We talked aboutXfce. We talked aboutPlasma. ‘Twas a turbulent year, and yet, it didn’t really have any defining linux moments. More sort of steady state, stuck in the middle of a prolonged identity crisis where both the desktop and Linux are struggling to find innovation. Now we ought to talk about Gnome, the third of the triumvirate. What be the best distro of 2018 wearing the Gnome desktop environment cape?
Last year, I wasn’t really impressed with what Gnome had to offer. Following a brief spike in hope from the year earlier, this particular desktop environment settled into a pattern of inaccessible defaults and high resource usage, making it rather unsuitable for everyday use. Sure you can adapt it and tweak it, but then there are better, more elegant choices out there. Let’s see what happened in 2018 and remember, it’s Gnome only, so we won’t be discussing the likes of Linux Mint or Deepin. After me.
CentOS 7.4This is an odd entry, but I think it’s important. Essentially, I’ve had CentOS installed for a very long time, with all three major desktop environments configured (including KDE4 though, not Plasma). Now and then, I would boot into the system, tweak and test, and run upgrades. In April, I did this, upgrading CentOS to the latest version and then some. I also upgraded the kernel , which created a hybrid monster using the super-LTS Red Hat base with older versions of various desktop environments and the latest mainline kernel available.
I found the Gnome edition quite pleasing but do bear in mind it’s been heavily modified from its baseline, with dozens of tricks, extra repos and apps to make it all work properly. Still, I had a product with reasonable performance, decent looks, great stability, and tons of cool stuff. Perhaps it wasn’t the most amazing thing around, but there’s gonna be supported for years to come, so that’s quite comforting. All in all, if you’re okay with using Gnome, investing in some homework making things pretty and functional, CentOS is about as solid choice as you can make.
Antergos 18.3
Back in 2017, this was my Gnome distro of choice. It was not perfect but it had lots of cool features, like Nvidia drivers out of the box, robust package management, reasonable smartphone support, excellent multimedia playback, and modest resource usage as far as Gnome goes.
This year, 18.3 delivered a less than stellar sequel, unfortunately. Everything was slightly less. The graphics drivers weren’t installed right away, I had to do that manually, the hardware support was worse, even though we’re talking about the same test machine, some applications crashed, some phone models weren’t supported just as well as in the past, and the fonts weren’t good. I like unique distros, and I like an aggressive stance of making fun, innovative products, which Antergos definitely has, alas this year, this didn’t happen, at all. It’s a shame, because I had really been looking forward to deeper, more meaningful experience with Arch-based systems. Something to think and consider moving forward, though.
Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver
Anxious about what the future was going to bring and keen on trying to find a new LTS for my production systems (those running Linux anyway), I did an early test of the beta version of Bionic Beaver, followed by an official release review . I will focus on the latter only, because it did improve quite a bit on what I discovered in the earlier session of testing.
Ubuntu ships with a modified Gnome stack, including various performance, usability and aesthetic improvements, like much needed windows buttons, dock, a few extensions, an older version of the file manager, and more. In essence, it bridges the gap between minimalistic, impractical defaults of the Gnome environment and what ordinary folks expect when they sit behind a keyboard and mouse to have some productivity and fun.
Now, this wasn’t a bad experience but it wasn’t memorable or exciting. There were some nice new features, like encryption and livepatch, but the rest of it was just sort of average. On the other hand, package management was broken, the network needs tweaks to access Samba,overall responsiveness wasn’t enviable, and there were still glaring usability issues small yet crucial things, like the (in)ability to create a new file in Nautilus, for instance. In the end, if you want a Gnome system that’s going to be supported for five years, plus a modern base, then Ubuntu 18.04 makes more sense than even the customized CentOS. But it ain’t nothing to write home about.
Fedora 28If there’s one distro that sticks to the(Gnome) defaults it’s Fedora. And perhaps for that reason, this was one of my more frustrating experiences , although I did eventually, fully tweak and pimp the system to a very reasonable, likable level. But going from the live session to that fully installed and functional system was a long, painful journey.
Phones and music worked out of the box, which is cool, but I had to invest a lot of time to be able to use the system, the fonts were really bad, the performance was just awful, and the whole thing felt bland, listless. The distro also suffered from application and kernel crashes. After several months, the distro settled, the initial woes disappeared, and Fedora 28 sort of behaved, but I found it very hard to relate to.
Fedora 29
With the memories of pain subdued, I approached the Fedora 29 upgrade with something almost approaching mild, reserved enthusiasm. I decided to run an in-vivo transition from 28 to 29 using dnf on the command line. This would mean all my settings and applications would be left intact, so I would not have to invest hours of time figuring out everything all over again. While it can be fun taming systems, it does become mundane after a while.
This was a very successful exercise . Positive, friendly, with good results. The upgrade worked without any issues, and indeed, I had a pleasant, moderately fast system Fedora 29 bringing in some much needed fixes in memory management. But like CentOS, it was far removed from the original idea, as I was using a heavily modified stack, both on the visual side and the software side. Most importantly, the system was stable, and even third-party programs worked without any issues. So in a way, I did warm up a little to Fedora (I’ve always liked Red Hat systems), but I am now at a point where I can’t really distinguish between the original product and my emotionally-charged layers of beautification.
Fedora 29 (second test) I think the biggest testament to my positive attitude to Fed