Updated: November 27, 2024
The more sharp-eyed among you will have noticed: I've not done an Ubuntu review in some six years. The reason is quite simple: I've worked for Canonical for a bunch of years, and since I have a strict policy of separation between home and work, and in the interest of objectivity and impartiality, I skipped this distro in my testing. And since I no longer work for Canonical, I can now do a fresh test. It's can-onical rather than cant-onical. Excuse my pun.
First, don't expect any reactionary drama. That's not me. Second, by and large, my expectations are low. One, the Linux desktop is pretty stagnated, and has been for quite a while. Two, even my darling desktop Plasma has misbehaved some recently, as I outlined in my latest Slimbook Executive report. Three, speaking of desktops, I don't like Gnome 3. It's simply anti-ergonomic, plain and simple. Nothing personal. Just pure usability and pragmatism. I'm not convinced there will be any revolutionary outcome today, especially since Gnome has become even more rigid (you need to compile themes to change basics like font color). Four, I used to love Ubuntu, it was my primary distro for many years, until the parent company switched to Gnome, when I went elsewhere. I still claim that Unity has been amazing, and to this day, it is superior to the desktop environment that succeeded it. With that in mind, let's have a review.
Live session, installation, awful fonts
I booted the distro from a USB drive on my IdeaPad 3 test machine, currently triple-boot Kubuntu, MX Linux, and Windows 11. This ain't a super-powerful system, but it has a Ryzen 5 processor and a small SSD. Ubuntu 24.10 booted fine, with only a single flicker and no text garbage the way many distros do.
The live session is a bit confusing. You get the setup wizard right away, but since the dock is hidden by default, you don't actually know you're inside a fully working session. Then, this wizard will ask you whether you want to try or install Ubuntu. But it's only the third or the fourth step in the GUI. It ought to be the first, like in the olden days. It did auto-detect my Wi-Fi (which I've already connected manually).
It's the fifth step actually - incongruent with what you see when you boot.
But this is just a tiny problem, really. A much, much bigger one - fonts.
Awful, awful, low-contrast, pale fonts. Probably the worst combo I've seen in years. Normally, Ubuntu fonts are the best fonts around, and yet somehow, Oracular Oriole ships with such a dreadful pale color that I got an almost instant headache. I have perfect vision, I use computers for hours upon hours, and I never have problem with my eyes, even after prolonged use. Here, within 5 minutes, my head was bursting.
What a horrendous contrast. Why? This doesn't even look pretty.
The worst part? You can't really change this much. There's the accessibility option, but it makes everything high contrast, not just the fonts (and then, not in a good way). In the live session, early on, the automatic font color change didn't work, it did later on, and in the installed system. But even this tweak wasn't good enough. The fonts still remained too pale for comfortable reading.
The accessibility tweaks through this wizard and through Settings aren't identical.
I went on with the installation, hoping to power through, hoping I would be able to do some level of customization once I committed the distro to the disk. I did some basic stuff, and I wasn't impressed. You can change the accent color, but you can't change the window borders, for example, like say Kubuntu offers with the Breeze Classic color scheme (among many others, all fully customizable). Even Windows 11 gives you this. Here, nope, zero-contrast fg/bg windows, or a dark theme (also badly contrasted).
Then, the text editor is ultra-rudimentary, the file manager STILL won't let you create files via right click by default, something you can do in every other operating system and desktop environment in the universe, you cannot resize its sidebar, file copy notification is confusing, fractional display scaling isn't active by default, and if you do turn it on, you can only do 5% jumps, you need Gnome Tweaks if you want to change font scaling rather than display scaling or font size, and the screenshot tool is spartan and ugly and annoying. It's the new Gnome thing I reported in my last Fedora review. No delayed screenshot option, it seems, and the images are auto-saved to a Screenshot folder inside Pictures, with long and ugly names. No option for you to choose a different location or give normal names to the images. Pure nonsense.
No hint what the three buttons in the top row do. Visual minimalism is cool, but also wrong.
No desktop icons by default, and no Show desktop icon - nor is there one in Gnome.
Anyway, back from the pointless minimalism of Gnome to the installation. A new wizard, written in a new framework, I don't care. The workflow is similar to the old one, but with worse contrast.
Apps wise, I accidentally selected the first option (default), as I was quite frustrated, and my eyes were hurting. Thinking about it, why would this be the default option? Why? An operating system with no software, for friendly home use, what's the point?
The partitioning step is annoying. Notice the visual layout - the line reading sda3 is not fully captured in the view. Why? What was wrong with offering 10 or 13 equi-tall rows of entries, full integers and all that? Why truncate the line so? Why show the non-installable boot media first, or at all? The visual resign of the installer was an opportunity to do things better, alas, nope. There's one positive thing: the installer does not take minutes scanning the internal disks before presenting you with the list.
