 Today marks a very special event. It only happens twice a year, but it always throws off your sleep schedule. No I'm not talking about daylight savings time. I'm talking about a boom-to-release date We get one every April and every October and this latest release 2104 It comes jam-packed with some new features new updates and as always we get a cool new animal codename This release 2104 is codenamed her suit hippo. Her suit is an adjective It means hairy or covered with hairs hippo could possibly refer to an ex-girlfriend Now one thing to note is that a boom-to 20104 is a regular short-term release or what they sometimes call an interim release And that means it's only supported for nine months Now a boom-to usually uses their interim releases to introduce new features and tests things out prior to the next Long-term support release a boom-to comes in a variety of official flavors and today I'm going to take a look at six different official flavors of a boom-to 2104 I'm going to take a look at a boom-to coo boom-to zoo boom-to Lou boom-to a boom-to mate and a boom-to budgie So the first flavor we should take a look at is of course the flagship edition of a boom-to a boom-to 2104 with the GNOME desktop environment now when I went through the installation process for a boom-to 2104 I noticed that it still defaults to the extend for file system those of you that want to use the ZFS file system You can still use ZFS all you need to do is during the installer click advanced features and choose ZFS One other important feature about a boom-to 20104 is that now it defaults to Wayland for the display server For those of you that are not on it video So if I actually take a look at the windowing system right here under the about program you see we are using Wayland now That's only for non-NVIDIA users So a boom-to 2104 it detects your hardware and it knows if NVIDIA hardware is actually installed on your system if it detects an NVIDIA card It actually will default you to XOR because Wayland still doesn't work properly with NVIDIA The other big thing that GNOME fans will immediately notice is that this is not the latest version of GNOME This is not GNOME 40 a boom-to is still using GNOME 3 dot 38 dot 5 And the reason they're still using GNOME 3 and not GNOME 40 is because GNOME 40 has it's still new and it's really It would introduce some major pain points and some major hiccups to the Ubuntu desktop if they tried to move to it right now It's because it's gonna break things It's gonna break some theming stuff because GNOME 40 of course introduces the GTK for toolkit And of course, you know, they the Ubuntu team uses a lot of their own custom GNOME extensions to get this this kind of look that they have like this bar on the side No, they make GNOME mimic the old unity desktop environment through these custom extensions and all of these extensions Of course won't work if they move to GNOME 40 So they are sticking with GNOME 3 dot 38 dot 5 at least for this release Now one of the major improvements that they've made with this release of Ubuntu is now you can have Desktop icons again, you can have files on your desktop And I'm not one of these people that I don't use files or directories sitting on my desktop My desktop is just a wallpaper, right? I've never understood the need to put files on the desktop But I know for a lot of people they're used to that because that's the way windows did things and when you take away That functionality that people expect to be there people get angry and a while back I think way back in GNOME version 3 dot 28 they removed this ability to have desktop icons And because so many people wanted it what the Ubuntu team did is there's now this new GNOME extension I think it's called ding DING and it allows you to put desktop icons back in GNOME If you have that extension installed in Ubuntu 2104, they just have that installed by default Let's take a look at some of the software that is installed by default in Ubuntu Ubuntu has always shipped Firefox as its default browser as far as I know since the beginning of time And that's the case here and they are on version 87.0 for the Firefox browser Firefox is of course free and open source software. They also ship looks like the entire Libre Office suite And so they offer two different installations during the installer. You can choose the standard installation, which is what I installed There's also a minimal installation option, which is going to have much less programs installed Now the standard installation did install the full Libre Office suite, which includes Libre Office calc draw impress math and writer Let me click on Libre Office writer here and let's see what version of Libre Office we are on We're on Libre Office 7 dot 1 dot 2 dot 2 very recent version of Libre Office Ubuntu is still using Thunderbird for its default email client They are on version 78 dot 8 dot 1 for Thunderbird The next thing I want to do is I want to bring up a terminal control alt T brings up a terminal in Ubuntu and most Ubuntu based distributions So let me make this full screen and let me zoom in here. What is the key binding to zoom in there? We go and what I want to do is check some software