Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was released thursday april 26th: https://distrowatch.com/10177 The derivative desktop environments (XFCE, LXDE, etc.) were released the next day. I’m not jumping on it immediately. I’ll be waiting at least to 18.04.1... Most probably getting distros based on it, like my favorite, Linux Mint.
If I was to load Linux Mint 19 when it first comes out, will it be easy to update to the maintenance release based on 18.04.1? About how long would you estimate the release of Linux Mint 19 will be, and how long the interval between the Mint version based on 18.04 and 18.04.1? (I do understand that LM 19, and not 18.4, will be based on 18.04?) The reason I'm asking is because I'm new to Linux (two or three months), my 10 year or so old laptop helped me decide to finally leave Windows. I'm enjoying LM 18.3, but it's still about (past) time for a system upgrade. I'm considering either ordering a computer preloaded with Linux Mint or building my own, but this close to the release date I'd like to wait for the release of Mint 19. Any thoughts/advice appreciated.
I repeat my criticism expressed earlier here that it is unfortunate that packages in universe and multiverse are often not properly maintained. Canonical promises only for packages in main that they will receive security updates over 5 years. Look at the CVE tracker for universe - although Ubuntu 16.04 is only 2 years old, many packages haven't received necessary updates, among them prominent packages like VLC. That's why I suggest: If you want an APT-based distro go for Debian. It's not affected by the problem mentioned above (with the rare exceptions of packages which don't receive updates from upstream anymore).
Some answers on their blog: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3521 I’m not more informed than what I read there, sorry!
Only comes with XFCE DE at the moment though. With Debian netinstaller you have a wide choice of DE available; GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE...
Ran into a show-stopper on Ubuntu Budgie just now (ran into it too on my netboot base install plus a bash script that installs Cinnamon/Nemo via the Tara repo). I can't change the Display resolution at all. I tried to set it to 1024x768, but when I click Apply the screen goes black, hangs there a few seconds, then reverts back to default. I'm surprised this bug wasn't taken care of before release. This is on a laptop with an Nvidia graphics card. Count me disappointed. Later...
Appears to be another bug: on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 AMD64 installation, when download a huge file, such as Windows 10 ISO (~4.3GB) using the built-in Firefox, I always get a corrupted file (md5 not match with the provided hash although the file size is always correct) no matter how many times I download it. Then after I switched to Google Chrome, the downloaded file has the correct hash values. Something is terribly wrong with either FF or Ubuntu 18.04. Another possible bug is - double clicking a encrypted 7z or rar file won't bring up fileroller and no prompt to enter password. Instead I see an empty Nautilus window and non-responding cursor. Hope it's not like this for others.
Could anyone please check and let us know if the above two potential bugs also are present in your 18.04 OS? Thanks.