I Miss Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

| ubuntu | software | nostalgia |

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was released today and as usual I ran off to install it on a VM to see what all of the fuss was about. Under the hood everything is perfect. A modern stable kernel, up to date packages (including most importantly the latest version of PostgreSQL), and of course the feeling of satisfaction in knowing that when I install this on a server I won’t have to worry about upgrading for five more years.

However on the frontend side, it was a whole different story. It seems like with each new release Unity gets slower and slower. To be fair, I installed this on a 1 Core VM with 2 GB of RAM and no video memory. Even after disabeling as many effects as I could the desktop still felt clunky and unresponsive.

I remember installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for the first time. Back then it ran GNOME2, it started up in seconds even on modest hardware. I miss those days. In any case, I look forward to years of great performance on the server side. Kudos to the Ubuntu team for another rock solid LTS release.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" (previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it...

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 7, 2026

Spoiler: Wil Wheaton is a Wizard

I am holding pink pages in my hand, reviewing them before I collate them into my script. A magic battle ensues between Wil and Bert (fireballs, energy bolts, conjured beasts, etc.) I look at the script again, to make sure I haven’t misread it. Yeah, it rea...

via WIL WHEATON dot NET August 7, 2026

Seeing like a state

The post about the dark mode toggle reminded me of two similar things rattling in my brain. On the positive side, here’s a delightful interaction from macOS. I can easily maximize the window to take up half the screen, but the moment I start dragging it, i...

via Unsung August 7, 2026

Generated by openring