User name, summary, and off we go. The installer took a merry 25 minutes to complete. Please contrast this with my recent MX Linux (which uses init) test on this very machine, just a month ago. Four minutes AND the entire live session saved (a unique thing MX Linux does).
Aside from taking forever, the installer only had two messages for me: Installing the system... and Setting up the system..., and you need to open the text console if you want more info. As it happens, the console uses good, bright, sharp colors. The wizard pages were okay, except 50% of the wizard is empty, unused white space. Instead, screenshots are crammed at the top, they're tiny, the supporting text is tiny and pale.
Trying to use the distro ...
Once the setup was complete, I rebooted. It's a clean boot all right. Most distros fail this very simple thing, and there's flickering and resolution changes and random text messages. Not here. The downside? It takes 24 seconds to reach the desktop, and that's without encryption. Among the slowest I had on this box. Again, for comparison, the MX Linux 23.4 distro did it in 18 seconds, with the ancient init and not the "amazing" systemd.
Now, problems. Or rather, more problems. Almost of them are exclusive to Gnome, and make enjoyment of Ubuntu impossible. You have to work hard - the same way Canonical does - to undo the anti-ergonomic features in this desktop environment, and you still won't make much progress.
I did toggle high contrast once more - this helped a little, but then, the dock is outlined with a big white border, for no good reason. I turned animations off, which also helped a little.
Why is the Home icon in the bottom right corner? I didn't put it there.
Performance, responsiveness
Average. Not very fast. For example, if you open Settings > Appearance, the tool will take 5-6 seconds showing the existing wallpapers. Every, single, time. It's like the slowest, most inefficient for loop. The images load as if you're on a 56k modem. The desktop itself isn't that snappy, either.
I liked the speed improvements in the App Center - it's lightning-fast compared to the Gnome Software tool, but then, that tool was so bad. Whenever I used Ubuntu in the past 6-7 years, I would always, exclusively use the command-line for package management, as the GUI was unusable. It would hang forever, as I've reported a billion times, and that bug was resolved only recently. There.
Speed aside, the App Center looks bland and boring. It's not inviting in any sense - not that any Linux software tool is appealing. They all look horrible, boring, outdated, off-putting. I long for the days of the old and trusty Ubuntu Software Center. That was a nice and fast utility. And well designed.
The trend?
Not reviewing Ubuntu does not mean I haven't tried the various editions over the last few years. On one hand, Ubuntu did improve - it's faster than it used to be (but still not as fast as with Unity), and it's much prettier than it used to be (in comparison to the earlier versions using Gnome; Unity is still prettier). But it has also become quite heavy, it's not very responsive (relative to the underlying hardware), the software management remains cumbersome, and the usability has taken a huge toll. It has everything to do with the desktop environment of choice.
It's like putting a 500HP V8 inside a Trabant. You get a Trabant than is a bit better and faster than the original Trabant, but it's still a Trabant. It can never be an amazing, lithe, super-elegant desktop. Luckily, you can still utilize the same solid, rich base with a different desktop environment - like Plasma.
And I must stop ...
I wanted to do more testing, but I just couldn't. The ergonomics wouldn't let me. I couldn't sort out the fonts, I couldn't change the windows color, I couldn't do half a dozen must-have basics that I expect and require in any sane desktop workspace. Perhaps Ubuntu has lots of goodies, and perhaps I might have enjoyed some of the stuff, but that requires a leap of photonic faith (in my eyes) that I don't have. I see no reason why I should suffer. If my head hurts staring at the screen for a mere half an hour, whereas no other alternative desktop setup creates such a problem, then there's that.
Conclusion
Let's see what I wrote in my last Ubuntu review. That was Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, and I also installed Unity in it, back then. I wrote: "Immediately, everything was better. Unity is sooooo much faster, snappier than Gnome 3. Prettier. Seamless top panel global menu integration. Smarter system settings. You can add a show desktop button. Speed, elegance. A professional desktop. Lightyears ahead of this sad new offering based on Gnome." And then, toward then end: "...the desktop should be more usable for ordinary humans. It's ridiculous that you NEED extensions to use Gnome 3, in addition to all the hacks Canonical introduced to make the system usable. So yes, if you wanna be mediocre go for it."
That was May 2018. We're in November 2024. My conclusion? Similar to the one above. Almost identical. In fact, sadly, the Gnome from back then was MORE usable than what you have now! You could actually change themes easily, without recompiling. If you didn't like a specific color scheme, quick edit, done. Now, you can't do even that. So you either must suffer from awful ergonomics, or go elsewhere. Beyond that, Ubuntu is sort of run-of-the-mill system - dependable, sturdy, mature, not very fun, not very interesting, somewhat bland, with average speed and appeal. Shame, because I know what it can - and could do. As it stands, 14.04 Trusty remains the best, the pinnacle, and hopefully, we will have that again one day.
Cheers.