I migrated from Windows to Ubuntu 16.04 in December 2016. It was a very great idea at a time, and I enjoyed using Ubuntu immensely. The main joy being that I came to loathe Windows and its update system, and Linux allow me great freedom to install and play with a lot of libraries and softwares easily.
(For the fact that almost everything on Linux can be compile using autotools or CMake, but on Windows some may requires MSVC, Cygwin, mingw32, etc, etc). Not to mention that I don’t need to compile by myself a lot of libraries as I could just apt install ****-dev.
Of course, being my first time on Linux machine, I would broke something very quickly.
Now, my laptop has discrete nvidia graphics in optimus setup, and I also use CUDA for my work. If you have set up either of those on Linux before, you know how nightmare it is to set up properly. If you have set up both of them before, you know how it is even more nightmare than setting up just either of them. Of course, I broke something in the process (i.e. not installing cuda-toolkit, instead installing cuda package that revert my driver to older version).
By the time I know the correct way to do thing, I really don’t want to go back and deal with this issues anymore. (Simply because it comes with a lot of headache of boot-loop, black login screen, Unity unable to start, Xorg unable to start, etc, etc)
The second mistake come when I try updating the texlive from 2015 version in Ubuntu repository to the 2017 one in PPA. I try direct upgrading, not knowing that the upgrade path isn’t clean, and that broke a little bit of apt on my system. The third come when I tried to install and uninstall kubuntu-desktop. A word of warning – do NOT ever install kubuntu-desktop.
I figured I should upgrade to 18.04 anyway. So I pulled the trigger two days ago.
It was both a blessing and a curse.
A curse, because nvidia+bumblebee is much, much harder to setup properly in 18.04 than 16.04. I did spend nearly 2 hours setting up nvidia+bumblebee+cuda. Of course, I spent days when I was setting up my previous 16.04, but that was when I was not experienced.
A blessing, because Gnome Shell is much, much more responsive than my Unity have every been. And to my surprised, Gnome Shell in 18.04 is set to be pretty much the same as how Unity every be. And 18.04 successfully detect all of my hardware without me needing to set anything (16.04 doesn’t work well with media button on my laptop, but could be fixed with some setting)
I have Full HD monitor, so display scaling is never a problem for me. I never liked how Unity Dash handled file/folder searching, and GNOME Shell handle it just as I like it, so that is also a plus for me.
Overall, using it for 2 days I am pretty happy with 18.04 in general (much more than 16.04). I guess the time will tell. (I mean, I don’t like both Windows and OSX right now either, so if this does not work out I don’t really know where to go. Maybe Windows 7)
Some machine configuration and applications:
- Ubuntu 18.04 (default, GNOME Shell, Xorg)
- Theme: Equilux-compact
- Icon: Papirus-Dark
- Extensions:
- Darker overview
- Gsconnect
- Media player indicator
- Openweather
- Pixel saver
- Refresh wifi connections
- Removable drive menu
- Ubuntu appindicators
- Workspace to dock
- Font: Ubuntu, 12
- Monospace: Iosevka, 16
- Applications:
- Google Chrome
- Jetbrains Toolsbox
- Mailspring
- Rhythmbox
- mpv
- Filezilla
- Aegisub
- Dropbox
- Zotero
- Texlive + TexStudio
- Sublime Text 3
- Visual Studio Code
- Skype + Discord + Slack
- KeePass2 (offline)
- Steam
- GIMP/Pinta/Krita/Darktable/Inkscape
- Calibre (i.e. iTune for Kindle)
- Audacity
- LibreOffice
- vim (surprisingly this does not come with Ubutnu 18.04)
- other command lines tools as requied (e.g. I love
dtrx)
- Color Schema: I use
solarized-darkfor everything (except MailSpring, which is Arc Dark due to unavailability), including gnome-terminal.