I am Very Impressed with Artful

[NoWorries]

Some time ago I install Artful on my Zesty distribution at https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?t=71745. I have been very impressed with its progress and it also has the very latest packages which, in my opinion, challenge what is available on Neon.

For an Alpha 1 distribution it is very stable and it is great to use, if you do not mind lots of updates each day (including Sundays) and American 4th July celebrations.

[NoWorries]

I have now found that weekend updates are no longer the norm as I think that what I was experiencing was the work for the Alpha 1 release.

I must confess that the caution expressed by Snowhog I have not followed. This distribution I have found to be rock solid and I continue to be impressed. I find that Discover often beats me to doing the command line updates of packages and it works very well.

I find that Synaptic works well and is my preferred application for package management.

Since this distribution is in early stages of development, I decided to try out the latest Linux Kernel 4.12. The site https://launchpad.net/~canonical-ker...buntu/unstable gives a ppa to do this.

I now have it installed and it has not broken my system. What I now have is:



I look forward to knowing if anyone else has tried this and how they find its performance.

[oldgeek]

I have not tried the 4.12 Linux kernel on Artful but I have been playing around with it on a virtual machine (VMM QEMO) and I find this version of Kubuntu to very reliable so far. I have been using a hybrid Kubuntu 16.04 /Neon with 4.10.0-26 kernel, which is very stable so far, but I just may go back to Kubuntu if the next LTS is as good as Artful is. I had a little trouble with Discover at first, but not now. My hybrid configuration eliminated Digikam the last update and I can't get it back at the moment due to lack of a dependency. I installed Digikam (5.6) on 17.10 and it went without a hitch. I think the Kubuntu team has done well so far--there aren't that many updates, either.

[NoWorries]

I am surprised that with Artful you are not getting many updates. I find that, quite frequently, I get over 10 each day. Maybe the reason for getting so many updates is because of the repositories I have. These are shown the image below which is off Synaptic's Repositories.

[oldgeek]

After using Neon dev stable for the past year I have different standards for 'a lot of updates'--30+ didn't seem all that much to me! Today there were 162 updates, mainly to go to Plasma 5.10.4, I think. I like this new version of Kubuntu so far, no breakages yet but then again I'm still just playing around. It took a long time to close down today, though--usually it takes just a few seconds. Maybe the fact that's runninng on a virtual machine has something to do with it. There's also a little kink--when I start it up I have to move the cursor around to get the Kubuntu logo to pop up and the process to begin. Not a serious thing, but it happens.

[NoWorries]

I must confess that I was having problems with Neon so I abandoned it over 9 months ago. At that time I replaced it with Yakkety. I now find that Artful has all the features of Neon, but Artful is much much more reliable.

[oldgeek]

I haven't had any problems with Neon, but since I plan to install the 18.04 LTS version next year, I thought I'd try out the latest Kubuntu on a virtual machine, and keep tabs on all the revisions until the release in October. I'm very impressed so far. Artful is almost right up to date with Neon and even Discover has been working properly (so far!). I probably won't use Artful as my main OS as it's not supported for very long. But Kubuntu has certainly gotten its act together from what I see.