in April, so we're always on lockstep. Let's work together and make something really cool. We have some interesting ideas, we have some good ideas to make it more user-friendly and a little more powerful. And GNOME, well, in my unbiased opinion, let me just say, GNOME decided that they had a strong opinion and didn't want to bother with collaboration and working, they wanted to get their own ideas out and focus on that, which is valid. But they weren't too friendly to ideas for enhancements and so on. So, their vision was different than what Ubuntu wanted. And so, Ubuntu decided that they needed to go ahead and take their vision, because GNOME 3 wasn't looking so good at the very beginning as far as user-friendlyness goes. So, in 2010 we had a brand new feel. And as netbooks started becoming the big new thing, screen size is not smaller and we had more and more connectivity and so on, it was decided that we needed a brand new look. And so, in Ubuntu 11.04, Unity was released. Now, in 10.10, if no one remembers the netbook remix, but there was a very simplified sort of early proto-unity that was just perfect for really tiny little screens on netbooks, and that simplified things and so we took that and applied it to the desktop. Now, the good news is that over the years it's got bigger and better. The bad news is 11.04 is a little rough. It worked out. You could work around the... learn how things worked and work around the changes. It wasn't that bad. The better news was that in 11.10 was really good and 12.04 focus was saying, let's make this really polished, really good for power users. But this was the new look of the game. I'm going to go into the launcher on the left to reduce space. One top panel at the top, if you maximize a window, the title bar disappears into the top panel so you're not wasting space. Rather than playing a game of what happens when I click this notification icon, this tray icon, if I click or right click, do I get a menu? Do I activate feature? Do I open a window? Do I close a window? Do I make a change? Rather, we had these great menus that had a networking menu that gave you network status, your sound menu that gave you volume sliders for your speakers, your mic if you were recording, play and pause and status of your rhythm box or VLC players. Everything all in one place. And so that did get refined. This is 12.04. This is the first LTS. Got refined. Very little sleeker. And the other thing Unity really did very, very well. This was the first standalone where they said we're going to make this a power user interface where you can do everything from the keyboard. And so sure enough, there's a great feature called HUD where if you're in LibreOffice or GIMP or some other program with really powerful complex arcade menus, if you're a power user, you probably know if you tap Alt key, you highlight the menus and use the arrow keys to move or Alt F goes to file, Alt E and so on. If you just tap Alt, you get a search bar then you can just type in what you wanted to do and it filters through searches the menu options and shows you them along with the breadcrumb trial to where it was. So one, you can just tell the computer what you want to do. And two, if you actually did need to find that in the menus later, it already taught you how to do that. So one, run it right from there. Best thing ever. In 1210, the idea was made to have web integration and so for example, if you went to Gmail or Google Play or Amazon Music, you could go in and so the nice thing about the launcher is that you could see what was open and the cool thing with the launcher is here is that if you had like a new email for example, you'd have like an icon with a little badge number when new emails or new messages came in you'd have progress bars and so the idea was made to let's bring web pages and let's have a Firefox extension if you go to Yahoo Mail and a mail comes in you get a notification on the screen and you get a little icon there Yahoo Mail would be a separate icon in the launcher. If you click it it switches to your browser and the right tab if you listen to music you can actually play and pause and do an extract and Spotify or Pandora and so on from the sound menu and that was a beautiful, beautiful feature that only was around for about a year because unfortunately it didn't catch buy-in, Ubuntu was a little too early and the W3C had some ideas for web integration that weren't quite compatible and also nobody adopted those changes themselves which I thought was a really, really good change. But as we got closer and closer to this idea of accessing information from everywhere the idea became that Ubuntu could be a single platform for many, many different devices already Ubuntu through Unity could bring if you had lots of programs running, you had lots of features through sound menu and so on where you could in one place in your shell control all of them works perfect for music and so on through the Unity launcher you could also search online so for example if I searched music, I could search not only my library but the Amazon MP3 music store I could search my audio tracks on I don't remember the services anymore, I think Google Play was one of them you could actually search for music online get listings and you could preview the music so if you saw if you didn't have an album you could go through and hit play preview the tracks, if you didn't but it was on Amazon you could actually take a look and see and you could actually hit play right