Free desktop personal experience

By Scott Hamilton

Last week I talked about some of the new features and improvements in the latest Ubuntu Desktop release, 20.04 Focal Fossa. Over this last weekend I installed the operating system on my laptop, replacing the previous release. At first, I performed an upgrade installation, so only marginal performance improvements over the previous version. A word of advice; if you are already running a Ubuntu distribution it is worth the effort to run a clean install with this release.

After using the updated installation for a couple of days, I decided to try a fresh installation, just to clean things up a bit from the upgrade process. The boot time was reduced significantly as well as the amount of time between logging in and seeing the desktop. The new Gnome desktop loads fast and is much more responsive than the prior release. I am testing on a laptop that is over 10-years-old and this release has brought new life to the old machine.

Being the curious type, I wanted to know where the speed-up in boot time came from and found a few things. The first was a change in the compression algorithm used to compress the initramfs file system. The initramfs is a temporary operating system used to load all of the drivers for your devices before booting the real operating system. The first stage of booting a Linux operating system is to decompress the initramfs into memory. The change from using gzip to using lz4 improved decompression time, significantly reducing the boot time of the system. They also shifted to using the hardware vendor’s logo on the boot screen, reducing flicker on boot and removing a few more seconds from the boot time.

I immediately noticed the removal of the annoying orange color of file folders in the file manager; sorry if you liked the original color schemes. It’s easy to put it back to the old default orange, but I find the new, dark gray much more appealing; it seems cleaner and bolder. The first thing I have done in every release to date was to download a custom, dark theme for a cleaner look. Ubuntu has finally listened to the community and released a dark theme as one of the defaults. Upon switching to the dark theme, taking the default window background from white with dark text to a dark grey background with a light text, it seems to me to be much easier on the eyes.

The default application set that comes preinstalled has also seen some improvements. Among the applications that are pre-installed, you will find the LibreOffice Suite, Rhythmbox for your music, Shotwell for photo management, Thunderbird for e-mail and Firefox for browsing the internet.

The final and most awesome change is the ability to apply fractional scaling to the display. This allows you to modify the overall display including icon sizes, font sizes, desktop wallpaper and menus simultaneously, rather than having to reduce screen resolution, modify font sizes and adjust wallpaper scaling to give you the experience you desire, whether that be smaller fonts to give more screen real estate or larger fonts to increase the ease of viewing.

I have been an avid user of free operating systems for nearly two decades and have seen constant improvement with every release, but my favorite part is the amount of flexibility in configuration. I can still install the first Linux desktop version interface and flash back to old experiences, with the enhanced performance of the new underlying hardware and software improvements. Imagine if you liked your old Windows 95 look and feel and could still use it on your new computer. That’s the feeling I get every time I upgrade my Ubuntu system and can change my settings to look the same.

Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.

By Scott Hamilton

Last week I talked about some of the new features and improvements in the latest Ubuntu Desktop release, 20.04 Focal Fossa. Over this last weekend I installed the operating system on my laptop, replacing the previous release. At first, I performed an upgrade installation, so only marginal performance improvements over the previous version. A word of advice; if you are already running a Ubuntu distribution it is worth the effort to run a clean install with this release.

After using the updated installation for a couple of days, I decided to try a fresh installation, just to clean things up a bit from the upgrade process. The boot time was reduced significantly as well as the amount of time between logging in and seeing the desktop. The new Gnome desktop loads fast and is much more responsive than the prior release. I am testing on a laptop that is over 10-years-old and this release has brought new life to the old machine.

Being the curious type, I wanted to know where the speed-up in boot time came from and found a few things. The first was a change in the compression algorithm used to compress the initramfs file system. The initramfs is a temporary operating system used to load all of the drivers for your devices before booting the real operating system. The first stage of booting a Linux operating system is to decompress the initramfs into memory. The change from using gzip to using lz4 improved decompression time, significantly reducing the boot time of the system. They also shifted to using the hardware vendor’s logo on the boot screen, reducing flicker on boot and removing a few more seconds from the boot time.

I immediately noticed the removal of the annoying orange color of file folders in the file manager; sorry if you liked the original color schemes. It’s easy to put it back to the old default orange, but I find the new, dark gray much more appealing; it seems cleaner and bolder. The first thing I have done in every release to date was to download a custom, dark theme for a cleaner look. Ubuntu has finally listened to the community and released a dark theme as one of the defaults. Upon switching to the dark theme, taking the default window background from white with dark text to a dark grey background with a light text, it seems to me to be much easier on the eyes.

The default application set that comes preinstalled has also seen some improvements. Among the applications that are pre-installed, you will find the LibreOffice Suite, Rhythmbox for your music, Shotwell for photo management, Thunderbird for e-mail and Firefox for browsing the internet.

The final and most awesome change is the ability to apply fractional scaling to the display. This allows you to modify the overall display including icon sizes, font sizes, desktop wallpaper and menus simultaneously, rather than having to reduce screen resolution, modify font sizes and adjust wallpaper scaling to give you the experience you desire, whether that be smaller fonts to give more screen real estate or larger fonts to increase the ease of viewing.

I have been an avid user of free operating systems for nearly two decades and have seen constant improvement with every release, but my favorite part is the amount of flexibility in configuration. I can still install the first Linux desktop version interface and flash back to old experiences, with the enhanced performance of the new underlying hardware and software improvements. Imagine if you liked your old Windows 95 look and feel and could still use it on your new computer. That’s the feeling I get every time I upgrade my Ubuntu system and can change my settings to look the same.

Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.