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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).
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.
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