here in the terminal The most important program of course on any Linux operating system is the Linux kernel without the kernel You don't actually have an operating system So let's check the kernel version and I can check that with you name space dash R And we are on kernel version 5 dot 11 and you always want to be on more recent kernel versions because More recent kernels are going to have better support for hardware they're typically going to have more security fixes already patched and 5 dot 11 includes some really nice improvements for things like USB for thunderbolt It also includes improvements as far as hardware support for laptop manufacturers such as Lenovo's thinkpads and ASUS gaming laptops Let me check some program versions here in the terminal for example the bash shell Let's see what version we are on if I can spill version quickly bash space dash dash version gets us Good new bash version 5 dot 1 dot 4. Let's check the Python version if I did Python dash dash version here Command Python not found so in Ubuntu You actually have to specify Python 3 space dash dash version and you get Python 3 dot 9 dot 4 Let me check system resource usage here in the terminal with the htop command and htop is not installed One of the problems I keep complaining about it with every new version of Ubuntu is I don't know why they don't have htop Installed for a terminal base system monitor I also don't know why they don't have vim installed for a text editor because these are not big programs at all They wouldn't take up any space really on the ISO on the system Just install htop and vim because especially with vim You know, nobody likes to use vi and most people don't like to use nano Just install vim for us regular Linux users, please Ubuntu. I'm begging you but we can install htop and vim We could do a pseudo apt install and I'll go ahead and install htop It'll just take a second We have to give a root password to install and remove software, of course And then once htop is finished installing here. I'm going to take a look at Our system resource usage using htop and right now this virtual machine. I gave it 4 gigs of ram We're using 937 megs of that ram. That's pretty Normal for a genome desktop. Actually that may be a little lighter than many genome desktops. Ubuntu does typically Register a little less ram usage than a lot of the other genome based Linux distributions I use but that's still not it's not a lightweight desktop environment, but it's not bad Of course cpu usage. We're barely doing anything. So we're not taxing the cpu at all here Let's check and see how many programs are actually installed on Ubuntu 2104 So if I do apt list space dash dash installed This will give us a list of all the programs that are currently installed on the system We can't do much with that list, but Let me go ahead and pipe that through wc which is the word count program wc space dash l for let's get a line count And now we get a line count of 1708 That is the number of packages that were installed on Ubuntu by default at least with apt Now we could do a snap list to see how many snaps are installed as well And there are a few snaps installed, but really not much I mean other than the snap store and snap d and the core of the snap I mean, this is just built into snaps. The only thing they explicitly looks like they went out and installed was uh GNOME 3.34 and GTK common themes Yeah, there's people that complain that Ubuntu is installing everything as snaps That doesn't seem to be the case at least that is not the case here in Ubuntu 2104 One interesting security thing that they did let me open up a terminal again Because I'll need a terminal to demonstrate this as they have changed some of the file permissions the default file permissions here in Ubuntu before your user's home directory used to have permission 75 they have since changed all user directories User home directories to have permission 750. So let me cd up one level here from my home directory If I do it ls-la to get the long format, you will see my home user dt His user directory here is the dt directory. The permissions are now drwxr-x-dash-dash that is permission 750 It used to be permission 755 which means this dash right there used to be a r What is that? Well, that means no longer can other users on the system If this was a multi user system, no other user can access my home directory The only person that can access my home directory is me So we've got the dt user here on the system and let's say there's a second user on the system And her name is Mary. Mary in older versions of Ubuntu could actually access dt's home folder and execute things and the dt user would be able to go and access Mary's home folder That's no longer the case. I think that's a wise choice. I think that's good for security I also think that's good for privacy on multi user systems The next flavor I want to take a look at is Kubuntu 2104 Now Kubuntu 2104 for one thing the plasma desktop environment just looks gorgeous I love the default wallpaper like this thing the immediate first impression for Kubuntu is well Now one thing about the installation process that differs with Kubuntu and standard Ubuntu is ZFS is not