 Twice a year we are rewarded with a brand new Ubuntu release and usually on the day of release I will do a video looking at the new features and Talking about everything that's in there But this time I decided to do something a little bit different this time I decided to actually use Ubuntu for almost two weeks I use it a little bit before it was released in beta form and then I upgraded to the stable version That was released that day and then I've been using it ever since now I've been trying to install it on the same hardware that I usually do these distro reviews on which is my main machine This time I was not successful in that that has nothing to do with Ubuntu I'm just having some hard drives problems and I keep forgetting about it It's like I forget that that hard drive is bad and then I spent an hour trying to fix it and it's dead I need to just replace it, but that's beside the point So I installed Ubuntu 22.10 on my laptop and that's what we're gonna be taking a look at today So the first thing that I should say is that the b-roll that you're about to see was recorded on a laptop That does not have a 1080p screen So there's likely to be a border around it when I edit it. So just I apologize for that I'm working on rectifying that situation, but they'll be for future reviews. So just I apologize for that So let's go ahead and jump in first I'm gonna talk about new features and then I will talk about the Experience I had with it over the week or so a little over a week that I used it So let's go ahead and jump in. So the first new feature that I was actually really excited to see is a quick settings panel now this is something that drops down in the place of the previous drop-down menu up in the upper right hand corner and What makes it awesome is that it's really Interactable there's a lot of stuff here that you can control right from this panel It means that there's no more having to go spelunking into the settings panel and actually In order to do things like change the power settings change the Bluetooth settings change the Network settings things like that a lot of stuff can be done right here Same thing with the dark mode dark mode can be toggled right here with a click of a button and it is Amazing, especially when it's combined with genomes Options of changing the wallpaper based on what mode you're in so you'll you can have a light and a dark wallpaper That's really cool. So the quick settings panel is a fantastic piece of work, and I really liked it I've also seen some Extensions come out in the last few days since the boom to 22.10 was released and sense canum 43 was released That allow you to add things to the quick settings panel things like the now playing and music controls We'll show up there too with a certain extension and I've seen a couple other extensions to that expand the capabilities of The quick settings panel. So that makes me even more excited for this particular new feature So speaking of settings the settings panel in a boon to 22.10 has been upgraded to the GTK for lib adwait Version of the GNOME control center This is something that they missed out on in the last version of a boon to and basically what you're getting here is a more cohesive experience with the rest of the applications in GNOME and a boon to so you're going to get a responsive design which means that you can shrink it down and look good on phones if you're going to use it on a smaller screen and You're going to have the ability to use tools like gradients to theme it and stuff like that So there's not a lot there in terms of actual user Features that are you know things that people will care about but it does fit in better now with the rest of the design of the operating system When you go diving into the settings panel, there are a few new things So there's a new a boon to desktop settings panel basically where it will allow you to Control and tweak certain parts of the boon to desktop things like the desktop icons How the dock behaves and stuff like that there all that stuff used to be in the appearance settings now It's been split off into the boon to desktop settings There's also some more settings and options for managing applications so you can actually get access to the store page of the application that you're searching for and Get more information on the applications that you have installed which is really nice The boon to doc has also gained some new functionality So if you have multiple instances of an application open You can click on that icon in the doc and it will show you an exploded view of all of the open Versions of that application so that you can choose between them. That is something that is really nice I'm not sure What happens now if you want to minimize something so if you're used to using the Dock to minimize things That functionality seems to have gone away. I'm not actually sure I didn't actually try that out So it may have just moved to a different click event or something like that But I seem to remember and you know that you'd click on the doc and it would minimize it But maybe I'm misremembering So one of the big omissions in the last version of a boon to was the newest version of Nautilus now Nautilus is almost notoriously behind in a boon to simply because it's a big application it controls a lot of stuff inside of GNOME and That means that they're very cautious with bringing in brand new features But this time they have managed to get the GNOME 43 version of Nautilus into a boon to and It is really good. It looks fantastic. So that's good But it also has a responsive mode so that you can actually You know shrink it down and make the different sizes and it'll look really nice it'll also allow you to Easily format USB drives and SD cards You won't see this in a b-roll here because I didn't actually have one connected to the computer But you can right-click on the USB drive in the sidebar and then click formats similar to what you could do in a lot Of other file managers. So that's a nice addition. Also the list view is much improved You'll see a little bit of this in the b-roll But I don't have a lot of files on the system So you probably won't get a good sense of what it's actually improved but basically what they've done is they've increased the pre padding around