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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."
From the article: I particularly noticed the Ubuntu difference when I put the operating system to the test by simultaneously launching and using multiple applications, listening to music and more while using my spare CPU cycles in the background to encode high-definition video with Mencoder. Ubuntu still felt very fast--even with traditionally sluggy pieces of software like OpenOffice.org.
Isn't it strange that people are still surprised that their computers are fast? Computers have gotten ridiculously fast compared during the last 20 years, and still they seem slow to many of us. Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
-- Cheers!
Lifehacker has a well laid-out and illustrated introduction avec screenshots.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Shuttleworth has already announced that the color scheme will be changed for 9.10, Karmic Koala. I havn't seen what color it actually is gonna be, but its not brown.
I am, however, still at odds with a few of KDE 4.2.2's features (namely KPackageKit, Amarok, and the way removable media is handled), but I think I can at last live with it. If you've been pondering whether to upgrade from Hardy (which I know some people have been), I'm sure you'll find 9.04 acceptable.
(in future though, I must remember not to upgrade on the day of the release. A presumed 45 minute upgrade turned into a 3.5 hour slog)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
And the effects are mostly great (on their own), but it still lacks coherency in its design. The UI elements still look ratty, old-fashioned, and ugly, and the visual effects (while fluid) are all over the place. Don't hate me for this, but at least Windows 7's design is much more coherent, from the UI controls to the visual effects - they look like they work together. What I've seen of 9.04 is quite the opposite - it looks like everything is engaged in a mortal struggle against everything else. A fluid, nifty effect generates a window that's full of 90s-esque design elements. It's rather jarring. Like taking a swanky elevator to a penthouse, and the doors open to reveal a highly-functional chicken coop.
Because Microsoft had been woken up with Windows 7. For a long time, Windows had a huge loophole that allowed competition - rampant security and stability holes while it's huge benefit was that most software ran on it. Exploiting this weekness allowed Apple to get back into the game.
We all joke about the BSOD, but tability, except for the odd driver, has been mostly a non-issue to the vast majority of users since XP. Security, otoh, seems to have been mostly fixed to the point of being good enough (hardly perfect) in Vista, especially if you don't run as admin all the time. In the days of XP, I had to reinstall my OS once a year just to keep it running at a tolerable rate, 2 years of Vista and the computer is still running fine without running antivirus or antispyware.
Still, this is behind a firewall and I'm not sure I would trust it out in the wireless world or on the road.
I'm glad Ubuntu is upping it's game. Coming out as it did in 2004 probably was probably close to the last point in time that a new linux distro could have been launched, aimed at joe user, that would have gained a significant following. Perhaps if came out in 1998, we'd be seeing Quickbooks for Linux on Walmart shelves by now. But that's making a lot of assumptions about the underlying packages at the time that no single distro could do anything about.
At work, the boss gave the developers extra monitors and a video card with dual DVI output. One guy got it working under Ubuntu 8.04 after some hackery. Another guy's Windows XP picked it up without much trouble. My Ubuntu 8.04 workstation wasn't so cooperative, even with the other guy's config options.
Last week, I installed 9.04 beta and it picked up the dual monitors without breaking a sweat. It even put the size/manufacturer in the upper-left corner of each monitor as the display options were being adjusted.
All it needs now is a "Launch World of Warcraft from my Windows partition" menu entry, and it'll take the world by storm.
I am grateful that Ubuntu and Fedora have world class support, improvements, and update frequently. Ditto for OOO, and many other open source projects (cluster ssh, firefox, openssh, apache, etc...) As long as the support for exchange mail is an OWA connector, I can't leave windows behind. OWA sucks, OWA sucks from IE on Windows, it double sucks with evolution-exchange.
No, I won't virtualize WIN/Outlook. No, I won't run 2 desktops. No, the Exchange server is not going to be replaced with insight or kroupware or any other open source replacement.
While I am happy for the 9.04 release, I can't help but not being too excited because in spite of all the goodness that Linux is, if it can't meet my needs, it's simply not a viable option.
If I can't run it, how the hell am I supposed to get my wife, kids, or parents on it? Yeah, thats a loaded question, and in actuality my kids PC is Fedora 10. I still have to continually answer the "why do you use Windows" style questions from them.
I don't know what it was due to, but for some reason, when I was running the previous version (Ibex?), various bits of text wouldn't render properly. They looked "fuzzy". Actually, Facebook (of all sites) had it the worst. Capital Rs were indistinguishable from capital Ps, for example.
