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Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X
An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece from ZDNet Australia. "Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04, which formally hit the streets yesterday: its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface since the last release in October. Just like Microsoft has taken the blowtorch to Vista to produce the lightning-quick Windows 7, which so far runs well even on older hardware, Ubuntu has picked up its own game."
Installed Ubuntu 9.04 over my 9.04RC and all i can say that its a lot faster than 8.10 (RC was faster too). And i mean it cause i have a quite old config.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Well, the author did specify a meaning:
I just upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze and it's in decent shape already.
At the moment there are no show-stopper bugs for your plain-vanilla desktop use. You can pull kde4.2 from sid too.
I'm having no performance issues with KDE4.2 eye candy on a Thinkpad T42. Way to go!!
Note, last week's build of the Squeeze net installer didn't work. Do a basic Lenny install then upgrade into Squeeze.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I just installed 9.04 on my work machine. The upgrade had one minor hiccup, which was quickly fixed(the PCM setting in the volume control was muted). Compared to the 8.10 upgrade, which was an unmitigated disaster, this was refreshing.
I haven't really seen a noticeable improvement like the article's author has yet; maybe that will change. I can say that this is the first upgrade yet that hasn't required fiddling with Envy or the Restricted Drivers Manager to get my Nvidia card humming nicely.
I have to admit this is the first smooth Ubuntu install I've ever had. It actually detected my wireless adapter right out of the box. No fiddling, no CLI hackery, no sacrifices to the pagan gods of open source (which is good because my lease forbids livestock and the downstairs neighbors frown upon blood dripping through the ceiling.)
Not bad, not bad at all.
An upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 hosed my polished UI yesterday because there were no nvidia glx drivers available for download. That was a bit of a shock and annoyance, but it's my own fault for not checking its availability before hitting upgrade.
Seems like there is one now in the repos but I think there's a lot of traffic because I can't seem to update.
Patiently waiting... still love Ubuntu.
I like the speed and the new interface. Both are very nice. I was really excited when I read there were improvements to handling multiple monitors and the evolution-mapi plugin that would finally let me use the office's exchange server. Sadly both have missed the mark.
I use the Nvidia driver which means the fancy new monitor settings are not available to me (it pops an alert that tells me I have to open the Nvidia utility). The good thing is I don't have to hunt for the utility, it opens it for me, the bad is the utility is mostly useless. X sees my two screens as one huge screen, which is fine when I have two screens but sucks when I undock the laptop. No way to switch to one screen without hand-editing xorg.conf
I've always had high-hopes for evolution and I don't know why because its always been buggy and slow. This time is no different: "We have REAL exchange support this time! I promise". Sadly while I was able to install the mapi plugin and it shows in my settings, evolution helpfully crashes when I try to login. There are bugs filed against it ...maybe it will get fixed ... someday
And no, I have no love for exchange but I'm forced to use it. I have used the evolution-exchange package that connects through OWA ... its slow and buggy. Often refusing to download my mail, losing the connection to "the backend process" requiring me to delete a certain file. All in all, not worth the hassle.
For now I'm stuck using Outlook in an XP virtual
The Anti-Blog
Try mint. They should have their 9.04 based version out soon, but 6 works pretty nice. Hulu and youtube out of the box, not to mention, DVD playback and everything else. Plus you get to use Ubuntu repositories for other packages.
Best desktop distribution IMHO.
Cheap storage VM.
Agreed.. the Ubuntu interface and speed are great, even running off a live CD. But if you plan to install to a flash drive, do not trust it to leave your hard drive alone. When it gets to the GRUB installation, it reverts back to a hard drive install and messes with your MBR. I tried it on a Windows XP machine, and it made both XP and the flash drive unbootable.. should have yanked the hard drive first.
The new Evolution, included in Ubuntu 9.04, uses MAPI to interact with Exchange, it no longer needs OWA.
http://www.mhall119.com
You do realize that you can do this with Wine, right? It's how I play. I never ran the installer in Linux, I just told Wine to launch Wow.exe on the NTFS partition and it worked.
A touchscreen is significantly different than a Wacom tablet. The Wacom tablets should pretty much work out of the box with Ubuntu. You don't have the orientation and calibration issues nearly as bad with the Wacom tablets as you do with the tablet touchscreens.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Youtube demos this pretty well, IMHO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h905pHzkXPw
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Or you could have just installed linux mint which is just a repackaged version of Ubuntu and which does the sound perfectly.