Ubuntu 18.04 bionic Beaver is out. Every 4 years, I would change my operating system with a fresh install and document its capabilities here.
I would also make a note of the default software as well as any installs we feel is essential to the end-user, especialy since most users are now spoilt for choice but not every choice leads to the out-of-the-box outcome.
Over the last 4 years, several technologies have had massive improvement in development and I believe this should be taken into account when software needs to be used over the next 4 years. We are not talking about developers but general desktop users. A non exhaustive list would include…
1) Machine Learning
2) WebRTC
3) Cryptocurrencies
4) 3d Printing
5) HTML 5.0
6) Internet of Things (IOT)
As Ubuntu is compatible, a fork of Ubuntu is best used. As such we have decided to proceed with Linux Mint Tara, which will be out 2 months after the April Ubuntu Release.
Meanwhile I will be testing out all the desktop environments that will come along with Tara… and of course release a video of my basic set-up. I am currently using Mint-Sylvia-KDE.
However Tara will no longer support KDE. Hence we will need to consider moving to a different desktop environment and with each comes a set of different software. A few potential concerns that will cause headache to the end-user:
- 256 AES encryption to PDFs.
A lot of users won’t know what this means, but this can be potentially problematic to people not familiar to the PDF format and find that their basic pdf readers cannot decrypt their PDFs. Essentially the ideal situation is a password prompt appears, password is entered and PDF is decrypted. - Ugly QT applications
A lot of applications run under QT such as Transmission, Teamspeak, Teamviewer and Spotify. A QT configuration utility can be used, but i rather things work out of the box. - Office suite
The sad fact remains that Microsoft Office remains the de-facto standard for commercial use. Libre office 6 will be out soon. For general users, they can consider wine (only up to MS office 2013) or use MS Office 365. - Browser
Firefox vs Chrome is the question. About 60% of users now use Chrome and only about 10% of users use Firefox. It would be ideal to have both, one for daily use and one for backup. Mint has traditionally used Firefox as the default but that is not the first choice for most users. Chrome on the other hand may have issues with some docks. AFAIK, Latte dock works well with Chrome.
Latte Dock with chrome
We will keep the site updated once Mint Tara is released.