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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Review (Lucid Lynx)
JimLynch writes "The open source world has been eagerly anticipating the final release of Ubuntu Linux 10.04, and now it's finally here. Canonical has been working extremely hard and it shows in the quality of this release."
... and I've given up. Between the backport madness, button relocation debate, purplification, and a complete disassociation with the community I did something which I didn't think I'd ever do. After 10 years of .deb distros, I'm running Fedora.
And you know what? It's nice. F12 is stable; yum seems to address all of those rpm complaints of old. I don't have strange oddities, there's actually SELINUX support. F12 works so well that in 10 years of running Linux I find myself (for the first time) in the situation where there is a beta out of the new Fedora and I haven't installed it as my system works flawlessly (I did boot the live CD and F13 beta is looking good too - I just don't want to upgrade until its baked).
I hope someone sees that the naming scheme is going to run into trouble when they reach the letter 'X'.
What is the best they can do? Ubuntu 24.0 (Xanthic Xerus) ?
Has it?? i've been running beta2 for a few weeks and it dual boots Win7 just fine. Did they break something?
Speaking of which, my impressions of 10.04 aren't as thrilled as the summary (can't read TFA yet). I ran 9.04 for nearly a year, skipped completely over 9.10, and now that I'm on 10.04, I honestly can't tell what's different from 9.04 aside from the new purple/grey/orange colored interface bars, moved min/max/close buttons, different IM tool (which I was already using in 9.04 anyway), and the login tool already knowing my name. Oh, and some icons for cloud computing (which I'm not sold on at all) and integration with facebook and twitter.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but with the short 6-month release schedule, it doesn't seem like -any- release of Ubuntu is worth "eagerly anticipating". It's not like we're talking the 6 year feature/design gap between XP and Vista, or even the 3 year gap between Vista and 7.
It seems like it basically comes down to "install whatever release is current, get it configured to your liking, and run it until support ends." I saw no reason to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, and I wouldn't have upgraded from 9.04 to 10.04 except I needed to wipe the HD anyway.
I know Kubuntu is the redheaded stepchild of Ubuntu, but you should try out Kubuntu 10.04. I don't know how I lived without tabbed windows.
I'll go out on a limb and predict that Phoronix concludes that the latest Ubuntu release is the greatest thing ever. All their benchmarks conclude that Ubuntu is the fastest thing that ever existed, even if it doesn't come in first. I stopped even reading their Ubuntu R0x0rs articles.
Interesting. Then maybe it is some more specific device ID that is affected?
Maybe you could comment on the bug report.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Only 10.04? Or including all versions before it?
9.10 is rock solid on my Acer Aspire R1600. It's got similar specs, except the gpu is a Nvidia ION instead of Intel 950. The only reason I reboot is for new kernels or moving the pc. I go weeks with zero problems and I play a lot of quake on it.
Camping on quad since 1996.
I use Debian Squeeze (Testing) on my desktop. It has up-to-date packages, and it far more stable than ubuntu.
"Has it?? i've been running beta2 for a few weeks and it dual boots Win7 just fine. Did they break something?"
Yes, Win7 still boots for some, and that is an unacceptable security risk. The inbuilt malware is pretty scary, and most antivirus programs will not detect it.
-Charlie
Is it as easy to install the Nvidia restricted drivers on Debian as it is on Ubuntu?
The other reason is when your current version is no longer supported. That's why I'm eagerly waiting for this release, since it's a "long term release", so I'll not be upgrading for a long time.
So instead of all installs having the bug only some installs will have it... doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
While I'm criticising... the recent patch to turn off SMART monitoring, because it apparently damages some SSD's, could have been handled better. On my system it seemed to have a side effect which manifested as all the file systems suddenly going RO - while I was running and editing something important. Even inserting a thumb drive to try and save the work resulted in it coming up RO. And it wouldn't "shutdown".
Long story short, after cycling the power it took the better part of half a day to get things straightened out. Yes there was notice of the change but honestly who reads every single little description of every single patch? Something this major should have had lots of bells and whistles to attract attention - not because of the headache I suffered, although it would have been nice to avoid the frustration and wasted time - but because turning off SMART monitoring without making damn sure the user knows the health of his disks aren't being monitored anymore is assinine.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
yeah and fedora drops f-spot and tomboy for Showtell and Gnote.. and removes all mono from live CD. Suprised Ubuntu using more mono
Which is why I'll probably get hate for asking this, but it is something I have just never understood about Linux: What is up with the rushing new versions out the door? I mean, say what you want about MSFT (And IMHO anybody who bought Vista should have gotten a free upgrade to 7 for being dumped with that turkey) their support cycles are long enough that by Sp2 most of the nasty bugs are gone and you end up with a pretty stable OS.
But I tried running Ubuntu from 6 to 9.04 because of all the buzz, and it seemed like every release would fix one bug and add three. And of course since a new version came out every 6 months the previous versions never did get fixed, they just got tossed to the side. I even tried the LTS but it didn't seem any better as far as being less buggy, it just ran old software.
So I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just honestly curious as to why the strange behavior. I mean the only other software I can think of that has that "ship it no matter what" behavior is video games, but they have enough money sunk if they don't get a quick ROI they can end up as dead as Vampire:Bloodlines.With Ubuntu and Linux being FLOSS I just don't get why the focus seems to be on rush it out the door instead of making it solid and bug free as possible. Is it a problem with the FLOSS model? Is it not possible to get developers to work on fixing bugs, the excitement of cranking out something new being easy to get free coders? Sadly the closest I cam to a rock solid laptop under Linux for Xandros, which is proprietary and nearly as expensive as Windows. Is bug fixing just not "cool enough" or something? Will they lose the community if they don't crank out a new version every x months? I just don't get it, sorry if I am missing the forest for the trees here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Why is Ubuntu still clinging to an install CD while all the other distros are using DVDs? Again, Ubuntu is not Windows, and it is not made by MS. Why follow MS's weak design choices?
If Ubuntu claimed that a CD version could not include OpenOffice and instead included Abiword, I would not be arguing. But the GIMP is almost as central to Linux as Gnome or KDE. It is a staple, like rice or bread. Without it, the desktop will be "undernourished".
Ubuntu also is not Puppy Linux. It does not take up a mere 100MB of disk space. It does not run on 20 year old computers. Why should the default install not include the best and brightest of the Linux world?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Use Debian?
Sadly, last I remember, they were looking to quicken the pace too due to people flocking to Ubuntu and generally complaining about Debian being "too old". I loved it the way it was. I switched to Ubuntu just to see what the hullabaloo was all about. I'm slowly switching back my workstations to Debian again. I've always been on Debian for servers just for that reason. I develop software. I need a stable target. Debian is it. And it's solid.