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."

Comments

screenshots?

[themacks]

its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface

and the link is to an article without a single screenshot....

Re:screenshots?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I realize reading TFA is frowned upon, but:

You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists. What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.

Re:screenshots?

[Boiling_point_]

Lifehacker has a well laid-out and illustrated introduction avec screenshots.

Re:screenshots?

[themacks]

eh, that's just a pretty way of saying, "I'm lazy"

Re:screenshots?

[Threni]

Yeah, why doesn't he just post a screenshot of slick animation?

Re:screenshots?

[Azaril]

Where would he have hosted it? Geocities is dead!

Re:screenshots?

[c0p0n]

Animated gif? Did I wake up in 1997?

Re:screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a shit why he needs a touchscreen? This is just excuse-making. Maybe he IS working on a kiosk. Maybe he's working on a POS cash-register app, or the next generation of surface-based interfaces. Maybe he just prefers touchscreens.

Honestly, I get sick of this attitude from developers when someone suggests a useful feature - "why would you need that?" That's why Linux will always by a system "by programmers, for programmers."

Re:screenshots?

[BlitzTech]

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.

Re:screenshots?

[HermMunster]

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.

Re:screenshots?

[Atlantis-Rising]

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.

Re:screenshots?

[oldspewey]

You didn't spring for the $229 PrtScr key upgrade? Understandable ... Mac options can really start to add up.

Re:screenshots?

[JSBiff]

Wait, wait. . . did you just make an argument that because some random poster on /. downplayed a request for touchscreen support, that Linux developers don't care about requests for less-popular but potentially useful features? I agree that the GP's response of essentially 'who cares about touchscreen support' is kind of dumb, I fail to see how his post on /. has anything to do with developer attitudes?

Re:screenshots?

[mabinogi]

why? It's worked for Apple users for years....

Re:screenshots?

[Bigjeff5]

I know you didn't RTFA, cause nobody does, but that was EXACTLY the point of the article. They didn't mean "slick" as in shiny and pretty and cool effects, they even said so. They said don't bother looking at screenshots, because that's not the kind of "slick" that they meant. They meant "slick" as in responsive, windows pop up quickly, feels quick instead of sluggish.

They made some comparisons like:
Vista - oh so not slick
Mac OSX Tiger - Very slick
Mac OSX Leopard - Not as slick as Tiger, but slick
Windows 7 - surprisingly slick
Ubuntu pre-9.04 - Not slick
Ubuntu 9.04 - Very slick

The guy who wrote the article apparently uses Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows 7 on a regular basis, and he was focusing on user-interface improvements. He noted that Leopard, while it added lots of "cool features" over Tiger, the usablility slipped in a few areas. He noted that the MS team got it right for once, and the Windows 7 UI is impressive. He noted that the Ubuntu team dedicated the UI that was formed last September has made some great improvements, and it should finally be competative with the other two brands' user interfaces.

The theme itself though, sadly, hasn't changed. Fortunately it's a heck of a lot easier to customize the theme in Ubuntu than it is in Windows or OSX. :)

Re:screenshots?

[bwhaley]

Youtube demos this pretty well, IMHO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h905pHzkXPw

Re:screenshots?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I had to go digging for the drivers and apps for my tablet for XP and vista. they did not magicanny install and work without effort.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.
In fact, I don't know what that word means.

Re:screenshots?

[b4dc0d3r]

I wrote a library adding support for MNG to IE - called MINGE

Re:screenshots?

[jdgeorge]

The theme itself though, sadly, hasn't changed.

What do you have against the color brown?? Other than it happens to be the color of dog poop laying on dirt.

Hmmm.... Brown is also the color of delicious chocolate, and benevolent, life-giving coffee, and the hazy morning sky over Newark, New Jersey....

Way faster than 8.10

[cbuosi]

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.

Isn't it strange

[tsa]

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?

Re:Isn't it strange

[Nerdposeur]

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?

That's what I want to know, too. If I had known in 1995 what the specs for my 2009 system would be, I would have freaked out and expected it to boot in milliseconds and do everything else instantly.