there in your shell and if you liked it you could click buy and you go to the web page and you could buy it there Ubuntu launched its own web service called Ubuntu 1 that had file syncing as well as well as a music store and did the exact same thing so the evolution of this was let's make Ubuntu a platform where you can write a program once use these services once and it can run on any device and that was really, really, really cool so what we have here in 1604 is the last version of Unity where it was really, really powerful and we had this ability to about 1504 actually about a year before where we could have a phone and we could have different programs we had a really nice Unity Dash that because of the phone it gave you your weather right there it gave you all your applications you could run you could play music through edge swipes you could pull up the launcher just like you had in Ubuntu you could go through your task list and we went we developed Unity for the phones and kind of worked backwards and sort of we know the perfect desktop is Unity so let's make sure everything works really great and so while work on that never finished it was we could take these exact same programs if you look on the right there the Dash, music, web browser and a terminal and on a tablet you could turn on stage or turn on computer mode and you could switch and get the exact same thing in Windows that were movable this is on Nexus 7 but look the exact same thing as on a computer these same programs automatically adapted to the form factor you were using so you could have a phone and you could be on there and you could get your information and then you got to the hotel room you get to scale, you go to the hotel room you don't need to bring your laptop you go to the hotel room you get your HDMI adapter plug into the TV and automatically adapt to this it was there, it existed, it was great it was working and unfortunately after several years there was just no industry buy-in we had several we did have a BQ in Spain and Meizu in China that had actually shipped devices and were working cells were iffy, the software wasn't quite there you could really see where it was going and if you we had them here at scale if you've been here you've seen the devices people would read them on the web and say that sounds really weird I don't understand and then they'd get to the booth and say so I heard about this thing and it was really weird and the moment someone swiped in from the left edge and saw the launcher swiped in, saw the apps clicked we switched desktop mode and everything came up the light bulb turned on touching was believing it was really great unfortunately after several years it didn't catch on and so it didn't make sense anymore to focus on this because the traditional desktop was kind of stagnating and this vision was really really expensive and it didn't catch on and so unfortunately just before Ubuntu 17.04 was launched it was announced last about a year ago that Unity was cancelled and was no longer going to be the future of Ubuntu and so a lot of people were really happy a lot of people were really sad and so the future of Ubuntu then was in question because Unity had defined what Ubuntu was for six long years and so we know that Unity was built on it has always been built on Davian always been built on GNOME and even when we used Unity we still used GNOME we just didn't use GNOME shell we put Unity in as a shell and we worked on that but we still used all the great GNOME apps like Minds and Solitaire and Calculator and the settings and the software we've always been close to GNOME but not interface wise so the answer was obviously to return to GNOME but GNOME looks like this and so it's pretty and clean as that is that is not very Ubuntu-y for one thing everything is giant two the launcher is gone so if you go from now any of you here who are an expert who your hand down when I said who couldn't figure out to quit you can figure anything out for yourself and customize it and you probably already know the 20 extensions you need to make GNOME shell usable for you on your computer but if we go from 1604 to to this surprise 8204 update in july and you get this a lot of people are going to be really upset because nothing works the same way everything's completely different they're going to be lost but while the idea was to go back to GNOME it was clear that we needed to do something else and so what happened was after the transition was announced canonical sent some employees to GWADEC which is a GNOME conference and they were sitting around saying we really want to just make some slight customizations GNOME really expects the distro to do a lot of customization GNOME sort of hardcodes a lot of things so for example if a distro has if a session has a default plugin you can never ever disable that plugin ever it's just not possible GNOME doesn't allow it so the question was well if we ship a plugin it can't be disabled and all plugins GNOME automatically updates the plugins so we can't ensure what we do so a couple bold decisions were made so at GWADEC I think Olivier T. Lloyd was someone else I can't remember Ken Van Dyne we're talking to some GNOME people and I said you know we just want to make some changes we want to have them separate so that we can put all our changes here so we're not changing everything GNOME but we have a way to customize we have this feature called session support and it's like tell me more so sessions GNOME is a way that