Takeaway:

Approved!

Installation was as easy as ever.

What about using the Ubuntu 16.04 ?

Once you get your fingers used to typing ‘systemctl’ instead of ‘service’ (due to systemd now being used as the init mechanism), you’re fine. Applications install fine with ‘apt’ (and yes, even apt-get, as in 14.04). Oh, and apt now has a progress meter! Read on!

Ubuntu 16.04 is almost identical to 14.04 in look-and-feel. The warm purple/red set of color tones are still used. You can get a fresh system rolling in an hour. The customization took a couple of days for my case, as I added things per-need basis. You most likely don’t encounter major upsets in desktop use. I have not personally used Ubuntu 16.04 as a server, apart from having a Apache2 to serve web pages locally.

The kernel: 4.4

16.04 shipped with 4.4 kernel, which is pretty fresh. Looking at kernel.org, the 4.4 is a “longterm” branch. Currently the Linux kernel is going at 4.7 (August 2016). And being Linux, you can always roll your own fresh kernel (a FAQ for compiling kernel 4.4.x).

In-depth:

Ubuntu 16.04 (LTS) keeps the ease of use, that everyone has accustomed to. There are, under the hood, some major changes:

• the init system changed to systemd instead of the Upstart
• alongside ‘apt’, there is a new package manager called Snap (‘snap’ command)

Where’s my “service status-all” ?!

It’s right here:

systemctl list-unit-files --type=service

I really missed iptraf!

This has absolutely nothing to do with Ubuntu per se, but nevertheless, since it wasn’t so easy to dig this in Google, here comes:

if you want to use iptraf, use the -u switch to support the ‘eno1’ naming that Ubuntu adopted for your dear LAN port.

sudo iptraf -u -i eno1