offered as an option with Kubuntu. It's not offered in the installer And it's it's not it offered because it wasn't implemented in the kde front end of the ubiquity Installer they just haven't implemented that option yet. Also the minimal installation option Is also not something that's offered in the Kubuntu ubiquity installer One other major change is that Wayland is not offered as the default display server by default You're going to log in to an xorg session now Wayland is installed You can switch over to a Wayland session if you choose. It's just not set as the default session And let me see if I can get some about information here for 2104 Kubuntu and it looks like they are using kde plasma version 5.21.4 They're using the kde frameworks 5.80 and the cute version is 5.15.2 Now since all the 2104 releases of Ubuntu are based on the same kernel You're always going to have kernel version 5.11. They're also going to be other similarities So if firefox is installed it's always going to be 87 and all the 2104 Versions of Ubuntu. Also if we have an office category and they have LibreOffice all the LibreOffice Versions are still going to be 7.1.2.2. Now one interesting change with Kubuntu 2104 Is that in past versions, I believe the default music player was Cantata They have since switched to Elisa as the default music player So that is one change that I think as Kubuntu users will immediately spot So those of you that were used to using Cantata, you may have to install Cantata now But if you like Elisa then it's there for you as well Now there aren't any really major changes from this version of plasma compared to previous versions of plasma Here in Kubuntu we still have the Discover Software Center For those of you that want a graphical software center If you don't want to install all your software using the terminal The terminal we can still bring up though with Control-Alt-T that key binding still works And just like in Ubuntu, let's get a package count list So I'm going to do apt-list-installed And once again we need to pipe that into the WC program So WC-L to get a line count And there are 1,937 packages installed on Kubuntu 2104 I didn't check if there were any snaps installed By default I don't believe there are if I do a snap list There are no snaps installed yet And moving along to Zubuntu 2104 Zubuntu of course uses the minimal lightweight desktop environment known as XFCE They're using the latest version of XFCE XFCE 4.16 During the installation process for Zubuntu I noticed that it defaults to the extend for file system But it does offer ZFS You can choose ZFS if you click on advanced features during the installation process One of the things I noticed with Zubuntu 2104 is the panel Now if I go to panel preferences here and go to appearance We have general here and dark mode Dark mode is turned off by default But I could slide that on And that is a really nifty way to quickly get a dark mode Because I do prefer dark themes So we still have a light GTK theme here as far as our applications But we do now have a dark theme here in the panel and the menu system Looking at some of what is installed with Zubuntu I mean you've got most of your XFCE applications of course Such as the XFCE terminal, the file manager, Thunar You don't really have too much in the way of games installed Mines and Sudoku Under internet you have a couple of different chat programs Used to I believe they just defaulted to using Pigeon for any kind of chat clients But now they have HexChat installed And HexChat actually by default Does connect you to the Ubuntu servers over on the free node network So if you need support for your Ubuntu installations Then you can just pull up HexChat And it should automatically connect you That's a really neat feature Another thing I noticed that under system If I go to system We have the synaptic package manager So unlike some of the other graphical package managers That have icons and big screenshots And a lot of whizbang effects And they're just slow and hard to use The synaptic package manager is fantastic For many many many years the synaptic package manager Was kind of the default graphical package manager For Debian and most Debian based distributions Including Ubuntu and most Ubuntu based distributions But somewhere along the way A lot of Ubuntu based distributions Started getting away from the synaptic package manager And I don't know why It really makes installing software rather easy If you don't want to use the terminal of course Once again Control-Alt-T will bring us a terminal And let me full screen and we'll check some stuff in the terminal Let me zoom in And once again if I did a uname-r Once again 5.11 The kernel version is going to be the same on all versions of Ubuntu Let's do an apt list-install And once again pipe that through wc-l How many packages are installed on Ubuntu? 