you can sort of ship with a profile that then sort of has some defaults but you can have different sessions and different profiles so if you look at 1710 right now actually this is actually bionic this is 1804 as of yesterday this is what it looks like now and this is what really 1710 looks like so this is a default to the newest version of Ubuntu it's going to look like this now you'll notice it looks a lot like Unity it's very familiar we didn't bother to re-implement Unity so there's no big friendly button the panels, the indicators are mostly gone times in the center but we put the icons back to a human size which is I think very nice we have a launcher on the left and while it doesn't do a lot of the things that Unity did it is that still very familiar look and so rather than go and do our own extensions there was already a fantastic extension called dash for GNOME a plugin called dash to dock it was a fantastic plugin and it did more than what we wanted actually so we said well let's maybe we don't want to support this forever and all these changes but we need to support what we ship so let's maybe talk to dash to dock and maybe sort of fork the plugin so it gets a different a different fingerprint ID so it's not constantly so when dash to dock can do their own thing and Ubuntu users aren't getting updated without a warning or a recourse and let's maybe reduce some of the features make it very very simple change the default, ship with something friendly and then maybe think about how we can work with dash to dock and the dash to dock developers were like this is a great idea let's work together and so a fork was made the Ubuntu dock is in the GitHub repository for dash to dock the subset doesn't have all the features any specific features we added specifically for Ubuntu has a different name space and so what happens is that when you make changes to the Ubuntu dock and you say you know I've been using Ubuntu now for a couple months and now I'm an expert and I just want more and I want dash to dock you can go and install dash to dock Ubuntu dock cannot be disabled GNOME does not allow it it's impossible so when Ubuntu dock detects that you've installed dash to dock and it's active the Ubuntu dock automatically hides itself so it gets out of the way any settings you've changed that are common are reflected in dash to dock because it is the same thing if you go in and you change like the launcher size or other more advanced dash to dock settings that we don't necessarily support if you uninstall dash to dock Ubuntu dock pops up automatically so you're never left without a way without a way to launch programs all those same features we don't support them we don't expose them but Ubuntu dock respects those features so you can move back and forth try it out and it's this really great symbiosis in fact when I in Canonical was kind enough to send me to New York in end of September to work just before 1710 came out we were already thinking about 1804 and the first thing I did was find I'm not a GNOME shelf fan so I was still on Unity and I installed a guy swapped out my hard drive installed it, played it for a couple weeks flew there and immediately found a bug in the dock so it said great bug here in launchpad followed bug upstream I hate finding bugs because it's hard work to follow a good bug but I only found good bugs 10 minutes later upstream said one of the developers said oh hey that's odd yeah you're right that shouldn't be that hold on and 45 minutes after that said yeah I fixed the problem this was the problem this the patch there's a pull request against it was fixed upstream and there's a pull request in our fork so there's a really lovely upstream relationship where we're working really hard so that we have a really good experience but you can also customize it to your hard content at the same time you can definitely say you love GNOME and you want to run Ubuntu for all the other reasons support lifetime and so on you can take Ubuntu 1710 or 1804 open up a terminal type after install gnom-session and you get this well you log out you go to your user name click on the gear icon you pick GNOME and you get this you get minus the wallpaper you get vanilla GNOME so we have a really great transitional interface for GNOME shell that we're improving iterate on and we'll do so more in the future but if you go from 1804 to 1804 users are going to it's going to be different but familiar and easy to to learn and if you really wanted GNOME you get it in fact if you were running Ubuntu GNOME 1804 and you upgrade this is what you get by default so we've worked really hard to work with GNOME and in fact GNOME back in 2010 when we were thinking about Unity and the new the face of desktop was very hostile towards external ideas and contributions that's since changed now I didn't know this because I said well I'm not a UI developer doing other stuff but meanwhile GNOME has changed so when we went back said we're going to go back to GNOME we want to work together how do we make our changes maybe give you improvements how do we work together GNOME said that's great we want to work together and so if you are used to the acrimony between the GNOME project and Ubuntu it's not there anymore well sort of feelings always linger a little bit here and there the GNOME project has been incredible so for example we used session support to enable you to have either our great defaults or GNOME's defaults and so we said well great let me make this even bigger