some items in the list view and They've made rubber banding possible. I don't know what that actually means But there's also a new column there that has the favorite icon if the items in the list have been Favorited which is nice. You can also click that to add a favorite Then there are a few features that I didn't get any b-roll of because they're kind of things that I can't display on the screen Easily, so pipe wire is now default. So if you are not a fan of pipe wire Tough luck there I guess you supposedly could probably pull that out and put pulse audio back in but for me pipe Wider has been working really well on my main system on fedora and it worked really well in a boon too I didn't have any of the traditional pipe wire problems that I normally have so pipe wire seems to be At least somewhat ready now at least for just everyday use now. I didn't do anything special on that laptop I didn't record any videos with them, you know, external microphone or a Dac or any of that stuff. I just used the built-in speakers and whatever and it worked fine So pipe wire is now default. They've also added web piece image support So when you inevitably download something from Google search, that is not a traditional image format like PNG or JPEG And you end up with web P Not unless we'll now show you a preview of web P support. So that is good. Why it wasn't there to begin with it I mean web P has been around for quite some time I don't know why they're just building that in but it does not support it and obviously you get all of the traditional underlying Linux stuff that is improved So you get a brand new version of the kernel you get brand new versions of a lot of applications So we'll talk about that in a minute, but you'll also get a brand new version of mutter Which is the compositor that lies underneath gnom So mutter 43 gains multi monitor direct scan out support It has better support for both Wayland and x-work sessions. So Both of those should be more stable gnom 43 also has better notifications in some places I didn't really notice any difference to be honest with you. I'm just saying what the show what the change log says So Notifications are still basically what they've always been to me and the yaru icon theme has picked up some new icons as well So Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the applications So i'm not going to spend a lot of time on the applications or the built-in application Simply because if you've ever used gnom or ubuntu before, you know what these things are Basically, they're all updated applications and in traditional ubuntu fashion. None of them are the same version So you're going to see some gnom 42 applications. You're going to see some gnom 43 applications I will say that it's not as bad as some of the releases in the past where they were like three or four versions of gnom applications behind I only saw for gnom 42 and gnom 43 applications here. So that's actually much better And as far as i'm aware All of them the major Applications that they ship are now the bad awaitus. So if you're using something like gradients you can Use that and know that it'll affect all of your applications, which is nice You're also going to get brand new versions of firefox. So you'll get firefox 105 And you'll get thunderbird 102 Libre offices version 7.4 So In terms of pre-installed applications, it's basically what you've always gotten with ubuntu. I didn't notice anything special here And they all look really nice and I will have to say this With the new ability to choose accent colors, which we got in a previous ubuntu release And the dark theme You can make ubuntu look really really nice, especially now that you're not Forced to use The dock along the side and you can actually make that into a floating panel along the bottom Without actually having to install an extra extension to do so that's really nice as well It makes it look really really good. So those are the new applications I didn't want to like I said spend too much time on it because I wanted to move into My actual usage of ubuntu over the last Week and a half or so or however long it's been. So I am not an ubuntu guy I'm a fedora guy now and I'm also not a gnome guy I'm just never have been if you've watched the channel for any amount of time You'll know that I've had many many many many many many words Uh about gnome and its Goodness, I suppose, you know, I've just not been a gnome guy ever So I was therefore quite surprised when I used ubuntu 22.10 to have such a good experience I managed to change enough of the key bindings where I could actually Switch between workspaces and the way I'm used to quit applications The way I'm used to open the terminal the way I'm used to I basically made it into a twiling window manager In terms of key bindings, which is actually a good idea seeing is how it makes it usable for me So that was probably the reason why I had such a good experience with it in terms of actual use It was Really good now There are a few things that I had problems with and I did not get any of this on camera Unfortunately in terms of the problem So the biggest one is that I had several times where certain applications would just completely crash And I don't know why it would just say Ubuntu has experienced an issue. Would you like to send a bug report? And of course a press yes But I noticed that when I was trying to use the gnome screen recorder to do a screencast because I was going to actually use The screen recorder to record the b-roll for this video. It didn't work because it just kept crashing There was a couple other times where certain applications would just for whatever reason crash. I also noticed that the Software center the or the snap store would take forever to load Even after it had already been loaded one time. So I'm used to the initial load time of a snap It's just something you're going to have to get used to but the problem is is that that was after I'd already loaded at one time And it took almost a minute for it to load now I was recording at the time So I'm not sure if they had anything to play with it But I did notice that now in terms of the whole snap thing I want to take a minute to talk about that because it's tradition and I have to I will say One good thing about it. They