 A couple of days ago Ubuntu released version 23.04 Lunar Lobster, now 23.04 I've played around with it a little bit in the last couple of days and I've got to say I've been pretty impressed. Actually I'm usually impressed with the Ubuntu releases. The interim releases which are the non long term support releases, now sometimes those are hit or miss. There was one release about a year and a half ago I think it was 21.10 that honestly I was pretty harsh on that Ubuntu release because of performance. It ran really slow sluggishly, applications took forever to launch but that was kind of an outlier because the very next version of Ubuntu it looked like all of that stuff was fixed. It was very peppy and fast and performant. It seems like every version since that release things have improved as far as I know people complained about the speed of the snap packages and things like that. But I haven't noticed any issues with that at all with this latest release. One of the big changes with this release of Ubuntu 23.04 is the inclusion of a new installer, the subsequent installer which uses Flutter which is a toolkit that comes to us from GNOME but it functions and feels very much like the old traditional ubiquity installer that Ubuntu has always used except it does have a little bit more fresh, more modern look to it. But pretty much all the features that you expect to be there as far as being able to manually partition drives and some of the experimental feature options that were in the Ubiquity installer they're also here. You also have the option of doing the normal installation, the minimal installation but other than that the theming is great. You can do a light theme or a dark theme for the installer if you care about the color of the installer while you're waiting five to ten minutes for the installer to actually do its thing and it just looks good. The slideshow was very sharp, very professional, job well done on the installer Ubuntu. One of the things that has always impressed me about Ubuntu is the fact that it has a corporation behind it, a large corporation, Canonical, they have obviously money and a large team behind this distribution and you can tell because it's always very professional, polished, it's very well put together. It's not hacky like so many community distributions that look like they're just being held together by duct tape. No, no, no, Ubuntu is a very cohesive, coherent product and I love the default wallpaper. One of the things is the wallpapers with Ubuntu are usually very good but I have to say this may be the best wallpaper pack of any release of Ubuntu ever. If I go to change backgrounds, let me show you some of the wallpapers because usually they have a pretty good wallpaper pack and one or two will be like super outstanding like that lobster wallpaper. I love that but look at some of the other lobster themed wallpapers. Look at this thing. That is an amazing wallpaper and you got light and dark themes depending on whether you have the light or dark GTK themes set. By the way, you can set the light and dark default GTK themes in the installer while you're running through that new subsequent installer or you forget to set to a dark theme. If you later want to change it, you can of course open up the settings manager here. Here is some other lobster wallpapers. Look at this thing. That is an absolutely amazing wallpaper. Here's another one. A white lobster. That looks great against the black background and a dark theme. This wallpaper pack, I'm telling you because I've seen every wallpaper from every Ubuntu release since the beginning and they've always had some amazing wallpapers but this truly is the best in my opinion. The real standout feature for Ubuntu 2304 is the fact that it ships with GNOME 44 which is rather new, right? GNOME 44 hasn't been out that long. A matter of fact, GNOME 44 I don't think has even made it into the Arch Linux repose yet which is kind of weird but Arch Linux here lately has a problem really keeping packages up to date. There's so many out of date packages on Arch but that's its own separate video but Ubuntu has GNOME 44. I love this session menu. When I click on the power button, this new session menu, now I'm using Ethernet here on my computer so I have this wired section but I could kick on and off the network if I want to. If you were connected with Wi-Fi you would have a Wi-Fi menu that when you click on the Wi-Fi button you will see all the available Wi-Fi connections. If you had a Bluetooth connection, you would have a Bluetooth menu with a drop down as well. You have your power mode and you have dark style that you could turn on and off. You also have some buttons here that I normally wouldn't expect in this kind of power session menu. For example, we have a screenshot button to immediately go to the screenshot tool. Now, typically I would probably just go into the applications menu, show applications here and search for the screenshot tool or if I had it set to a key binding, I'd use that. Kind of an odd place to put the screenshot quick launcher there but I don't mind it. You also have a quick launcher for the settings which is of course your GNOME settings where we were just at looking