and better so it's stronger and every desktop can use sessions and ship default GNOME with very little changes but have their own customization great let's talk about that we're talking about indicators we're talking about ways to share technology so that and help improvements so when Ubuntu says well we need this and we're going to do this own thing we say how can we implement this in a way that's not going to interfere with your plans and so that relationship is new very strong and is still continuing today so the present today is we have GNOME we have GNOME shell we have a really nice way oh if you want unity by the way if you've upgraded you'll get that GNOME shell interface on login prompt you click your name you click the gear icon you can pick unity and you can go back to it or just like I said you can say apt install GNOME session and get perfect GNOME you can do apt install unity session and it will pull in unity so that's still going to stick around for those of you who still want it like myself it's not going anywhere as long as it's kind of maintaining it working with the xorg drivers and so forth so we're working really hard on a really solid stable desktop now the thing about LTS and software these days is that you have lots of great applications and the Ubuntu guarantee of stability is that we're going to ship applications we're going to maintain them you're going to get bug fixes you can get security updates for up to five years in the desktop remember 606 I've said three years it was five years on the server three years in the desktop now it's five years for everyone so if you really love unity in 604 you can keep using that until 2021 unity is also still in 1804 and then you can use that until 2023 so there's lots of options the problem is is that we have all these great applications LibreOffice is the best office suite out there for general purposes VLC for example isn't shipped by default but it's like the best media player out there I love Calibre to manage my ebook collection I'm an author as I said and a writer and so I use that for my Kindle but it's an older version and so we the question is how do we you don't want to have 5,000 desktops deployed across your enterprise and wake up one day and then you have LibreOffice 17 and also it's a saving a new file format and it doesn't read any of the other file formats it's all it changes all the funds to windings you don't want to wake up and deal with that so that's our guarantee you get the same software but sometimes you want that new software you can use 604 like I said until 2021 that's a long long time it's three more years but you may but LibreOffice 6.0 is out and so you're still stuck on LibreOffice 5.3 I believe it is in 1604 so the question is how do we deal with having a really solid base we have great relationship upstream things are better than ever how do we keep these applications if you're going to use Ubuntu and rely on it for a long long time how do you keep applications fresh because remember the goal of the system isn't to use the operating system it's to have a platform to run to the programs and get out of your way so you can interact with those applications so those need to be there as well the answer came out of the phone when you have a phone you can't install things and have broken dependencies and then everything is broken and you just re-flash your phone that doesn't work so while we didn't stick with the phone we worked really hard to have technology that is reliable and super dependable and the answer grew out of the phone we had click packages to the phone we kind of made a super click package click2.it was called SNAPS we knew we could run on embedded devices which again can't be upgraded can't have dependency problems can't have failed installs can't be re-flashed if you have like 15 of them across the state or the country so SNAPS are a way to develop things now the cool thing about SNAPS is that it's made of different modules and so even to 1604 shipped with SNAPS support 1804 it's even bigger and better on the desktop with the SNAP you have a core SNAP that is downloaded and installed and it's even to 1604 it's the tiniest little seed system drivers and libraries and so on rather, libraries and then when you have a program it's compiled for 1604 because that program runs against that core SNAP that program that you compile for that you've released now runs on any platform that supports SNAPS so that one program runs, so if you take a program and compile it and then copy the files over to different Linux distributions it will break unless all the stars align, the plans align and all every library version is exactly different because we have a core SNAP as part of the SNAP experience that one program runs against even to 1404 1710 I didn't rem as well but they're not supported so 1404, 604, 710 1804 without modification, it also runs on Arch, OpenSUSA, Fedora we're working on Debian that same program runs basically everywhere that supports SNAPS and so for free software you can always recompile if you have the source code but it's a lot of work and a lot of work if you've never packaged software for a distro for Debian and for Ubuntu and Fedora and for RPMs and everything good because it's really hard and they're all different and it's a lot of work and you have a system with a SNAP you do it once it works everywhere so not only is it easier for smaller developers but also for a proprietary software where you don't have source code