have made the firefox snap load faster than it was the last time I used Ubuntu so Even on the crappy think pad that I tested this on which is like a core i3 from nine years ago I mean it was a long time ago The firefox snap loaded fairly fast now. It was still slower than if it was a native package It was but it wasn't like 45 seconds slow So it loaded much faster than it used to so that was a good thing I also noticed that pretty much across the board that snaps have loaded faster this time than ever before. So Finally Finally decided that they're going to put some effort into making snaps load a little bit faster So good on them. Thank you canonical. The bad news is that that stupid snap application folder is still in your home directory and That ruins any goodwill I had towards them making snaps faster It makes snaps completely unusual for me because I do not want you to ever mess with my home directory at least In full view of me like if you got to do it make it a hidden file I don't like it. I don't want you to do that but at least hide it away It's like shoving something in the closet. So I just don't have to see it You know, I know it's still there But at least it would be out of sight out of mind But no that damn snap directory is still there And it just Why can't we fix this? There is a bug report On for snapd to get rid of that and it's been there since snap was created It still has not been fixed I'm at the point now where I'm going to learn how to code just so I can you know Fix that problem because it's draw it drives me nuts and makes snaps completely unusable for me And I know it's a stupid thing. Like I know it doesn't matter in the gram scheme of things It really doesn't impact the performance of snaps and whatever, you know, whatsoever But I can't stand it. It drives me bonkers. Like it just Drives me nuts. So yeah, that was not a good experience honestly just Use flat packs. I mean, maybe I'm just biased because I like flat packs so much better But just flat packs are better. They should use flat packs. Anyways, that's not that's really neither here nor there so My experience with this version of Ubuntu specifically was really good, but really what I took away from it was That GNOME continues to get better And the Ubuntu version of GNOME is even more ahead of vanilla GNOME So I've used vanilla GNOME fairly recently And while they have done a much better job of Doing certain things that make it more usable. So they've added a dark mode, you know, and they've Made the UI cleaner and stuff like that Ubuntu has taken what GNOME offers and adds Certain pieces to it like accent colors and the ability to Move the dock around and have dash to dock already installed and they have added extensions for like desktop icons And things that go up the icons that go in the task tray or whatever You know, they've added these extensions that you kind of need in order to make your desktop functional so basically what It has happened Is that they've taken GNOME And solved a lot of the problems that GNOME has always had Specifically when it comes to things like customization that ability to choose an accent color is just Chef's kiss. It's so good. And it almost completely Negates the reason for you to ever want to theme your your desktop Just choose an accent color and it just makes everything look really good Especially in dark mode where that like a purple and the red kind of just really pop I'd have no reason to install a theme at all Like I use this for a week and a half never install GNOME tweaks And that is just unheard of when it comes to me and GNOME Like that's always the first thing that I do this time. I didn't install it at all. So Yeah, I had a pretty good experience and I'm kind of shocked now Before the people who dislike GNOME as much as I always have get out the torches and pitch pitch forks You know, I'm not still I'm still not a GNOME guy like the the workflow Is just not for me. I'm a tiling window manager guy. So I don't really Think that even as good as GNOME on Ubuntu has gotten It would ever sway me away from my tiling window managers Now there is one thing that I find a little annoying and I just kind of thought about this is that when you tile application side by side in ubuntu It does a really good job Of doing so so you can put two Windows side by side and if you move them back and forth, they'll actually move both of them So if you drag in the middle, it'll drag both of them. So it'll resize both That's really good The problem is is that they've no longer have the quarter tiling like they used to maybe that hasn't been there for a while But I just and I just noticed it But if you drag up into the corners of the desktop You can no longer tile in a quarter of a screen like you cannot basically every other desktop environment And that means that if you want to tile things you either have to install an extension Or you have to do it kind of manually and that's that's not a great experience You'll probably see that in some of the b-roll if I get that part in here But it was just not that's not a great thing And it's weird because when I first saw that ability to basically Drag in one place and have both both windows resize. I was like, hey, that's really good, right? And then I tried to tile in a in a corner with for the quarter tiling and it just it doesn't work So that kind of ruined it for me a little bit. So that was one extra thing that I kind of noticed So overall if you are an Ubuntu user And you are one of those people who don't use the LTS So you're moving from the interim release to interim release This is a good upgrade for you if you are not an Ubuntu user But you're looking to just your hop This is also something good for you to try because I actually really enjoyed it outside of those few bugs and the Randomness that is the snap directory in my home directory. Just you know, whatever It was a really good experience and I'm happy that I gave it as much time as I did So yeah, that is Ubuntu 22.10. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on mastodon or honestly those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the challenges would not be anywhere where it is right now. So thank you so very very much Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time