I had installed Ubuntu 16.04 yesterday in a virtual machine and have played with it a little bit. My impression so far: I am not at least impressed. To say it mildly. I could also say, that - with Mint experience in head - I feel, as I got a software from 10 years back, partly crippled. And I do not mean Unity in this place; discussions about Unity are several years old and I do not want to start a new one.
Examples:
File manager: No menu, no dual pane, no bookmarks (or so good hidden, that I didn't find them)), no folder dependent display of the content and most likely more missing. The built-in help says, that there is a preview function by hitting the space-bar (similar as we know it from Nemo), but I can press the space-bar as often as I want, nothing happens.
The calendar (I asked about some posts above): A bad joke. It includes a birthday-calendar, which is write-protected, most likely because it uses a different source for the entries. But what source? No hint. Accommodation of the calendar: Near to not existent.
Synaptic: has to be installed by the user. Support time is only 3 years, one dependent library only 9 months (the
not so Long TS problem). No filter bar, only the far more circumstantial to use search function.
Strange reaction: VLC is not installed by default; I knew this and wanted to see, what happens, if I enter VLC in the dash: Result: LibreOffice Calc got launched. I had expected, that Ubuntu had told me, that vlc is not present. But this is the same, as if I would choose in Wikipedia
random article, but with the difference, that I get in Wikipedia something surprising, because I do expect nothing. From an OS I expect, that it does, what I want and not surprises my with its own decisions.
Performance: I have this VM on the same host, which runs all my LM-Cinnamon guests, so I expected the same performance. But this was a nice wish. The reaction of Ubuntu is slow as a snail. Note: This is (except the installation of synaptic and the needed guest additions for VB) a pure installation, no software added, changed or removed, just Ubuntu out of the box.
My personal hobby: astronomy. I use 2 Linux-programs for this: Stellarium and Celestia. Positive: Stellarium gets provided (at least at now) with the latest version. Negative: Celestia has been removed. (Luckily there is a Windows-version which works in Mint via Wine better than the Linux-version, although both are on the identical version state.) But for heaven's sake: Why did they leave the package celestia-common-nonfree in the repository, which has alone no meaning at all, fulfills no dependency for anything else and does nothing than occupying 10 MB space?
The list could easily get extended. Example: burning software. There is no burning software pre-installed, because Ubuntu says, that there are many computers without such a hardware (but they neglected the fact, that there are still many computers with such a hardware) and that the until now pre-installed Brasero is since long no more developed (something what I tell in the forum again and again). If the user wants a burning software and looks into the software center, he will find in the probably matching categories nothing. Only if the user comes to the idea to enter in the search bar the name of the software (a newbie will most likely not be able to do that, because he doesn't know the name) or the word
burning he gets results. Most likely this problem will also be there for other software. Mh, if I want to play a hide-and seek game, I do this with my grand-children or with my dog or I play a memory game.