Not so now. Cleaner and crisper text across the board. I was delighted to see that the upgrade cleared that particular issue up. So 9.04 is starting off on a good foot!
(One continuing gripe, though: the Mahjongg tiles still look like they're straight outta 1990.)
windows moving around without jerkiness
While I generally like 9.04, this statement is not quite true. At least on my machines, there is a lot of tearing and flickering when you move a window no matter whether desktop effects are switched on or off.
Just a minor quirk, but annoying. I experience no such flickering in windows XP or OS X. (I'm customarily using all 3 OSes, Ubuntu for work, OS X for home, and XP for gaming.)
Speaking of Macs, the Gnome widgets have always reminded me strongly of Mac OS 9. In fact, remind might be too weak a word- they look outright copied. That is probably why many commenters here think they look dated.
Comment of the year
As we've noted in earlier articles, Microsoft has also brought its best to the table with Windows 7. However, it's a pity that Apple didn't seem to do so with Leopard.
Ubuntu comments aside (I use and enjoy it myself), this hardly seems like a well written piece. The author talks up Windows 7 and complains about the current version of Mac OS X. It seems a bit biased to ignore the Vista debacle, talk up Windows 7 before its release, then complain about Leopard without doing more than mentioning Snow Leopard. It's not like Apple is being secretive about what they have in store for Snow Leopard. Apple seems to be addressing just about every complaint the author made about the current version of Mac OS X. Both Windows 7 and Mac OS X v10.6 are most likely due out sometime this year, so comparing them would be much fairer than comparing a future version of Windows to the current version of Mac OS X.
They're plenty of use. I used a tablet for all of my college notes, which made it convenient to copy&send to friends who might have missed class. The fact that I couldn't install Linux on it (despite several failed attempts) was irritating, because my battery life was better on Linux (surprise!) and the tablet was significantly faster under Linux. Unfortunately, the calibration would frequently de-align itself and screen rotation didn't always rotate the calibration as well (i.e. pointing at the lower left would make the cursor jump to the upper right).
In answer to your comment about desktop use, I know many artists who do most of their work in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet. They hate using a mouse for that kind of work. If you question these users' importance overall, I can only direct you to the frequent conversation about 'I need apps that don't work in Linux! You can't use GIMP as a replacement for Photoshop!'.
I agree it's not that huge of a deal, but it might be a dealbreaker for a not-insignificant number of people.
I also got this message (ATI), and upgraded anyway. I really don't have any use for the acceleration. It's only recently that using the fglrx driver stopped causing my laptop to freeze on sleep/hibernation. Surprisingly, I can now get desktop effects, without the driver. This makes the open office menus look ridiculous, so I'm not sure if I won or not.
You don't have to. You can just download and install it. It is free you know and extremely simple to set up. I own and operate a small business where I do repairs, upgrades, and sales. Linux is tremendously easier to get up and running than Windows. I've been involved in computers for almost 25 years. You can't beat the value and ease of use of Linux today, on the desktop at that.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
How old? 8.10 jetisoned support for older Nvidia cards:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810#nVidia%20%22legacy%22%20video%20support
No such mention in the 9.04 notes, but that seems addressed to people who could go to 8.10.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904
Anyone already in-the-know on this? There's a lot of otherwise fine machines running 8.04LTS as their 'last Ubuntu' because of this, which was a PITA frankly. If you didn't dig out and understand the release notes, there was no warning. The 8.10 LiveCD worked fine, then you got a new install that failed to install. Much tearing of hair and unanswered forum posts from people before that one was sorted.
Sorry I'm a non-expert, but that's why I went with Ubuntu. Does the X.Org of 9.04 work with GeForce4? How do we find out? The card works great with 8.04 and of course Windows.
I have a tablet PC, with a multi-touch display (Touchsmart Tx2). Windows 7's support is light-years better than Windows Vista... and that would be a deal-breaker.
You say it stresses your arms, but it really doesn't. After about two weeks of practice, I could touch-type reasonably quickly on the onscreen keyboard (with a couple of quirks), and when I'm working, it's so much easier to lift a finger from the keyboard to touch the screen than it is to lower one hand to use the touchpad.
I'll never get another notebook that doesn't have a touchscreen, and I will never use an OS on it that doesn't have at least reasonable support. Touch is a godsend.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I remember being a windows user applying all sorts of Aqua themes and running all kinds of menu bar emulators and docks but at some point I realized that none of that stuff changed the inherent lack of usability of windows. The drag and drop still sucked, the window management still sucked and the performance sucked even worse with all of those hacks running in the background.
