Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Thursday, October 18, 2018 at 23:30


Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" released today Thursday, 18 October 2018 with the new user experience and latest desktop technology, including, GNOME 3.30, GTK+3.30, and Yaru Theme. The most shocking, but pleasing thing is it got reduced in RAM usage down to only ~800MiB after freshly installed (already lower than 1GiB)! It brings the latest Snappy with the rapidly increasing and growing Snapcraft.io App Store platform. It comes as the most user friendly operating system for PC and laptop with 9-month support lifespan (October '18-July '19). This traditional welcome article sums up some details and information in brief about this latest version. Download, install, give it a try, and enjoy 18.10!



Download


For direct download, go to official page.

Release Announcements & History



For Pre-17.04 Users


If you used Ubuntu up to 16.10, and somehow got stopped for a while, you may get shocked now seeing the new user interface of Ubuntu desktop. Yes, it has been switched to GNOME 3 since 17.04 (so 16.10 was the last one with Unity) and in this Cosmic release we see GNOME version 3.30 codenamed Almeria as the default user interface.

System shows GNOME version 3.30.1


0. Codenamed Cosmic Cuttlefish


After 'B' Bionic Beaver, it's now 'C' Cosmic Cuttlefish. It's actually a name of squid. See Mark Shuttleworth's Cue The Cosmic Cuttlefish.

1. User Interface: GNOME 3.30 + Yaru Theme + New Wallpapers


Latest GNOME, a new theme including icons set, and of course new wallpapers.



2. Reduced Memory Load!


What I love the most is memory load reduction. And it goes down to 800MiB now, in contrast to 1.2GiB last year. Thanks Ubuntu developers, you did it very well.



3. GNOME Shell Connect


Do you know KDE Connect? GS Connect is a fork of it, but works for GNOME instead. For GNOME Shell 3.30, thus for Cosmic, it works starting from v13. It's the pair of progams that enable you to share files easily between your computer and Android phone, either with WLAN or with USB Tethering. With this, you can transfer files between Ubuntu and Android much more easier in Cosmic.




4. HiDPI Support


Yaru Icon Set provides @2x icons. This means doubling the pixel, or, HiDPI ready. This means Cosmic will be ready fo all Apple MacBook Pro, Dell XPS, Lenovo Yoga, Gigabyte Aorus, and Microsoft Surface Pro alike laptops which have HiDPI screens. Do you have one? Please help test Cosmic LiveCD on your machine!




5. Updated Built-in Apps


LibreOffice 6.1, Mozilla Firefox 63, Thunderbird 60, and Nautilus 3.26, those are Cosmic's built in apps.




6. VeraCrypt Support in the Disk Utility


Now, you can access and open TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt encrypted disks and partitions. Disk Utility 3.30.1 is able to do it right now.


Closing Words


A wonderful thing to have in this release as it's far more resource friendly (unusual, but really really good) than before by keeping latest version of everything. The installation process takes only 12 minutes. New UI/UX and wallpapers will make you want to upgrade, and pleased to use it. This release is gorgeous. What are you waiting for? Download and install it (and please help seed the torrents), enjoy!



This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.