at the wallpapers and the GTK theme a second ago. And of course in the logout session menu here you have the ability to log out or to lock the screen. Now of course you have a slider for your volume control as well. As far as the applications, the standard suite of applications that has come with Ubuntu forever is here. So it's typically a lot of the standard stuff. You're going to get Firefox, you're going to get some of the default GNOME applications, you're not going to get a whole bunch. For one thing, Ubuntu, kind of a minimal distribution. And this was the normal installation option. I didn't do what they call the minimal installation option. So this is the full installation but again, you don't get a ton of programs. You get just enough to get started. You do get an office suite, you get LibreOffice, you get a calculator, you get a text editor, an audio player, rhythm box, you get a video player, photo manager, Shotwell, but not much else. Let's take a look at Firefox. Let's see what version of Firefox we're on. So if I go into the menu system and go to help and to about Firefox, we are on Firefox 111. So that's a really recent version of Firefox. And you notice I didn't even think about how fast it started up. It started up rather quickly, right? Especially in this virtual machine, which I'm running this in a virtual machine for purposes of this recording. The virtual machine only has six gigs of RAM. So it's like a kind of mediocre or underpowered laptop. You can say I had no problems with the speed of that. I didn't even really consider that, you know, takes a couple seconds, which is about normal, considering the specs. If I was running this on my main production workstation, probably wouldn't be an issue at all because it's a beast of a machine. I have 64 gigs of RAM on the actual host machine here. Now, one of the controversial decisions here in the last couple of versions of Ubuntu has been the decision that some of these applications no longer install as a dev pack using the app to package manager. Instead, they default to installing as a snap. And for the most part, this is not a decision that canonical made. This is not a decision that any of the Ubuntu team has made. This is a decision that the maintainers of these packages on Ubuntu have made. It's just easier for some of these packages that receive a lot of updates constantly like Firefox, for example, web browsers, especially are constantly being updated. So if you're packaging them for a static release distribution like Ubuntu, it might be better to package them as a snap, which can roll, right? That they constantly get updated. No, the snap packages are self-updating packages. So that's why Firefox and so many other, especially web browsers probably, are now going to start moving towards snap packages on Ubuntu. You're going to see other things that we'll default to installing as a snap. A lot of times when you go into the terminal now and do sudo apt install name of package, if the package is not available, it will warn you the package is not available through the apt package manager, but it will tell you the snap command to install it. A lot of your proprietary software is going to be like that. So if I tried to install something like discord or telegram or Spotify, you know, it's going to tell me, hey, apt can't install that. But you know what is found in the snap store? Do a sudo snap, install discord, for example, and boom, there you go. And I could open a terminal and put this to the test here. So let's open a terminal, zoom in and let's see if I can do a sudo apt install Spotify. Proprietary software, so is discord, so is telegram. That's why they're not in the standard repositories. So it's going to say, hey, you can't install that, right? But Ubuntu is very much like Debian in that they really don't like putting non free software in their repos. They're very anti proprietary software in the standard repos. That's why if you want Spotify, you can go get it as a snap. There's a lot of proprietary software out there that's packaged as snap. So that's why you're going to have to go get all of that as a snap. While I've got the terminal open, let's do a snap list. Let me zoom out so you can actually see the list. What is installed as a snap out of the box? Really nothing. Firefox, Firefox, the snap store, which is your software center. That's it. And then some of the other stuff are just dependencies that are needed. So really you have really one snap, you know, you have Firefox. So the people that say that Ubuntu is forcing snaps on people, not the case. That's really not the case at all. It's kind of a weird complaint. Let's also do an apt list dash, dash installed and get a list of everything that is packaged as a Debian package through the apt package manager. Let me up arrow and pipe that into WC dash L. WC is the word count program. If you give it the dash L flag, you get a line count. So let's get a line count of everything that was installed as a DevPack. 