The linux community needs to create a standard set of controls and application frameworks. This has to be in place before they can attract serious commercial software developers like Adobe to linux and before linux will be taken seriously as a desktop OS.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Well, the APNG (animated PNG) format never really went anywhere.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm new to KDE so I may have the wrong of it but I have the konqueror file manager as an option...
I never used 3.5 for more passing fancies and couldn't stand 4.0. I gave 4.2 a shot with the kUbuntu beta and while there has been a learning curve, I haven't looked back at GNOME.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
For nothing really, just for very specific tasks. I would love a touch screen in my laptop to perform live using Ableton Live.
Your head a splode
Brushed metal doesn't exist anymore. When it did, it was for applications containing a source list or emulating some real world device, so there was an intended consistency. Around the time brushed metal disappeared, black HUDs showed up in Apple's media applications, allowing you to make edits without obscuring too much of what you're working on. The deviations in OS X have a purpose.
The inconsistencies the person you're responding to is talking about is stupid crap like the way fonts are rendered. There is still uneven kerning and bad font choices after all these years. Applications don't follow a standard interface paradigm. You know how a Mac app is going to look and feel, even when it deviates from the norm, such as Delicious Library.
Ubuntu is odd because it's a project trying to take all this third-party work and make it feel like it's cohesive and meant to go together. I'd rather use the stuff in "vanilla" form and not make-believe that it was all created by the same team.
Installed the 64 bit version on a new Toshiba L305D with an AMD Turion X2 processor, ATI Radeon graphics and 3GB ram. Though partitioning was a minor pain in the ass (fat32, swap, logical), all went well and the entire install took about 20 minutes.
I was concerned the Atheros wifi was going to cause me problems but all it required was the ssid and passkey. Having problems talking to the Samba share on my Debian box though. Ext4 has had no hiccups, so far.
Dual booted in case I ran into more problems than I have time to fix right now but I feel comfortable scraping Vista off the HDD now.
yeah. I can't get the intel integrated graphics to stop doing that, no matter what I do. To test it, I wrote an example code to use double buffer and do vsync. Amazingly, it just kept on tearing. Annoying.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I watch my new EeePC run circles around my $1600 iBook with a mixture of awe and horror.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Where does this notion that whatever became the design trend yesterday is always the best come from? Being cool means you don't spend hours each day in front of the mirror trying to dress and posture like the supposed "cool kids." That approach is exactly why pop music sucks worse than ever, on the whole, while nearly everything else (say, architecture) is also largely in decline. It's why Wall Street went head-over-heals for "financial products" invented yesterday, instead of staying focused on the very-profitable products that were invented centuries ago.
The new that's truly new - there's a place for that. Pop music, for instance, once had a lot more truly new stuff in the mix. But the "new" that's merely imitating someone else's trendy details - totally bogus. Good UI's persist, they aren't disposable trash. Trends have little to do with that.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
What do you expect if programmers drive the development process? These things simply are not important to them.
Yes we should totally turn it over to the MBAs!
I think 1 billion $$ might cover their golf expenses, might need a couple of billion more for their dinner and travel.
We'll use whatever's left to pay engineers to develop the UI, in strict conformance to what the MBAs say, of course.
"Why do you need a touchscreen?"
Because I'm too lazy to fuck with the piece of shit trackpad that most laptops come with? Because sometimes the mouse refuses to work properly, or maybe the keyboard got something spilled on it and I'm out of warranty? How about for those of us with arthritis and bursitis, which can make clicking a button a massive pain where one could just touch the screen and be on their way?
You would do well to think a little further before you make such inane statements.
Why? BECAUSE WE CAN. BECAUSE IT CAN BE DONE AND THERE ARE MORE USES THAN WHAT YOUR MIND ALONE CAN COME UP WITH.
Seriously - innovate or die off and make room for someone that can.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, it isn't.
Desktop Linux was good enough for non-geeks to use a decade ago. What's holding Linux back on the desktop is Microsoft's entrenchment. End of discussion. Most users have a perceived need to stay with Windows because they have some legacy application they feel they need to continue to run, or because they're afraid of change, or because Microsoft continues to strongarm the OEM channel. It has nothing to do with the quality of the operating system. Windows did just fine for years during which much time was still spent fiddling with config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini, etc.
Ubuntu is definitely the most user-friendly Linux available, and reports of v9.04 is that they've done an exceptionally good job this time, but desktop Linux has been viable for years now. It isn't about the technology; it's about an entrenched monopolist bullying the industry around.
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