1664 packages Are there any snaps installed out of the box? Snap list says no snaps are installed yet And we'll close out that terminal One other thing to note is that the right click menu here inside Zubuntu It no longer contains your application menu You used to have an applications menu in this right click menu Similar to how you can browse your applications in this menu here on the panel You used to have something like that here in the right click menu But they have disabled that Of course you can always re-enable that if you need it Now let's move on to Lubuntu 21.04 Lubuntu uses the lightweight LXQ desktop environment When I installed Lubuntu I noticed first of all It's not using the Ubiquiti installer It uses the Calamaries installer And because they're using a different installer There's no advanced features button in it to click Where you can get the ZFS file system It just defaults to the extend4 file system Also I did notice that it was very easy to create a swap file If you prefer swap files to swap partitions There was a drop down You just click swap to file And it creates a swap file for you You don't have to worry about taking up a lot of space with a swap partition Logging into Lubuntu for the first time The first thing I noticed was Lubuntu has always been very attractive The LXQ desktop environment can actually be very attractive Although I must say I'm not crazy about that wallpaper That wallpaper is a little weird One of the other things I needed to do Is I needed to change the screen resolution here When I first logged in And for most of the other flavors of Lubuntu I noticed that I can search for the word display Because it's typically a program called display settings Or set display or something like that That returns nothing here in the menu I had to search for monitor And there is a program called monitor settings But I wish the Lubuntu guys could actually make that Where if you actually search for the word display You still get that program returned Going back to the menu settings here If I click on about LXQ We are on the latest version of LXQ Which is version 0.16 And 0.16 has seen a lot of improvements Nothing earth-shattering But LXQ is still a rather young desktop environment It hasn't been around that long So it still needs a lot of work done to it And you will notice a lot of improvements To the LXQ panel You'll notice a lot of improvements To the PCMan FM file manager Also the Qt terminal The Qt terminal Looking through the menu system here At some of the packages that are installed Most of them are going to be specific LXQ programs Or in some cases KDE programs Because KDE of course is a Qt-based desktop environment As well you'll notice things like Featherpad is our default text editor It's just a plain text editor For Compositor I noticed that Pycom was installed Games we really didn't have any games installed Other than the 2048 game No real graphics programs I mean we had LibreOfficeDraw And we did have ScanLite For those of you that still use a scanner Internet programs Firefox is a web browser Once again 87.0 And Trohita is the email client I still don't understand why They don't just install Thunderbird I don't think anybody really uses Trohita or Trojita or whatever this email client is Just install Mozilla Thunderbird You're already installing Firefox anyway Of course we have the entire LibreOffice suite And we have VLC for our media player VLC is fantastic What version are we on? We're on 3.0.12 If I do a Control Alt-T to bring up a terminal One thing I will say about Lubuntu Is they do get some things right Unlike mainstream Ubuntu Htop is installed by default And also them is installed by default Because of that I do want to give the Lubuntu team two thumbs up Moving on to Ubuntu Mate Ubuntu Mate 21.04 is still a Ubuntu Mate This has always been a rather Interesting distribution in my opinion Because I mean the year is 2021 But Ubuntu Mate they're still partying Like it's 2008, right? It's still like GNOME 2 That's basically what Mate originally was It was just a fork of the old GNOME 2 project Because they didn't want to go to GNOME 3 And it's still an okay desktop environment I didn't hate the old GNOME 2 desktop environment I wasn't a fan of it But it was certainly usable And I would say the Mate desktop environment In its default form is also very usable And of course with the Ubuntu Mate You don't have to stick to the default layout This GNOME 2 kind of look and feel You can launch the Mate tweak tool And you can turn on desktop icons Or turn them off I like them off The panels So here's where you change the look and feel Of the desktop environment By default the familiar look Is your GNOME 2 kind of paradigm But if I chose Redmond for example That would be more like a Windows 7 kind of look So if I switch to that You know we get the panel at the bottom The menu system at the top There's also the mutiny layout Which mimics the old Unity desktop environment Where you have your panel on the left hand side There's also a Mac layout Which is called Cupertino I'm actually pretty okay with the Windows Like layout there I don't mind that Taking a look at the menu system And going through and seeing some of the programs installed Of course you have your Mate suite of applications Like the Engrampa archive manager The Mate calendar The Mate search tool And of course the Mate plain text editor Which they call Pluma Which is actually a really nice plain text editor This is Pluma 1.24.2 Under the internet category We have the