Re:Isn't it strange

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Isn't it strange

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Isn't it strange

[FireFury03]

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.

Yeah, I've got to say that I find it pretty depressing to find the base OS being more resource hungry every time I upgrade. There is some increase in priddyness, such as Compiz Fusion, but I'm sure a lot of the bloat is behind the scenes stuff such as HAL, UDEV, PulseAudio, etc. To the end user they don't offer a really noticeable advantage and they do add to the bloat.

A quick look down my process list (Fedora 11) shows top bulky processes are:
  * FireFox with a resident size of 184MB
  * Xorg with a resident size of 125MB
  * Lots of Gnome bits and pieces totalling maybe 100MB
  * Nautilus with a resident size of 33MB

So you're looking at a fairly significant memory consumption just to surf the web - this is something that my old P166 laptop could do with 64MB of RAM around 1998 (and it was faster at it then than my 2GB Athlon XP 2100+ is now!)

There are a whole load of processes running and socking up memory that just don't need to be there too - the PC Card daemon (this is a desktop machine with no PC Card slots), the Bluetooth daemons (this machine has no bluetooth interface), gpm, gnome-power-monitor (why do I need this on a desktop machine?), etc. Sure, these processes do useful stuff in certain situations, but there's absolutely no need for them to be running all the time. Take Nautilus, for example - I never actually use it, but Gnome wants it to be running all the time just in case.

And yes, I know I could spend hours tuning my system, but my point is that I shouldn't have to - there's no need for modern systems to have all this bloat running all the time, it's just there because it is easier to be lazy and tell people to get better hardware than write efficient systems.

There's also a trend towards using much less efficient languages - for example, a lot of stuff is now written in Python and Java. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no sane reason to use a system like Java with the overhead of a VM when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them.

Re:Isn't it strange

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Ssh. You aren't supposed to admit that. Everyone on slashdot has been a wildly-ahead-of-the-curve-or-fashionably-contrarian-retro tech user since before birth. The only exceptions admitted are on "emotional linux conversion story" threads, where it is acceptable to admit that you used to use WinME, and "Oh man, I remember having to use AOL because of my mega-lame parents" topics, which are self explanatory. Them's the rules, dude.

Re:Isn't it strange

[jd]

If you use Coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), optimized kernel settings, optimized glibc settings, and stick to a lightweight window manager on X, you should get exactly what you're describing.

Re:Isn't it strange

[daybot]

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.

Re:Isn't it strange

[SanityInAnarchy]

HAL, UDEV, PulseAudio, etc. To the end user they don't offer a really noticeable advantage and they do add to the bloat.

HAL and UDEV make devices work better and easier. Things like being able to plug a USB hard drive in, and have it autodetected and ready to mount, is directly the result of udev.

Also, udev isn't slow. I've used it on incredibly weak hardware. Trust me, it's not the bottleneck.

PulseAudio, you might have a point -- at least in that the user-visible improvement isn't there yet, unless your soundcard is too weak to handle multiple audio streams -- I know I configure everything to just use ALSA.

But it will come. Like Vista -- having a volume knob per-app would be very useful.

There are a whole load of processes running and socking up memory that just don't need to be there too - the PC Card daemon (this is a desktop machine with no PC Card slots), the Bluetooth daemons (this machine has no bluetooth interface), gpm, gnome-power-monitor (why do I need this on a desktop machine?), etc.

That is true -- it would be very nice if these things could be handled by some sort of hotplug script (which you still need HAL and udev for), so that the moment a PC card slot appears, you're ready for it.

Interestingly, I see absolutely no bluetooth icon on my Kubuntu 8.10 machine (can't risk upgrading yet), until I turn it on (via the hardware switch).

And yes, I know I could spend hours tuning my system, but my point is that I shouldn't have to - there's no need for modern systems to have all this bloat running all the time, it's just there because it is easier to be lazy and tell people to get better hardware than write efficient systems.

Well, yes and no. I used to spend hours tuning my system, when I had a 200 mhz machine with 256 megs of RAM. I even carried these same habits to my 1.7 ghz machine with 512 megs of RAM.

