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Looking Forward, Ubuntu Linux 6.06
SilentBob4 writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at the upcoming version of Ubuntu. From the article: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry. As I said before, it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise, so in that department it's solidly ahead."
"I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."
Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Since when does the average home user need to compile anything?
Thanks (u|k|x|edu)buntu devs.
I just can't be bothered.
To turn it around, I noticed growing trend of smug and arrogant attitudes towards Ubuntu and its user base..or rather its *perceived* user base.
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
If everybody that whines gets the attention they want, Ubuntu will become as bloated as any other general purpose distro.
"1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log."
Duh. Ubuntu is a distro built around Gnome.
"2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work."
And the KDE Education Suite developer would still be doing what they were doing if there were no Ubuntu. Sounds like they are starting to get a bit eager for some of the pie, even though they volunteer to do what they do.
"3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets."
Did Canonical say they would finacially support the team creating the Kubuntu-Live cds? If not, hey, it's a vounteer operation just like most other distros. Suck it up. You chose the job.
"4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access."
Don't know anything about this situation, so I'll give it a big "So what? The people that run Kubuntu can do whatever they want to do. It's their baby.".
"5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.
"
Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
I've been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.06) Alpha 5 for about a month or so, and am very impressed with it. Of course, one can't expect the stability of a stabe release from an alpha, but ever since I installed it, I've been very surprised as to how stable it is for an alpha. This makes me look forward to the stable release even more -- if the alpha's like this... the stable release will be awesome! The best thing I like about Ubuntu (especially in Dapper) is its hardware support. I have hardware (such as a touchpad, etc.) that never worked correctly in other distros (it even had quirks in Windowze). Ubuntu had great drivers, but Dapper is awesome. Thanks, Ubuntu Devs!
Most people are working on things that benefit all of Ubuntu, not just one desktop. And since Ubuntu started specifically as a polished Gnome desktop - and since that was a major reson for the early enthusiasm - it is hardly strange that most employees and contributors are Gnome users and developers as well.
Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.
Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I applaud them for this and this is soemthing that's been needed. Look I want to work on my program, my server, my web server or some other thing. I don't want to have to dick with things like getting the frickin hardware to work. Ubuntu has made great strides in this arena. Also, they are absolutley correct in saying the IRC help channel should be absolutely helpful. Telling someone to RTFM or to just google it isn't a solution.
Gorkman
I use Kubuntu but I'd like to offer the protesting 'developers' a nice big cup of SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Ubuntu is a GNOME based distro. Kubuntu is an offshoot KDE version.
Ubuntu with its default Gnome interface is polished and very 'usable'. My son learned to navigate it at 3 years old. KDE is no where near as simple to navigate, its a whored up MS Windows start menu + pretty OS X-ified effects. And I use KDE.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Don't mod me down as flamebait right away.
Then don't go and Godwin yourself right off the bat by saying "the people on the freenode channels are complete nazis when it comes to "Politically correctness" and "being helpfull"."
The vast majority of Ubuntu people seem to really stick with that "Linux for Human Beings" thing they have plastered on their website. And good for them.
On a slightly different note: when did observing and calling someone out for rude or dumb behavior start getting derided for being bad?
Person A: "L0lz, I have this linux problem 'foo', where 'bar' doesn't work and that's teh ghey!"
Person B: "Hey, that calling that remark 'gay' wasn't necessary, and wasn't polite. Fix 'bar' by doing 'bleh', and 'foo' should work."
Person A:"OMG, STFU, political correctness!"
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Why is speed of a distro even an issue?? Turn off the crap you don't want if you want to go faster. You aren't going to get significant speed gains by switching distros. If you don't want to lose feature set, the MOST you can expect to gain by switching distros while retaining your current feature set is maybe 5%.
Compile your kernel.. you will get a bigger speed gain here by filtering out what you don't need and it's a WHOLE lot easier than switching distros. If you REALLY want the last 5-10% then compile and strip EVERYTHING yourself custom for YOUR processor. No distro is going to do that for you because they need to remain generic so that they run on "x86" instead of "Dual Proc Pentium 3 Coppermines only". If you want to do that, then get Gentoo, which exactly why Gentoo exists. Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.
I'm a *nix user (various flavours) for over 10 years now, and have been running Linux on the desktop both at home and in the office for the past two and a half years. I'm a professional *nix sysadmin, with experience ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers.
I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacial pace of change).
Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.
..and I'll form the head!!
I've noticed this "dumbening" (is that how you spell it?) as well. I've been on Ubuntu since 4.10 and little by little, I realised things were creeping into it that made it fluffier, softer, and weaker. Along these lines, though I realise it happened before Warty, what the hell was wrong with cd's and flash drives mounting in 'mnt'?!?! Doesn't that make sense? You mount things in mount! Perfectly logical to me. But nope, now they go to media.
But back to it. Today I was checking out the screenshots of dapper - trying to decide exactly what to put on my new box due friday - and noticed something horrifying; something so terrifying I stopped dead. Screenshot #6 is particularly ominous. I'm not sure what will be going on this new box of mine, but in light of recent evidence, I'd say that Dapper is not the forgone conclusion it once was.
The matter of the UI toolkit is partly a matter of taste. There are certainly areas where gtk+ and Qt are inferior to other implementations, but I don't think it's as drastic as you make out, nor do I think that cloning the Apple UI is the correct solution. I actually find getting around the Mac UI somewhat painful at times, and I think you'll find that a large part of the problem you're encountering stems from familiarity and taste (especially WRT appearance).
If there are specific instances where behaviour changes would improve usability, please submit suggestions to the gtk+ team and to TrollTech. Suggesting a wholesale "research and rip off" of the Mac OS X GUI is neither helpful, nor likely to ever happen.
