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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."
its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface
and the link is to an article without a single screenshot....
i read about it in a blog once
I have it on both my laptops, and even installed it on a virtual machine on my work Mac.
BUT... I won't be recommending it to friends and family until they get the damn sound working immediately upon installation. If people can't use Flash and watch Youtube on it, it might as well be green letters on a black background.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
from Lifehacker
As for being as slick as OS X, well, spoken like somebody who obviously doesn't own a Mac. It's nice, but there's no way it's even in the same neighborhood that the ballpark for OS X is in. I'm gonna light a small fire here, but I wish a super talented artist would redesign the widget set for Gnome, it's very very dated as it stands now. KDE is far better looking but even it is getting long in the tooth.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
10 years ago I expected my machine to simulaneously...
Rip/transcode CDs.
Play mp3s
Browse the web with bloated browser.
Manipulate documents with bloaded office suite.
The only thing that's reall changed in the last 10 years
is that the tools have changed in appearance. Some are
more snazzy, and some are less snazzy but more automated.
However the basics are pretty much the same as well as
the expected level of concurrency.
I expect the computationally interesting stuff to run
for as long as it needs to without crashing and without
negatively impacting the "end user experience".
Unix had that part covered 10 years ago.
"using spare cycles for something useful" is what Unix does.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"As for being as slick as OS X, well, spoken like somebody who obviously doesn't own a Mac"
"I am starting to prefer using my Ubuntu "Jaunty Jackalope" desktop over the similarly slick Windows 7 beta (which I am currently running full-time on one desktop) and Mac OS X Leopard operating systems, which I also use regularly"
Never mind aqua, brushed metal, grey slates and black HUDs don't look the same either ...
From the summary I expected at least a snapshot gallery, maybe even video and benchmarks since it was a CNET address, of this latest release.
But this article is complete shit. It's a crappy fanboy blog post with no numbers, no pictures, and just breathless "it works for me, and I'm emotionally committed to this platform, so it's the best thing ever" anecdotes.
Here's a counter-anecdote to the OS X Leopard (10.5) bashing: I'm running 10.5.6 on my 12" PowerBook G4 and it is great. The machine only runs at 1.33GHz with 768MB RAM. The only time it feels slow is when more than one Flash animation tries to run at once (Fuck you, Adobe). Otherwise I can have more than a dozen apps open, a video podcast playing in iTunes in the corner, promiscuous network monitors saturating the resources, and the only time I wish I had a newer machine is when I'm stuck with audio-only chats with my wife while on the road because this box doesn't have the built-in iSight and I don't want to pack an external one.
Stacks have been great since the 10.5.2 update (which came out in Feb 2008, BTW) added several options to how they work. I use them all the time. Folders that have lots of files and subfolders are set to display as a menu very similar to Windows's classic Start Menu. Folders that have few items, like certain subfolders that hold a category of applications or my Downloads folder, display in a grid for quick access. Stacks are awesome, and they are the reason I have stopped hating the Dock and wishing I could turn it off.
Spaces was updated in 10.5.3 (which came out in May 2008) and addressed many of the criticisms the initial feature faced when 10.5 launched several months earlier. I admit it isn't as good as some virtual desktops in Nixland. But it is very, very solid and waaay better than anything available for Windows.
To avoid "your just an OS X fanboy! Nyaah!" flames, let me say that I do love OS X. But I am also running the last LTS of Ubuntu at home and find it a very nice environment. At work I actually prefer OpenBSD, but Windows is currently on my main workstation at the office following some pointy-haired unpleasantness (OpenBSD is still usually the active window, running in a VM; Its main mailing list is also a source of entertainment all day long). I admin several servers running CentOS. I also have to touch Windows Server frequently, which is more often than not a pleasant experience.
Slavish OS fanboyism and an inability to admit to the faults as well as the strengths of an OS is a symptom of a weak mind.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
On the other hand, the price point at which we "have that covered" has absolutely plummeted during those years.
Huge amounts of "exciting new" PC tech is arguably just a rediscovery of stuff that was being done on big iron ages back. The difference, and it isn't a small one, is that the new stuff is crazy cheap.
To most people the GUI is synonymous with the OS, but they're two separate things. By far the bulk of the review seems to be talking about how he likes this version of Gnome better. Well, that's fine, but Ubuntu isn't the same thing as Gnome. I run Ubuntu, but I don't use Gnome.
He also seems favorably impressed with the performance of the GUI, but again this mixes together a lot of stuff in a pretty uninformative way. He's got a particular nvidia card. I don't have that card, so his perception of "windows moving around without jerkiness" probably means nothing to me, even if I were to use Gnome.
