Having been using Ubuntu Unity for nearly decade, I was a little hesitant to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04, which has switched from Unity to Gnome Shell. It’s a bit different. Mostly in a good way. As ever, there were a few things that needed fixing up.
Gnome shell extensions are rather good, and can be installed from extensions.gnome.org. To do this, you need to install:
sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool chrome-gnome-shell
The new communitheme icons are also rather good. Install them using snap and then activate with the Gnome Tweak tool:
sudo snap install communitheme
The multi-load indicator of old is no longer quite compatible, but there is an alternative Gnome Shell extension. First remove multiload-indicator if required. Then install:
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gtop-2.0 gir1.2-networkmanager-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-cogl-1.0
Then grab the system-monitor extension from here. Probably it’s a good idea to install Transparent Window from here also.
On one of my machines, I had trouble getting the Dropbox and cloudstor tray indicators to show up following the upgrade from 16.04. Removing a unity app indicator package:
sudo apt remove indicator-application
did the trick.
The fact that alt-tab spans workspaces is a tab annoying, but can be fixed using:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.app-switcher current-workspace-only true
I was also having some annoying problems with palm detection not working well for the touchpad. These appear to have been caused by having the synaptics driver installed rather than using libinput, probably due to upgrading rather than a clean install. This was fixed with:
sudo apt remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
I upgrade, I also started having some intermittent problems using the openconnect VPN. This manifest as errors on connection:
Failed to read from SSL socket: The transmitted packet is too large (EMSGSIZE).
Failed to recv DPD request (1406)
Send BYE packet: Aborted by caller
The fix, for me, is apparently use the –no-dtls option when running openconnect. This works. I don’t know why.
I’ll update this post as I discover more things to fix. Otherwise, Ubuntu 18.04 is looking good.