If you're looking for an environment that behaves exactly like OSX....
Might I suggest...
OSX?
Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.
On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
You may now proceed to mock my spelling and grammar in response. Nonetheless, I think that this article is a prime example of "juvenile journalism."
FC5 is very snappy indeed. It's the most responsive Gnome desktop I have used so far. Much better than Ubuntu 5.04. If the article is right, and the new Ubuntu really smokes FC5 with respect to speed, I will be impressed. This really looks good for Linux.
Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome.
It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.
Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or perhaps even more pollished Linux distros, using Gnome 2.16 that probably will be available by the time Vista hits the market.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Is any linux user an "average" home user?
.tgz format.
There are alot of packages I compile, because some packages are only in
Unless you mean by average home user (this isn't meant to be sarcastic I'm sorry if it sounds like it is) a person who dabbles in linux or just learning or just a hobbyist?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I installed the Dapper version of Kubuntu on my lappy yesterday. The install was quick and it automagically detected almost all my hardware. The only issue was with the wireless network. It would not work during the install, but it did detect my card and I was able to manually start the network after installation with a few commands. I still prefer KDE to Gnome, but I think I'll give Gnome another try once Dapper comes out. Like an idiot I failed to create a /home partition on my current install, so when Dapper is released, I'll just do a fresh install and try out Gnome.
I use Kubuntu as my every day desktop. Windows partition was deleted yesterday. :)
Smeghead every day of the week.
Adjusting the screen resolution is one problem I've consistently seen with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
This review is too kind on the matter for the audience I talk to; suggesting that novices use "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" and answer questions about their hardware is not something I'd recommend to novices. While other parts of Ubuntu GNU/Linux shine for the novice, this is not one of them. Fedora Core GNU/Linux has always been better at letting me use the GNOME screen resolution adjuster (and setting the default to the highest screen resolution at the highest refresh rate so I don't often have to adjust the screen resolution at all) and getting the desired results.
I hope Ubuntu's chosen resolution picks the native resolution for LCD screens. I mostly work with users who have older computers and CRTs but are planning to switch to LCDs real soon now.
Digital Citizen
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
You know, all this talk about Linux stability is really more related to the advancement of bloated desktop environments and poorly tested features and new versions.
Every distro is constantly rebuilding the latest KDE and GNOME with $NEW_FEATURE and sometimes it doesn't work well or isn't well tested.
I believe that you could disable X (or run twm) and run just about any Linux distro as a rock-solid server.
But... as time goes on, Linux users evolve (or should I say devolve?) and more people consider Linux-the-desktop-experience to be Linux. If you run a bleeding edge Linux distro and try Beagle, it might well crash. Does that make Linux unstable? Depends on your audience...
Well, I use both fedora and debian (but not yet Ubuntu) and I can say that while yum has made great strides since FC1 (when it was essentially unusable), debian kicks the shit out of fedora in this respect. Primarily this is the advantage of having what amounts to a HUGE core -- almost any free package I ever looked for was available from the standard debian repositories. Even counting extras fedora has a relatively small base of pakcages, and they have consistently abandonded older packages that some of us still use. Thus a fedora user must add a number of alternate repositories, which can frequently have package name conflicts with each other and from one release of core to the next.
Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".
Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.
Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.
Your comment ommits the fact that some people don't want to invest allot of time to see performance benefits. Yes you can compile everything, but most people don't want to sit around for that. Don't get me wrong, I like gentoo as much as the next ricer, but I will admit the strengths of ubuntu/debian. And you as a gentoor (new word?) should appreciate not having to disable extra stuff, but rather enable the bloatware.
My advice?
Forget about getting a perfectly working desktop system, and just concentrate on learning Linux. Don't treat the project as a plug and play Windows or Mac replacement so much as a side project learning a new (and very different) system. Linux is a rewarding and fun system with the right expectations, and the willingness to take your time learning stuff.
If you are new to *nix altogether - I would even say forget about the GUI altogether and learn Linux from the ground up with the command line (on an old surplus PC) and maybe some stuff like Apache etc. IMO learning Linux is easier from the bottom up rather than the top down. Starting with a nearly fully configured desktop is just too much complexity to take in at first.
Installing non detected drivers requires a level of skill that is much higher than that needed to just use Linux. You will struggle if you decide to tackle that as your first lesson. Start with simpler goals and you will soon find that over time you can tackle trickier problems much easier as the info you find on the web starts making more and more sense.
Learn Linux because you want to learn Linux, not so you can just replace something else.
Ubuntu was a good choice - I'd recommend just forgetting about trying to get the sound working for now. If Ubuntu doesn't autodetect it, it will probably be a 'hard' problem for you at this stage. Just start learning and playing with the stuff that does work, and worry about the sound drivers much later on.
While Ubuntu is a great distro, it's installation is really intimidating and geekish especially for beginners. I don't see any major change on its installer. It still has a text-based interface. Mandrake's installer is light years away in terms of usability and design and it was implemented years ago.
I've been a long time Linux user (Debian) and it still is my favourite OS on custom built PCs. But what still bugs me about it - especially after using OS X for almost two years now - is that you need to be a computer expert to get it running. I know you have to be the same when installing Windows from scratch, but I've stopped taking Windows as the bar like 6 years ago.
I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.
Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Mandriva may use KDE as a default but offers a well-polished and stable GNOME environment (and a bunch of other desktops) as well, just a few mouseclicks away. They employ developers that work on both "big" desktops, too.
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but I think Ubuntu's KDE people would probably be better off making Mepis a great KDE distro.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.