Now I have a 2.5 ghz dual-core with 4 gigs of RAM. The slowest it will run is 800 mhz. And it's a laptop.

It is simply not worth my time to run around tuning this stuff. It's not a personal itch I feel like scratching. Just let it eat 200 mhz (more than my old machine even had) and a gig or two of RAM -- better than me having to spend hours tweaking it.

If someone else wants to, that's great! Certainly, I'll tend to use more efficient alternatives when they work -- for example, as I'm in KDE, I'm writing this post in Konqueror, rather than Firefox. But for the most part, it's just not worth it.

a lot of stuff is now written in Python and Java. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no sane reason to use a system like Java with the overhead of a VM when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them.

Firstly, Java can actually do some runtime optimizations that (for example) C can't. There are even circumstances where a garbage collector is faster than manual malloc/free. So purely from a performance aspect, it's not quite as clean as you think.

Second, there's still Python. And I don't know about you, but I'd much rather most of my system be written in Python than in C. Just by virtue of the respective languages, less code to do the same things means less bugs, garbage collection means fewer memory leaks and fewer segfaults, and really no sane possibility of buffer overruns...

I don't know about you, but I'll almost always trade a few more cycles for a bit more reliability and security.

The reason? With apologies to Churchill: My Ruby script may be slow today, but it will get faster as the hardware and interpreters improve. Your C program, however, will still be ugly. (Uglier code, more of it, and buggier...)

Re:Isn't it strange

[drinkypoo]

If the hardware manufacturers weren't so bent on making Coreboot a PITA then I would consider it. I do have an IBM eServer 325 that I'd like to put coreboot on. Problem is, last time I followed the build guide I received a MASSIVE FAIL... kind of like trying to build Angstrom linux. OpenEmbedded? Embedded in my eye.

Re:Isn't it strange

[drinkypoo]

PulseAudio, you might have a point

The only thing wrong with PulseAudio is the way it is implemented in Ubuntu. The Ubuntu packagers have clearly not understood (or perhaps even read) PerfectSetup. PulseAudio worked perfectly for me in Intrepid (not making this up) and still works perfectly in Jaunty, but in both cases I had to follow the PerfectSetup guide in order to make it so. This was especially egregious in Intrepid, where pulseaudio was installed by default. I had to install it to get mixing working on my laptop (HP 8730w with snd-hda-intel) and now everything is beautiful.

Re:Isn't it strange

[Feanturi]

For kicks I installed Win98 on one of my modern boxes once. The install process was blinding fast. Up and bluescreening in less than 5 minutes. It would only stay stable with no NIC drivers installed. Might have been tempting to keep going otherwise...

Re:Isn't it strange

[jellomizer]

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.
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 .exe or .com file.
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.

Re:Isn't it strange

[oakgrove]

Here's my 2 cents as an amateur programmer. I make little utilities for myself all the time to do various things. Like, I coded a python program recently to keep track of my prices on Amazon and adjust them up or down based on the market from time to time. Now this program is relatively simple and does exactly what it is designed to do. It is completely CLI based and since I am intimately familiar with it, I know how not to break it and I don't need or want it to do anything else.

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.

Re:Isn't it strange

[mrt_2394871]

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.

Re:Polish & slickness are buzzwords

[Nerdposeur]

Well, the author did specify a meaning:

You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists. What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.

OT: Debian Squeeze

[mpapet]

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.

Very Impressed with the update

[Patman]

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.

Consider me impressed.

[JoeytheSquid]

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.

Re:Consider me impressed.

[laughing_badger]

my lease forbids livestock and the downstairs neighbors frown upon blood dripping through the ceiling

Sacrificing the neighbours would avoid both problems. I'm just sayin'...

Re:Consider me impressed.

[LordKaT]

You should use the bath tub.

Re:Consider me impressed.

[LordKaT]

OK, that +5, Insightful is just plain fucking scary.

Re:Consider me impressed.

[suggsjc]

Human sacrifice is only necessary if you're installing Gentoo.

There, fixed that for you...

