Ubuntu 17.10

[Dirk Broer]

Ubuntu 17.10 is out and I am presently about to start a 3rd machine with it.
Is it that good? Both yes and no.

New: no more 'Dash' in the left upper corner, but something likewise in the left lower corner and default close/minimize/maximize at right upper corner. As if some windose developer has been busy...but it works.

In 16.04 the GPU part of an APU got automatically detected, it was just that the OpenCL support stopped at 1.1
In 17.10 the GPU part of an APU does not automatically get detected, unless you work with the latest greatest RX cards -or a R7 at minimum.
When you manually install the OpenCL you need you are -when you use older AMD video hardware like me- in the land of 1024x768, a serious throw-back.
Oh yes: for older hardware OpenCL 1.1 is still the limit, even when it is recognized as capable of doing OpenCL 1.2...
And using Xrandr is no solution, because the legacy X.Org made place for Wayland (and no, I do not get the option to boot into X.Org at startup).

The BOINC-Integer MIPS in the new BOINC-client (4.8.3 Linux-x86) under the new kernel have reached sky-high values, to the point that they are virtually useless to compare them with older Linux BOINC clients or contemporary Windows clients

AMD Athlon 5350 (Socket AM1), running Ubuntu 16.04, BOINC-client 7.6.31:

di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | Benchmark results:
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | Number of CPUs: 4
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | 2444 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | 8932 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

updated this system to Ubuntu 17.10, BOINC-client 7.8.3:

Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | Benchmark results:
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | Number of CPUs: 4
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | 2343 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | 56329 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

We'll soon find out where those MIPS are good for....

In short: the flight forward, in the hope that 17.10 would solve the problems 16.04 had, proved futile -but we're on the bleeding edge of progress once again, FWIW.