Firefox web browser Again version 87 We have transmission for BitTorrent client We don't have an email client installed by default I guess they assume Everybody these days is using Webmail Which unfortunately is the case A lot of people don't really need a desktop email client I use an email desktop client But I know that's not everybody Although we do have Evolution installed We also have again the entire Libre Office suite as well The control center here is really nice For those of you that are coming over from Windows To Linux So you're brand new to Linux It's sometimes nice to have these programs That kind of resemble programs that were in Windows For example, this control center It kind of reminds you of the Windows control center Here's where you get information You can do settings for drivers Bluetooth displays Disk keyboard settings Mouse settings Power management settings Here's where you can tweak the look and feel For example, if you wanted to play with the themes You can go into the appearance preferences here And maybe you want to enable BlackMate Which is a nice dark theme Oh yeah, that looks better already Let's see how the menu system looks with that theme Yeah Once again, Control Alt T will bring up our terminal And what terminal are we using here in Mate? We're using the Mate terminal As a fork of GNOME terminal And if I zoom in once again here What I want to do here is check Htop Is Htop installed? It is Thank you, Ubuntu Mate team You guys are awesome We're only using 727 megs of the 4 gigs of RAM I gave this virtual machine The other test is Is Veeam installed? Oh, you were so close to Ubuntu Mate To being my favorite Ubuntu flavor But if you don't have Veeam I can't get behind you I mean really Ubuntu Mate If you'd have just had Veeam I'd let everything else go The fact that you still use this GNOME 2 like desktop environment And that quite frankly It's just this crazy looking green All over the place I'd have let all that go If you just have Veeam installed out of the box And last but certainly not least Let's take a look at Ubuntu Budgie 21.04 First impressions When you log into Ubuntu Budgie Is always just gorgeous The Ubuntu Budgie desktop Is always looked amazing It's really got a familiar look and feel Especially for those of you That are used to Mac So you got a top panel and a bottom dock And you got a traditional kind of menu system That you could go through And search for different things And you've got all your standard programs here Now by default You've got this kind of slide show Kind of effect going on Where everything's just thrown into one category But if you wanted your applications Grouped by categories You could click view by category And now you get this traditional kind of menu And going through here And taking a look at some of what is installed Under accessories We have a lot of GNOME utilities This is especially what Budgie uses So like your archive manager I believe is just the standard file Roller program Your GNOME archive manager Same thing with things like your calculator I believe it's just going to be the GNOME calculator Yeah, it looks like that's the GNOME calculator Calculator 40.0 So yeah, they're using the absolute latest GNOME calculator One thing I did notice Installing Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Monte Which I don't think I mentioned Is both of them do offer ZFS You can click on advanced features During the installation And click ZFS And install the ZFS file system But of course by default They both default to the extend for file system One other interesting note Is now Ubuntu Budgie actually offers Raspberry Pi 4 images Which is rather cool I searched for about Well, we get some about information here So it's kind of like the GNOME about information Where we get information about our latest desktop version And it's going to report that it's GNOME version 3.38.5 Of course, it's the Budgie desktop environment The Budgie desktop environment that they're using Is actually 10.5.2 We are using XORG So we're not defaulting to Weyland Like we are in standard Ubuntu One of the things I noticed about Budgie here Is if I go to the Budgie welcome And I don't think this was the case In the last version of Ubuntu Budgie But it is the case now So you have your little welcome screen And one of the very first things they ask you Is about browsers So browsers, Firefox of course Is the default browser in Ubuntu Budgie Just like it is And all the other flavors that we've taken a look at Chromium is also here But they also offer proprietary browsers For those that need it Now I don't like these proprietary browsers I try to use free and open source software Where possible But I don't mind that they offer quick installations For things like Google Chrome, Vivaldi, and Opera Now me, I prefer free and open source software And my browser of choice these days Is actually Brave And they have now added Brave To this page This browser ballot page And you can quickly get Brave installed By clicking snap install It's going to install it as a snap But that's fine I have no problems with snap packages They do work And I do love the fact that they offer the Brave browser Now I think more