This part baffles me. "No package management or dependencies." Since when have you ever had to worry about package management or dependencies on an ubuntu machine? Dependencies are taken care of automatically by apt. "No apt-get. Point and click." Huh? For years and years now, you've been able to install packages on a debian/ubuntu box by clicking around on a gui, if that's what floats your boat. (Personally I prefer to use apt from the console, since, e.g., it lets me install fifty apps at once just by cutting and pasting a string of package names.) Why is he using apt-get in contradistinction to point and click, as if it was a new thing to be able to access apt via a gui?
Find free books.
PRoducing a highly polished UI, with consistent colors, shading and graphics is hard and takse time and talent. Most of the people with these skill don't want to work for free (as in free software) and would rather earn a living for their talent (or time).
It also requires a degree of central coordination and control--most lacking in free software. Even MS Windows (where some may consider the interface not as polished as the Mac) sweats a lot of the details--does it work in 8 bit color mode? does it scale to low res screens? black & white? is there a high contrast version for visually impaired? And then there are all the internationalization issues...
Writing polished software, with a highly integrated interface has never been free software's strength. Too many programmers who aren't designers, too many "but I really like orange and green and pink" windows.
Firefox probably comes closest (or meets) the requirements for "Joe or Jane User". But most of the stuff just doesn't have the polish of really high quality commercial software. (Compare, Gimp with Photoshop, OO with MS Office).
FOSS is great for infrastructure stuff--apache, MySQL, etc., but it's been 5 years away from the desktop for the last 20 years...
10 years ago I expected my machine to simulaneously...
Rip/transcode CDs.
Play mp3s
Browse the web with bloated browser.
Manipulate documents with bloaded office suite.
And yet, in Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu Jaunty, I cannot scroll down this page without pauses because some other website is loading in a background tab...
The only thing that's reall changed in the last 10 years
is that the tools have changed in appearance.
What the average user expects from web browsing is considerably different to what it was 10 years ago. If you showed me Hulu in HD in 1999 I think I'd have passed out - you can do that in a browser? My Mum and Grandfather have both just bought new computers because their old ones couldn't do BBC iPlayer SD in high quality, let alone the new iPlayer HD content.
The personal computing industry owes a lot to YouTube, Hulu, iPlayer and the like: outside gaming, these are the only mainstream killer apps that actually require 21st century hardware.
We are also doing things that are rather unheard of on these old systems.
So lets compare Windows 95 system with today.
1. Real-Time Semi-Transparency. Doing stuff back in 95 would have taken at least a second to render. .exe or .com file.
2. Anti-Aliasing fonts. Back in the day we knew what text was done in Photoshop and what was rendered on the fly.
3. Wobbly Windows. (or similar effect) That would take crazy computing power back then
4. Disk Indexing, We knew how to index back in 95 it just took to long to be useful
5. Complex interpreted language programs. If it wasn't in binary format then it was too slow.
6. Multi-tasking. Windows 95 just barely had working multi-tasking. Burning a CD back then was a crap shoot. because chances are your computer would freeze up and mess up your PC.
7. Security. Back in 95 a Buffer overflow would mean your program would crash, and if you had a password protection you were considered secure. Viruses only infected
8. PCI was the new kid on the block and plug in play was plug and pray.
9. Configurability. Go work with windows 95 and even compare it with XP you will realize how much stuff you have taken for granted over the years.
I bet if you take your old 486 and run 95 you will realize how slow it was.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now, let's say, I wanted to sell this program. Firstly, I would need to put a pretty interface on it, then I would need to write in all of the error and exception handling required to make sure it didn't crash when the user starts randomly hitting keys on the keyboard. I would need to write in new features that, while I might not necessarily want them, to make the program commercially competitive, have to be there for other users. And on and on. That's how a 300 line script turns into a 10's of thousands of lines bloated nightmare. At least that's how I see it.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
The only thing wrong with PulseAudio is the way it is implemented in Ubuntu.[...]
Er, no.
Another feature^W bug of PulseAudio is the automagic resampling to $whatever_frequency_it_decides.
Which is marvellous if you want 44.1kHz system beeps on your VIA-powered mini-ITX lounge jukebox system to blend perfectly with 48kHz audio recorded off a DVB radio stream. Or a DVD.
So, PulseAudio decides to lock your audio to 44.1 kHz on startup, and then 48kHz audio stutters and skips because the poor (600MHz) processor (which makes a meal of just about everything) really doesn't like realtime re-encoding.
And the really Homeresque thing about this is that the onboard sound can play 48kHz audio natively. Of course, I'd be only too happy to tell PulseAudio to use 48kHz all the time, but for the ripped CD collection on there too.
In fact, an ideal solution would be to somehow, magically, on-the-fly, send audio files sampled at frequencies it knows the sound card can handle, directly to the card and not resample them arbitrarily.
Just like it did in 2007.
Grrrr.