Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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!
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
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 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.
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
everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.
I think this sentence describes exactly my problem with this kind of "reporting". Not all users are created equal.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
These comparisons don't help Linux.
The phenomena of giving someone a third choice often drives them to choose from the first two is well known.
They should have used a summary with the new features in this version instead of more comparisons that don't matter.
I'll take the kernel with *no* Digital Restrictions Management.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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?
Not with the 4850X2 or 4870X2 (like me).
The X Server segfaults on startup: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/364180/
It's not nearly as nice looking when using VESA or RadeonHD.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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
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.
Ok, but you'll need to post some information so we can notify you. Your mailing address, phone number, something. I mean, come on, how do you expect us to add you to the "notify when usability is better than Debian+e17" list if you don't give us something to add?
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
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.)
i do agree that Ubuntu 9.04 looks slick. i installed a few of my favorite fonts (Futura, Droid) and adjusted the theme. (it's really simple... anybody who complains about the default really needs to learn how to click System -> Preferences -> Appearance and choose one of the alternatives, including *gasp* blue/gray themes! That's right, THEY'RE INCLUDED! YOUR MAIN GRIPE AGAINST UBUNTU IS SOLVED! :-P ) I must say though, those Gnome folks have really improved the font situation in Linux over the years, to the point where fonts look just as nice in Linux as they do on a Mac, IMHO.
but what isn't slick is support for some webcams (mine "works" but in an unusable state), media codecs that must be installed separately and then don't always work (in my personal experience, even VLC has run poorly)... which may be caused by still inferior (to Windows') video card drivers (even when using 1st party drivers from ATI/nVidia). The sad truth is that a hacked together osx86 install gives better media performance and capabilities than a legit Ubuntu install.
I would love for a release of Ubuntu to focus primarily on multimedia and drivers. this is where Ubuntu must concentrate in order to convince users to switch from Windows (if that is in fact a goal). i understand the licensing issues that prevent some codecs from being included. but is there really a need for my Dell's onboard sound card to be listed as a Pulseaudio device AND an ALSA device AND an OSS device? Why not unify this? I plugged in a webcam which had it's own mic, and suddenly i have a dozen possible devices to choose from as an input device in every application that can use a mic. how about just two?
medibuntu repositories should be available by default. people DO want codecs and 3rd party software like Skype, despite what people like RMS might think. they don't need to be installed by default, but at least have the capability there by default. (Totem does go out and search for codecs now at least, which is a good thing.)
in my experience, it's still not there as a desktop OS yet, but Ubuntu is progressing. with each release, we get closer.
frog blast the vent core
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...
Dammit!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I believe they're favouring this one.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
2009 will be the year of Desktop Linux.
There is stuff though in Ubuntu, and other Linux distros though that is simply inexcusable.
Like positioning text inside a text field.
For who knows what reason something as trivial as that Linux still can't get right. The text is too big, the font is a manifestly retarded choice, the text is not centered and aligned to the box properly.
Just a few seconds of looking at the OS X desktop and Ubuntu side by side makes this glaringly obvious.
Ubuntu has the money to do so, has the complete source code, and even has a perfect example of how to do it right. And yet version after version is riddled with the same stupid UI problems that could be fixed today.
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.
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.
Give the nerds that and many more would try it, especially if you promised more fps during raids.
Yes, I am being serious.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Yeah, I hated how when I installed, it didn't recognize my video card, and I had to go hunt down the drivers.
Oh wait, that was XP SP3.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's being compared to Windows 7. Do you REALLY want screenshots, or painkillers?
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've now done the upgrade from Intrepid on three machines and here are the results:
.deb from somewhere else. Annoyingly, the madwifi drivers seem to kill whatever ubuntu do to NetworkManager so I'm stuck using the propietary, even though they've been in the kernel since 2.6.25.
1. Work Machine - Uses an Intel 965 Graphics cards, support of which is broken until kernel 2.6.29 / 30 according to the forums, and won't be properly supported until karmic. Fucking annoying, since by 'broken' I mean "utterly non performant".
2. Home Laptop. Ran just fine, but apt decided that I didn't want the restricted packages installing on the upgrade, so my atheros wifi card was out of action until I could get the
3. Home Desktop. This has killed X. Killed it good. At the moment I've no idea how it was managed, but it was...
I love ubuntu, but this upgrade has gone horribly wrong for me on two out of three installs, and 'smoothly' on none of them.
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.
The year of the Linux Desktop was 2008.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
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
May be we need: "Designers! Designers! Designers!"
You should try Gnome-Do. It gives you a dock, if you want one, and also a QuickSilver-like interface for launching apps, which is far, far better than a dock.
It also gives you mono
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
With more users, and more software available (both free and commercial) comes more people interested in investing time and money to make the OS run great and become more usable. Right now, from a mainstream (Joe user) point of view, Linux is on the edge of viability. One really bad release from Ubuntu and one blockbuster OS or app release from Microsoft could set Linux on the desktop back years. I'd like Linux's future to be more secure.
Who says Linux should achieve Microsoft's market share? I'd like Linux to go from the perhaps 1% desktop market share to 10-15%. But Microsoft's 85% market share hasn't been healthy for them as an organization, or for society.