My opinion on Ubuntu Budgie plus some suggestions

I have been using this distro since its beginning I think, and its my main daily driver for a year now.

What I like about it :

  • Very ez customization with cool themes and applets, looks fine and its almost work-ready out-of-the-box.
  • Budgie desktop design, very practical with tilix.
  • Its very stable and reliable, I have few times crashed my kernel by using custom debian repos but with snapper or timeshift I never need to reinstall entire OS.
  • Lots of little useful scripts like menu for opening files with nemo, or just ll being aliased by default, nice to have at start and less work to do.

What I dont like :

  • No kernel type choices, but I guess its a standard for ubuntu.
  • Can be sometimes a bit slower than ie cinnamon based ubuntu distros, or most of the arch based distros.
  • Preinstalled and enabled by default SMB, 90% of linux security flaws is related to this and I dont know anybody that has it turned on all the time.
  • Preinstalled Rhytmbox, I cant get my way with it, it just stops playing always after one song, plus it opens some tcp port on a local machine when Im just listening music, very crappy app.
  • Not installed by default important terminal tools like ie traceroute. Is there even anybody who uses linux and dont need console utils like this? Without my terminal tools i could be simply just running Windows.

Some suggestions, things to polish up:

  • Bash is a song of the past, every productive person uses now zsh or fish, lookup manjaro zsh default config and create something with autocompletion, suggestions etc, maybe mix it with some cool powerline status bar, linux users loves this stuff. I know I can do it myself but its about what you as devs can do to make your distro better.
  • Gnome screensaver daemon should work with xscreensaver, like it does on linux mint.
  • Some of applets from older budgie version seem gone, like showing an output of the command, this was so good and it should be restored.
  • Pocillo icon theme is a decent one but feels bit old, I am always changing it to ie la capitaine theme from keeferrourke’s github and its licensed gnu so something like this could replace pocillo icon theme in the future, you have only one chance to make a good first impression on a user and it would help I think.

Thank you for your work with Ubuntu Budgie and take care. Best regards.

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lots of stuff to digest there - thanks!

Alot of your thoughts are about stuff I would classify as “power user” tools - so stuff that is pretty diverse and difficult to satisfy. Things like powerline do not meet the “simplicity & elegance” threshold I’m looking for.

Power user tools-sets is something the team has discussed on and off over the years but no real consensus. This really should be led by the community and the effort here should most definitely come from our most experienced & knowledgeable members of the community. Happy to guide.

Okay, thats a very meritorical reply.
I thought I may know something about UB but I guess I still have a lot to understand.

Will any of possible kernels in UB give me performance boost or additional security layer? Low-latency kernel is a unfortunately a sad joke on linux, at least if you want to use it for a music production cause latencies are far worse than at OSX or Win and amount of problems with configuring VST and DAW is so huge you could write it all from scratch and it could be faster, but Im used to doing some part of my things on Windows so its not a problem for me, personally as a linux user I think I would expect choices like security-hardened kernel and something like bleeding edge for best possible performance, but just as you have said its hard to satisfy all powerusers on that.

Well I guess my mediocre performance can be HW related indeed, I have no dedicated GPU for now, Im on the AMD Vega with default opensource drivers, should I install the official drivers from the manufacturer in that case? My years of experience with Nvidia screams that opensource drivers can be a mess but does it matter with AMD?

SMB - I meant samba service of course. I dont feel safe with it running all the time, I enable services like this only when I need them. Maybe it should be automatically enabled/disabled in some future? That could be more like a question to the kernel hackers cause it could be touching a pretty advanced OS concepts. The more I think about it the more Im sure that someone has tried to achieve this and failed already.

Hmm guess I will have to create my own bash-script for installing my tools, group it in a few variants, and maybe someone else will use it too when needed.

What is so dreadful about xscreensaver? I mean I know that on some distros it starts when ie user is watching a video on youtube, but on mint it worked fine. I was using my binary-ring on debian for like 15 years or something, I cant live without it. Maybe some themes from xscreensaver should be simply added to UB ? Sadly I cant see any screensaver settings anywhere here.

Yeah I guess powerline might be kinda overkill for a regular user, but zsh with autocompletion and suggestions could help them too because most of them cant selectively browse bash history or use keyboard shortcuts, and almost every linux user has to do something in a terminal someday.

Thank you for clearing things up. Cheers.

Really? This is the default kernel for Ubuntu Studio - an official ubuntu distro dedicated to music production.

I guess Canonical will argue that’s the whole point of apparmor - inbuilt security

If you want bleeding edge kernels then Canonical offer their mainline PPA - every release, release candidate etc from the linux kernel project has an autobuild for all ubuntu users (Kernel/MainlineBuilds - Ubuntu Wiki)

I can’t help here since I am an nvidia user. I think AMD have swapped to using opensource drivers now and these are included with Ubuntu. Again there is a bleeding edge PPA available for all things drivers (Updated Open Graphics Drivers - since 2011! : Oibaf)

Stable - but latest drivers - are available if you run ubuntu-drivers install

Its included by default because we know many users connect to windows based shares. Obviously you could just uninstall samba if you have no need for it.

Its legacy tech that looks and runs just poorly. I have no wish to inflict poor software on our users.
Screensavers should simply be “turn off the screen” - at the end of the day that’s all that they are used for. No need for squiggly things running all over the screen taking power. Again anecdotal evidence we have that most UB users are laptop users - gnome-screensaver is most efficient for these users.

As I said previously I have no trouble for the community coming up with a “power terminal” solution - maybe accessible via budgie-welcome or maybe via a menu option to install and configure stuff like this.

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Yeah I know, but trust me its like eating nails. Long story short linux even with alsa/jack has longer route for the sound, and market share of linux is too small to make a DAW fully working with it. For most of the modern Virtual Instruments you would have to run some virtualization and its like running Windows 10 in vm on a linux to play some next-gen games. I mean sure you could do some sampling and stuff, but if you need to record something with like 5 external VST used on the sound input, and you also want to hear it with that effects in a real time like any vocalist or guitarist would expect, then you are simply dead in the water with the ubuntu studio. Golden standard in every major pro studio is OSX with Logic or Pro Tools, in most of the home studios I have seen Windows with Reaper or Ableton, I have never in my life seen a studio using linux and I probably wont see it cause of the things that I have mentioned earlier.

Thats a very nice idea actually, will have to wrap my head around that budgie-welcome thing.

In regards to terminal, personally I use zsh too , but as said, adding it via budgie-welcome would be the best compromise. Having bash offers pristine shell interface for new users who are learning to find their way with linux.

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I am implementing this and made a PR: https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/budgie-welcome/pull/233