Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 – new kid on the block

Budgie is the newest player on the arena of Desktop Environments for Linux operating systems. It is the baby of Ikey Doherty and his team. Their flagship distribution is, of course, Solus. You can read my review of Solus operating system here.

Unlike Canonical’s Unity, Budgie is available for other teams to use too. It is currently available for Arch, Debian testing, Manjaro and some other distributions. Some of them have Budgie in the repository, others have already prepared the special Budgie spin-offs.

Ubuntu Budgie is the newest addition to the officially supported Ubuntu flavours. It is quite interesting how these two parts can play together. The first time they married was the Ubuntu Budgie 16.04 remix. And since 17.04 Ubuntu Budgie is officially supported by Canonical.

You can download Ubuntu Budgie from one of several mirrors around the world, or via torrent. The ISO image size is 1.6 GB. I used the dd command to "burn" the ISO image of Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 64-bit to the USB stick.

The USB drive is in the port of my Dell Inspirion 17 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Why I will not write a full-feature review of Debian 9

Debian 9 is out. It has been released on the 17th of June 2017.

Its codename is Stretch, which is yet another character from the Toy Story animated film.

It is available for download in both Install and Live versions, and Live version is available in many flavours: GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE and so on.

I hope you will read the review of Debian 9 somewhere else, but I will not feature it on my blog.

There is a reason. Even more than one...

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Life and blog changes, and 10% off Linux disk orders

Hello my dear readers!

I am happy to share some news with you.

First of all, I have recently moved countries. My new residence country is Cyprus, a small sunny island in the Mediterranean.

Second, because of this change, the contents of the reviews will slightly change. I now do not have a remote file server with network attached drives. I will try to bring that file server to my new location too, but for the time being I will not be able to cover that part of my regular review scope.

Third, and this is the most interesting for you probably, I changed the pricing of the articles on the BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk site. You may be aware that prices there depend on the shipping country. Because postage prices' structure on Cyprus is different to the one in the United Kingdom, and generally postage is cheaper here, in most cases you will see a drop in the cost of your future orders. Isn't that a good reason to buy even more disks with your favourite Linux distributions?

To celebrate my move, I also offer you an additional 10% discount for all orders placed before the  27th of July 2017. Just use the code CYPRUS at the checkout.

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 - what does the future look like?

You could recently read reviews of different flavours of Ubuntu 17.04 on Linux notes from DarkDuck blog: Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu, Lubuntu.

And you all remember the recent announcement from Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical that Ubuntu 17.10 will be the last version of Ubuntu coming with Unity Desktop Environment. It means that more attention in the Linux – and especially the Ubuntu – community is now on the Ubuntu GNOME version. I've never reviewed this version of Ubuntu yet.

Let's see what it is like. I downloaded the ISO image of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 64-bit, which is 1.5 GB in size and "burnt" it onto the USB stick using the dd command.

The stick is in the port of my Dell Inspirion laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Fasten your seatbelt. Let's go!