and where the vendor has a single platform and so with SNAPS software can come directly from the developer and what that means is that instead of waiting for it to hit the Debian repository get pulled into Ubuntu then it gets polished and then so some 6 to 9 months down the road it shows up in Ubuntu that program can show up right away, it gets pushed the developer compiles it tests it real quick, pushes it to the store promotes it to the stable channel and then it does the day to make sure that it finds a new version it updates automatically the updates are atomic when you install a Debian package every single program you've ever installed on Ubuntu through a Debian package through Ubuntu software however it may be double clicking on it you put in your password and you give that package root access to your computer because there's install scripts that takes your files user bin user shared and so on every single program is decompressed takes more room, you've got the original archive you've got all the decompressed stuff you've given the package maintainer root access to your computer now the way SNAP works it's one file it's a squash of S file it's compressed, it's downloaded to install it's mounted in place so it's still compressed it doesn't take up any extra room it never gets root access and plus applications are actually sandboxed so that they can't go off the program itself sees if it looks in root it sees that core SNAP not your actual system many programs to be useful have access to your home directory that's a plug that can that can be changed like on a cell phone you can give access to networking or home or so on and in 1804 there's going to be ways to a couple plugs a couple access to things are granted automatically if they're requested some programs need extra things and so software, Ubuntu software is going to give you an option when you install it here's some additional things it can't have access to and you can just decide whether or not you want to grant it access you get that cell phone security on your desktop with a program that can always be the freshest software from the developer and you can control the access so SNAPs can be confined to enhanced security Skype for example is not confined for esoteric reasons it almost works confined not quite Microsoft's working on it Canonical's working on it but a lot of programs are confined so they're really safe when you're getting software from third party developers most of them are trustworthy but all it takes are credentials to be compromised and someone else can swoop in and compromise that PPA or that software project and so with SNAPs you don't have to worry about that the vulnerability surface is far, far, far, far less and SNAPs run on different versions of Ubuntu so Ubuntu's always had this goal to be a complete solution for the computer to always be up to date with existing of free and open source software other than drivers where you don't have a choice and so as we move from Unity and as we go to GNOME shell and we rejoin that community I made a joke at the beginning Ubuntu turned 13 and suddenly strange new features popped up where there weren't features before and we all remember I'm sure very, very fondly puberty but puberty also is adolescence and adolescence is where we not just suddenly get way bigger and become an adult but where we... adolescence is where we re-evaluate our relationship with ourselves and our peers and parents and our community and so as Ubuntu heads towards the 3.5 year mark in April that's exactly what's happened we've gotten closer upstream we're shipping more vanilla packages we have better ways to send them to you 10 years ago that Microsoft was going to specifically package Skype for Ubuntu and ship it and that's the exact same code that's running on the phone and on Windows and on Mac is running on Ubuntu in a container that Microsoft supports everyone looked at me like I was crazy and because of the work... that same program should work I don't know if it works on 1404 but that 1604 package works on 1710 and 1804 works on Microsoft's behalf which is the way they like it and no one's to work really on our behalf on the end user's behalf which is how end users like it so as we continue forward and we start charting a path of what's new for Ubuntu we have a really really strong stable basis to make that so I hope that gave you some context as to where we've been, where we are and where we're going thank you very much we are actually of course Ubuntu has a booth at the exit floor which starts in I don't know what time it is in one... I can't read in one and a half hours we'll be there we'll be Saturday and Sunday we do have computers with the development version of 1804 running on system 76 hardware thank you so much system 76 we have 1710 and we are prepared to answer any questions and I think I have 5 minutes so if anyone has any questions now I can answer them here as well although as regards questions yeah we have at 3 o'clock when we come back here we have a whole session the annual tradition of the ask anything you want it's ideal if it's about Ubuntu but it could be about anything but it's the Ubuntu Q&A ask anything you want we have a great talk here after our extended lunch so we definitely so while it's lunchtime we know the expo floor does open at 2 so we're not making anyone come back here to give a talk, you don't have to feel guilty go look at the floor you've got an hour you can come back if anyone has questions about