A Zapus is a kind of jumping mouse. A Zesty Zapus is the new Ubuntu Linux operating system, 17.04.

It has just been released and has some important features. But Zesty Zapus is not as interesting at the Artful Aardvark, which I’ll discuss briefly below.

Support of 32 bit hardware is waning across the Linux world, and in this release the 32 pit PowerPC is not supported. The 64 bit PowerPC still is, but I would not be surprised if that support dropped in the not too distant future.

There are various other changes deep under the hood that the average desktop user may not care about, including the use of systemd-resolved for the DNS resolver for networking.

Of special interest is that Ubuntu is now not by default using a swap partition. Swap is a place in your hardware, normally on a drive, that the operating system uses as extra memory, so that when you don’t have enough physical memory, the swap can be used. There are two ways to make swap, one is by dedicating a hard drive or hard drive partition to it, the other is having the operating system use unused disk space on your computer for it. In the past it has been considered faster and more efficient to use a partition, but the non-partition option has always been in the background to use as needed and you didn’t have to have a swap partition. Now, Linux seems to be moving away from the partition and using the swap file instead, and Ubuntu will do this by default.

Zesty Zapus uses Linux 4.10. It has “driverless printing” which is a new thing and works for some printers. There are updates to various software included with the distribution, including LibraOffice (now version 5.3, a fairly significant upgrade).

Several if not all of the major “Ubuntu Flavors” are also updated, including the one I prefer, which is Mate (I’ll write about that elwsewhere).

Otherwise, this new release of Ubuntu will act a lot like the previous release.

But that will not be the case with the next release, 17.10, Artful Aardvark. As the alphabetical cycle of release names comes around full circle, so does the desktop paradigm. Ubuntu, controversially to some, not controversially to most, started out years ago using the Gnome desktop. Over time, Ubuntu created the “Unity Desktop” which was meant to unify the user experience across all devices including the as yet to exist and now never going to exist (I think) Ubuntu phone. In my view, Unity was a bad thing, I did not like the way it worked. On the other hand, the main Gnome people for reasons that are still mysterious to me, decided to copy Ubuntu and make Gnome look and act a lot like Unity.

Now, Ubuntu will kill Unity. The next release of Ubuntu will not included Unity, and will instead use Gnome.

So, to install Ubuntu 17.04, which you may not want to do (I’d wait until 17.10 if you want the Gnome interface) go HERE and follow the instructions. It is possible that you can upgrade your current installation to the new release, but if you have a non-Ubuntu OS or an older version, you may need to download an image and reinstall. Then, when you are done, you may want to do these things.

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