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Shuttleworth Announces Karmic Koala
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Mark Shuttleworth has announced the next release in the horribly alliterative Ubuntu family, "Karmic Koala." The new version hopes to include a newer, shinier, faster startup, better small screen support, a spruced-up desktop look (no more brown), and many minor tweaks and updates. "A newborn Koala spends about six months in the family before it heads off into the wild alone. Sounds about perfect for an Ubuntu release
plan! I'm looking forward to seeing many of you in Barcelona, and before
that, at a Jaunty release party. Till then, cheers."
Am I the only one who likes the brown color scheme?
I find that it's easy on the eyes without being outright drab, but maybe that's just me.
I actually thought this was a joke when I first read it. Especially with the cloud computing bullshit.
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I just wonder if the next will be Leaping Lizard.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
... is that it scatters its seeds by explosion, into the remains of a forest fire (which it promotes via its extremely flammable sap and the tinder pile of leaves and shed bark it creates around itself - apparently "in the hope of" getting the fire started B-) ). A row of eucalyptus trees during a fire can become the equivalent of a walking artillery barrage targeting a fuel dump.
So I certainly wouldn't want to compute on a eucalyptus cluster - even if it is a "cloud" floating far away (like over the Berkeley Hills - high enough to be visible from I5 north of Sacramento). I'd worry about it taking out the data center and my data with it and "distributing" it up to the tropopause and onward with the prevailing wind.
As for my laptop, no WAY I'll install any eucalyptus package on that. It's got enough problem with those lithium batteries with the energy density of a hand grenade without adding something more with the energy density of napalm.
= = = =
And I thought Ubuntu had an unfortunate choice of names. Good grief!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's 2009. Over twenty years since the original Macintosh was released. Twenty years since the fundamentals of UI element spacing, text rendering, text kerning, verticle and horizontal text alignment, colour usage...
And the latest Ubuntu, the 'gold standard' for Linux desktops, is a complete mess:
* Text kerning problems all over the place
* Alignment problems in almost every single text field or label
* Almost random colour choice for UI elements
* UI elements having no consistent alignment or spacing
* UI elements that look like they come from some amateur 1990s Mac/Windows clone
Honestly, the toy apps I throw together in Interface Builder look like polished commercial grade software compared to almost everything I see in Linux. I can only assume that there is no standard Linux UI building tool equal to Interface Builder.
Microsoft is on the ropes with Vista and frantically rushing Win7 out the door. Cheap netbooks are doing major damage to the OS profit margins.
And Linux continues to be a UI train wreck. Silly names. Stupid package management with insane dependencies. Redundant and competing desktops. License wars. Mass duplication of common apps with each version sucking in their own unique ways and no single app every getting to the point of being a drop in replacement for commercial Mac/Windows versions.
Even something as trivial as the damn Solitaire app looks like a complete piece of shit.
Boggle.