Following my earlier rant...

[bhunachchicken]

... about the state of KDE, I upgraded to Kubuntu 9.04 yesterday and have so far found it to be exactly what was promised: it's faster, more compatible, and... well, I don't know about stable because I've never had an issue with stability with Kubuntu.

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)

I love Ubuntu...

[greenguy]

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.

Re:I love Ubuntu...

[worip]

I've downgraded a few laptops and desktops now to XP, and most of the sound hardware does not work right after install: you actually have to download a few drivers. Might not be the same as installing a brand new OS, I'm just saying that no OS is perfect in its driver support, especially when it comes to laptops.

Re:I love Ubuntu...

[pnutjam]

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.

Screenshots

[molarmass192]

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.

Re:Screenshots

[Frosty Piss]

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...

This is an interesting quote because it illustrates how much many users consider "eye candy" to be a critical component of "usability". If only the widget icons were more up-to-date with current styles, Gnome would be more usable?

Re:Screenshots

[je ne sais quoi]

As a daily mac user, I can say that the author does point out some of the well-known gripes about leopard: 1) the stacks feature of the dock is just weird, and somewhat impractical to use with a folder with a larger number of items (although it has gotten better with one of the updates). 2) Spaces is not well implemented. A standard pager would have been a better choice, so you can see what windows are where. 3) Perhaps the biggest issue, a lot of people suspect (and this is supported by benchmarks) that Leopard is streamlined for intel macs, anybody with a G4 or G5 PPC can run it, but it doesn't run well. This is the first point release of OS X that hasn't been faster than its predecessors and that should say something. I nearly installed it myself on my dual G5, but after looking at the benchmarks, decided that 10.4 ran just fine, and I have a real pager already.

As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking. That said, my other major problem with gnome is the minimalist design paradigm. Whenever I use gnome apps, I often find myself getting irritated at the lack of options. It wouldn't kill them to have a few more clicky things on their preferences windows. For the record: I use e17 as my desktop manager and run a mix of gtk, qt and kde 3.5 apps (won't use kde 4 because they nuked the konqueror, which is my favorite file manager of all time).

It's damned fast

[dave420]

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.

They also don't tell you about nVidia drivers

[plasmidmap]

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.

Re:They also don't tell you about nVidia drivers

[plasmidmap]

Now the driver has downloaded and it looks fantastic! I spoke too soon.

Dual Monitors - No Sweat

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Dual Monitors - No Sweat

[TurboNed]

All it needs now is a "Launch World of Warcraft from my Windows partition" menu entry, and it'll take the world by storm.

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.

doesn't own a Mac

[viralMeme]

"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"

The problem remains... groupware

[Sun.Jedi]

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.

Let you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Ubuntu- Text Editor,OSX- Professional Page Layo

[aliquis]

Never mind aqua, brushed metal, grey slates and black HUDs don't look the same either ...

Terrible Article

[foo fighter]

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.

Re:More than 10 years ago

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

review of Gnome, or Ubuntu?

[bcrowell]

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.

Want Adobe Flash or other proprietary software like multimedia codecs on Ubuntu? Just search for them in the one location, under their own names. No downloading anything from any Web sites. No package management or dependencies. No apt-get. Point and click.

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?

Re:review of Gnome, or Ubuntu?

[cabjf]

To most people the GUI is synonymous with the OS, but they're two separate things.

This is what is holding Linux back on the desktop though. The public wants a consistent, intuitive, and responsive interface with their computer. The major aim of Canonical is to simplify Linux for the common user. That means working on configuring Gnome (as that is their GUI of choice) to meet those requirements. So a review meant for the public of the latest Ubuntu is going to focus on how it will look and act to a general user. While the bulk of it may be Gnome, the underlying system has to get everything right as well.

All of that stuff is just hard...

[klubar]

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...

Desktop Linux

[PeeShootr]

2009 will be the year of Desktop Linux.

Something doesn't add up

[cabjf]

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.

Re:I'm going to give it a try

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Ubuntu- Text Editor,OSX- Professional Page Layo

[bonch]

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.