Ubuntu or GNOME or anything like that I'm happy to answer them if you need some time to think as you wander the expo floor I was just curious about maybe other platforms. My daughter uses, you know, Linux Mint. And I use, you know, Ubuntu. So I'm just wondering what, I know it's based on, you know, the packages are based on Ubuntu. What, you know, what kind of support will she need? I mean, what do you, I mean, what's the plan forward for other distros for, you know, and I'm just trying to figure out what, you know, what I should do for that. So you use Linux Mint now, right? We have both. We have both, you know, Ubuntu 14.04 and then Linux Mint and then we have Windows 10 and whatever else. So Linux Mint I can't speak to. They go out, they take Ubuntu and they go off and do their own thing and have their own security updates. And so I usually don't recommend people use Linux Mint unless they really know what they're doing and are willing to say that some security updates and fixes may not be available. And they're going to, I think there's a backwards thing or something that you can enable them. But Ubuntu just does it for you. So I said, when it comes to Ubuntu support, if you have 14.04, you can definitely upgrade directly to 16.4.4, which is the newest version. I don't know if I gave the booth ISOs. Well, I'm going to be at the booth later, I think, for a little bit. We're going to have ISOs. If you bring a thumb drive, we can give you an ISO 16.4.4, which is 16.4 with all the updates rolled in since April 2016, as of March 1st was when it was released. So less downloading once you install. You can go from 14.04 to 16.04. Then you have three years to determine whether or not you're going to migrate to 18.04. We've worked really hard to make the interface very familiar so that we're going to reduce documentation load as far as teaching new users and training. If that didn't answer your question, see me after this or at the booth. You talked about the Snaps and, of course, the new Unity desktop. How much have you done in terms of performance drop-offers or even better performance? Because it's been better optimized compared to the original Unity. Well, it's two parts. It's Snaps compared to native packaging versus running the Snaps because there's compression and all that's involved. Is there a performance loss at all when you're packaging an app like that? Good question. So is there a performance loss with Snaps? The answer is that the first time you install Snaps and you run it, the app armor profiles get compiled, and then so you click and you're like, hmm, 20, 15, 10 seconds later, Snaps opens up, and then you click and two seconds later it opens up every other time, right? That's something they're working on. Now as far as the Snaps being entirely compressed and then being needed to be constantly decompressed, I don't know if they're using hardware acceleration for that, but in practice computers are so fast and we have multicores that I certainly haven't seen any performance changes in Snaps myself. I haven't run benchmarks, but it's comparable, you can't tell. Of course I run my home folders encrypted and everything's being decrypted on the fly too, so that's the kind of thing where luckily computers have gotten so fast that that is easy stuff for computers. I'm not aware of performance problems related to that. And then also about the Unity desktop with the new switching to GNOME as the back end for that. Is there a performance loss there or is it faster compared to the old? The lenses are a little bit faster in GNOME, but they have a daemon that runs in the background that constantly indexes your files. We'd have it turned off by default in 7010 and 1804. You can install I think TrackerD and it's just running. So it's a little heavy when you first log in. We're looking at enabling that in the future by default and making that less of a performance problem. You will find that I think many of these GNOME shells are a little bit faster actually. I love Unity, I'm happy to wait, but a little of these GNOME shells have been very snappy. You want to bring it to three? Will SNAPs are becoming the default in 1710 too? Or is it 1804? Where does that start? So Debin packages will never go away because that's how Ubuntu gets made. SNAPs are an alternative. In fact, the great thing about SNAPs is because they're modular, they're all self-contained, they're automatically updating and they're completely sandboxed in location if not in what they can access. Ubuntu ships with LibreOffice. If you want the new LibreOffice, you can install the SNAP version. If you don't want to abandon LibreOffice 5.0 for 6.0 instead of going out and getting the PPA installing and everything else gets uninstalled and reinstalled. The Debin packages and SNAP packages run side by side. Not only is there no conflict, there can't be conflict because SNAPs are separate. So you can literally test drive it, see how it is. In 1804, there will be a new option during a fresh install on a desktop image. Minimal install, which is actual full completed Ubuntu install, but without... You get a desktop web browser, a couple games, utilities, but you don't have LibreOffice, you have all these other things. So if you know you want the LibreOffice SNAP, you can install a slightly lighter version of Ubuntu and just go for the SNAP. But yeah, the devs will always be around. All right everybody, enjoy your lunch and enjoy the opening of the Expo floor. We'll be back here at three.