The Ubuntu 18.04 release arrived at the end of April and plenty of news coverage was there to greet it.
Most major tech publications no longer carry reviews of Ubuntu, instead preferring to give readers with a punchy “overview”, with a blow-by-blow rundown of the key improvements or changes at hand.
So this post is less of a “review roundup” and more of a “overview roundup”.
The good news is that plenty of such posts appeared after the Bionic Beaver burrowed its way out on April 26, 2018.
And in this article we recap the best of them!
Ubuntu 18.04: Press Reaction
‘I’ve been really impressed with the snappiness and usability of this latest LTS desktop‘
Ars Technica‘s Sean Gallagher treated readers to a “first look” at Ubuntu 18.04 (ahead of a more in-depth Ubuntu 18.04 review due for publication later in the month).
Alongside a well-stocked gallery of screenshots Gallagher shared his own thoughts on the release, writing: “Most of the major internal changes in 18.04 LTS are more important on the server side. But so far, as Ars’ primary day-to-day Linux desktop user, I’ve been really impressed with the snappiness and usability of this latest LTS desktop.”
The gallery format was also used by eWeek, whose slideshow runs through the core changes in Bionic Beaver, like the inclusion of kernel live patching for reboot-free upgrades.
Canonical’s official Ubuntu 18.04 press release did its job well as a number of online news outlets carried its key points on security, multi-cloud, containers & AI.
The savvy inclusion of a quote from David Aronchick, Product Manager at Google’s Cloud AI, praising the new release’s prowess on the server side, helped further the message in particular.
Among those repackaging the press mail out was TechRadar. Despite hyping the release as “controversial” and “divisive” — a case of hoping rather than reporting, I think — they manage to touch on the key 18.04 changes, like the new GNOME Shell desktop, the data collection opt-out, the lack of 32-bit installer, and so on.
Similarly, Zdnet‘s SJVN also strode through the key cloud-related changes Canonical pointed out, including the quote from Mark Shuttleworth announcing that there are now over 3,000 Snap apps available on the Snap store.
The Wall Street Journal pitched the release as being “focused on multi-cloud environments [and] artificial intelligence”.
Sadly there wasn’t so much as a peep from the mainstream tech publications like The Next Web, Mashable, The Verge, or Engadget (all of whom carried release news in years past).
Other publications to touch on this release include V3.co.uk, Liliputing, Chris Hoffman for How To Geek, and some odd-sounding site called OMG! Ubuntu!