1,810 Debian packages are installed versus Firefox is installed as a snap. So definitely not forcing snaps on anyone. Because GNOME has moved to their new version 44, a lot of the GNOME applications have also been updated to newer versions with some newer features such as Nautilus here. So Nautilus, if you're looking in a list view, so by default, Nautilus has this view. But if you go into this list view and you go into preferences and under preferences, you have the general section here, expandable folders in list view. Slide that on, which in my case, it's already ticked on. And now if I go to a folder that has some sub directories or stuff in it and I click the little right pointing Chevron, the greater than sign, right? It's letting me know that I could get an expandable list here. So if I click on it, it's kind of hard to click. One thing I've noticed with this, it is kind of hard to hit that in just the right spot, but you get it to pop out and you can see now you get, you know, the Firefox directory, which is also expandable. Now, for me, I've never cared for this kind of expandable folder, this tree view and file managers. It's not something I've ever used in any of my file managers, but I know some people probably prefer it. And it's certainly nice to have options. Having more options is never a bad thing. Let's take a look at the Ubuntu software center. So let's open that. The very first time you open it, by the way, it will take a minute to load because it's got to download a new catalog of software, get all that information from the internet here. I just opened it not too long ago. So it pops up rather quickly for me here on camera. But you can see, looks nice, right? It's just your standard GNOME software center. And it's very easy, intuitive. There's the updates tab, which right now Firefox does have an update. So if I wanted to take that, I could hit update on Firefox, just update that one package, or I could hit update all to update all the packages that have an update available. This was just released two days ago. So obviously there's nothing to update. Just Firefox in this case has seen a minor bump from 111.0 to 111.0.1, it looks like. So not much difference with the software center. It's the same Ubuntu software center you've grown to know and love for those that use it. For me, I prefer opening a terminal and doing things at the command line. For example, doing a uname dash R to check the kernel version. Now this is a very recent kernel, 6.2.0. So that is good, especially for those of you that have some rather newer hardware that need the latest kernel for drivers and such. For those of you wondering about system resource usage, let's see if Htop is installed. It is not. So let's do a sudo apt install. Htop looks like Htop is also packaged as a snap because it told us we could install it either with apt or snap, but I installed it through the apt package manager. So let's do Htop. Now I have opened a lot of things on camera here in the last few minutes. So the RAM usage is actually a little higher than what I would have expected. 1.27 gigs of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. That is high. Also, CPU is actually running rather high. Nearly 20%, 34% at fluctuates, but I'd say it's using about 20% of the CPU. Now we just opened the package manager a second ago and ran that update, installing Firefox. I don't know if that's, the package manager is still doing something. One thing we should also mention here, let me close the terminal, is that by default, 2304 Ubuntu defaults to GNOME on Wayland. So we're actually running GNOME on Wayland here. Now there is an option in the menu in your login manager. If you want to, you can switch to Ubuntu on Xorg. So you can go back to just using GNOME on Xorg if you need to. Now Wayland, a lot of window managers on Wayland have issues but the big desktop environments, GNOME and KDE have gotten most of the Wayland stuff kind of worked out. Most people are probably going to be okay and running GNOME on Wayland. If for some reason with your hardware, Wayland is an issue, you do have that fallback option in the login manager if you need to switch back to using Xorg. Overall, the couple of hours that I spent playing with Lunar Lobster in the last couple of days, it's been great. Like I've really been impressed with it. It actually makes me kind of want to install it, right? Especially having run rolling release distributions and some of the headaches that sometimes I get with broken packages and things like that. If I ever wanted to actually run a static release distribution, this one, this really wouldn't be a bad one, right? Going back to Ubuntu, damn, that's a sexy wallpaper. Anyway, guys, Ubuntu team, job well done on the big release 2304 Lunar Lobster. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Gabe James Maxim, Homie's too bald, Matt Nimit, Mitchell, Paul, Royal West, Armor Dragon, Bash Potato Chuck, Commander Angry, George Lee, Marshdom, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archimedes, Royal Polytech, Realiteats for Less Red Prophet, Roland, Tools Devils, and William Zenibet. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons. Over on Patreon about these guys. This quick and cursory look at Ubuntu 2304 Lunar Lobster. It would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Ubuntu understands how to make a sexy desktop. It's all about the wallpapers.