Linux distributions Need to seriously start considering Using Brave Not just offering it as an option But maybe considering defaulting to the Brave browser It's that good And of course it adds a lot of extra Security benefits as well One thing I've noticed Compared to previous versions of Ubuntu Budgie Is that now the Budgie theme Does appear to look a little darker The other thing is It's a little wonky At least in my installation Like the title bar And then the toolbar here And then the panes here of the window And then the status bar That's five different shades of gray Essentially nothing It really doesn't quite match up And I'm not sure why Let me go to themes Let's play with some of the themes Budgie themes and layouts And we can switch the appearance I'm not sure what they're doing by default I think they're doing this art design Is that the one they're doing by default No, Pocillo Pocillo is the one they're doing by default They do have a new Mac-like theme That they called White Sur Let's install that And click OK And it warns us it's installing a third-party package All right, and that finished installing Now if I click Apply Makeover That should have changed our theme And it definitely changed the top panel Now the top panel is transparent I don't particularly like transparent panels But I know a lot of people do So we'll leave it That changed the icon theme To this Mac-like icon theme That actually is pretty neat Let's see how the GTK theme looks Ah, it's a much better coordinated dark theme And it has the Mac-like buttons Although they're on the right side Really, shouldn't they be on the left side I'd probably move that if that's possible I'm sure it probably is And the customization options I think I'm just gonna go with that for now Close that out One other neat thing With this version of Ubuntu Budgie Is now they have this thing called the window shuffler Which I have it enabled here I think by default it's not enabled But this allows you to do some grid snapping And some pseudo tiling kind of thing And you get key bindings So you have these key bindings For the tiling and layouts And move and resize And let me open up another window So one that's not fixed in size This window shuffler menu here Or this window is actually fixed in size So I can't really demonstrate too much with it But this file manager Let me resize it And then if I did Let's try super alt left Moves it to the left Super alt right Top right Super alt down Would move it down Super alt left Moves it down left You know I can move it all around the screen Some of the other things that we could do It looks like Control alt plus a number Moves it in a like a nine kind of grid So if I did Control alt nine Oh we were on this window Let's get rid of that window Let's do control alt nine on this window All right control alt eight Yeah control alt seven And control alt six Control alt five Yeah I used to do a very similar grid kind of effect Snapping effect on my windows With my old open box configs I had an open box configuration That did the same thing I'd do control alt and then One through nine on the keyboard And it would put them in one of the Nine grids if you were dividing it Like in a three by three grid Really really nice feature For the Ubuntu budget desktop team Let me get a terminal Let me make it full screen And I'm going to zoom in Because one thing I do want to do Is let's check out H top H top is installed in Ubuntu budget as well So kudos to these guys We're using one gig of RAM Or the four gigs of RAM That I gave this machine And you know what? I will name a Ubuntu budget 2104 Best in class If it has Vium installed Vium is not installed Oh my goodness So I don't know who's going to get The best in class award For the six versions of 2104 I took a look at today It would have been in a landslide Ubuntu budget 2104 Had they just had Vium installed Out of the box I guess if I was going to have to give One of these six flavors The gold medal As far as the one that really stood out I can't do it All six flavors Actually looked really good to me I would have no problems Running any of these distributions That we took a look at today So I do want to congratulate The teams that worked on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Zubuntu Lubebuntu, Ubuntu budget And Ubuntu Monte 2104 Job well done Now before I get out of here Let me thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode I need to thank Absi Delos, Gabe Lue, Mitchell, Allen, Akami Arch 5530, Chug David The other David, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul Polytech, Scott, Steven, Sven Wes and Willie These guys They're my highest tiered patrons Over on Patreon Without these guys This quick look at these six editions Of Ubuntu 2104 Hersuit, Hippo It would not have been possible The show is also brought to you By each and every one of these Ladies and gentlemen as well All these names you're seeing on the screen These are all my supporters Over on Patreon Because the Distrotube channel Is sponsored by you guys The community And if you'd like to support my work Look for Distrotube Over on Patreon All right guys Peace You gotta have Vim installed Or at least Emacs