Ubuntu's "Lucid Lynx" Enters Beta

ActionDesignStudios writes "The upcoming release of Ubuntu, titled 'Lucid Lynx,' has just entered the beta cycle. Alongside the usual desktop and server versions, a special version has been released that is designed to run on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. This release of Ubuntu does away with the brown 'Human' Gnome theme we've all become accustomed to, replaced by a new version Canonical says is inspired by light. The new release also includes much better integration with social networking services such as Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook, among others."

Comments

Using it since Alpha 1

[Aphoxema]

I really like what I see, but it is a little... counter-intuitive that they not only put the window controls on the left side of windows but put them in order of Maximize-Minimize-Close. No matter, I have everything maximized all the time anyways and on my Wind I've been using Maximus with Window-Picker-Applet.

Re:Using it since Alpha 1

[LingNoi]

They say it was a decision from the design team however, I suspect the decision to change the window controls has to do with the new mac guy that just joined canonical. The timing is just too convenient.

Either way it's a foot meet bullet situation. I very much suspect a lot of people to move distro over this. Yes, I know you can type in a command to fix this however the point of Ubuntu was that you could install it and go. You didn't have to dick around with it and this decision is going to force people to spend time configuring their system unless they add some option at install time.

It's like Snow Leopard changing the controls on the right. How they expected to do this without getting criticised heavily for it is absurd. Not only that but Mark's Comments towards the end of this bug report posted in a previous slashdot story have really opened my eyes as to what a dick he really is when talking to his users.

There's lots of reasons to keep the close buttons on the right by default and yet Mark can't come up with one reason to move them, just a lot of nonsense about "his plans" which he doesn't want to share.

I'm using Lucid Lynx Beta...

[oldmeddler]

...right now. I like it fine, though some changes (moving windows controls to the left side, took a bit of getting used to. The purple scheme sucks but is easy enough to change. There is still a problem with running a fixed IP, or at least there is some trick to making it work properly that I haven't learned yet. It does seem to boot a bit faster, but fast boot times are of little importance to someone who typically runs his computer 24/7. So far, I see no significant improvements, but more importantly, no noticeable degradations, yet.

Re:Window Buttons

[iris-n]

They're mostly complaining about the ubuntu devs: "Don't these these devs have anything else to do, other than toy with the placement of window buttons?"

Re:Lucid what?

[0100010001010011]

10.0 was Cheetah.

Public Beta: "Kodiak"
10.0: "Cheetah"
10.1: "Puma"
10.2: "Jaguar"
10.3: "Panther"
10.4: "Tiger"
10.5: "Leopard"
10.6: "Snow Leopard"

One step forward, two steps back

[Judinous]

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, and I mostly run Ubuntu Server or Debian machines for my personal desktop usage. However, their habit of catastrophically breaking important features in their releases is really getting on my nerves. Wi-fi support, for example, has been fixed and re-broken repeatedly over the past few years. I think that this release takes the cake when it comes to breaking existing functionality, though. The first two known issues listed for 10.04:

#Because of the new alternatives system used for nvidia driver packages, the nvidia installer from NVIDIA's website currently doesn't work.
#The fglrx binary driver for ATI video chipsets does not yet support the X server in Lucid. As a workaround, users should use the open source -ati driver instead.

Both of these are pretty much show-stoppers, especially the ATI issue. Is a month long enough to sort out a problem this serious?

Re:What I want to know is ...

[Again]

The new release also includes much better integration with social networking services such as Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook

Why should an operating system "integrate" with a social networking service?

Ubuntu provides not just the Linux operating system but also the package of applications that they deem people may find useful. Applications which provide social networking integration will be put to use for a lot of people so they are included.

Re:f1rst p0st

[techno-vampire]

how can Fedora bl less user-friendly?

Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora doesn't automatically install any of the un-free codecs you need and getting the drivers for ATI or nVidia cards is strictly up to you. And, I might add, although Fedora started out with a six month release cycle, it's more like nine now.

Re:Why do people like Ubuntu?

[pr0nbot]

At the moment I run Ubuntu out of inertia - I installed it once at some point in the past and have just gone with the updates.

My Linux box is essentially a PC that became obsolete when I bought a laptop. I don't use it for much, just gaming with Wine (because I can shove a decent graphics card into it) and light browsing in Firefox whilst gaming.

Before I tried Ubuntu, I had tried just about every distro in the hopes of finding one that just installed and ran, by which I mean hardware stuff like: could run my monitor without me having to reverse engineer X configuration files, could drive my USB speakers without me having to take a crash course in kernel modules, could detect my wireless LAN without me having to download and compile stuff from RealTek, etc. At the time, Knoppix, Gentoo, Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE etc all failed in some way or another.

Another killer feature for me is system updates, which happen pretty unobtrusively on Ubuntu (dare I say it -- rather mac-like: a window pops up, you browse the updates & pick the ones you care about, and type in the password).

So, for people like me who are bored of learning about some distro's internals just to get to the point where audio works (say), Ubuntu does the trick. Having said all that - as your post shows, one's opinion about a Linux distro will tend to be based on how well stuff worked out of the box, which as far as I can see normally comes down to hardware support. In your case it all went horribly wrong, in my case it all went absolutely swimmingly. I suppose the popularity of Ubuntu may reflect that it works smoothly for more people than not.

Re:Why do people like Ubuntu?

[moonbender]

I like Ubuntu. I really like Gnome, so I don't feel like I have to tear it out. Most things just work for me -- including 5.1 sound --, and though some things don't, I can't imagine any other distribution (or OS, for that matter) not having its own share of issues. I don't care what init mechanism is used as long as things are running after booting. Similarly, I don't really care how partitions are mounted as long as they are, in fact, mounted. I guess I'm a luser these days. Many of the decisions that annoy me can easily be reverted (ctrl-alt-backspace in the past, menu bar buttons in the present; even removing PA apparently wasn't that difficult, even though I never tried it).

Other things I like:
  - the update cycle, which is often enough to be interesting and rare enough not to be annoying
  - the community support is really good because it seems to be sort of the default distribution these days
  - the bug tracker is nice (from a user perspective, anyway)
  - PPAs are available for popular software projects, sometimes from upstream itself, so I can get new versions or even nightly builds with updates and without compiling
  - overall, Launchpad is pretty awesome