Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu 11.04, Slackware 13.37
Approximately one billion Slashdot readers wrote in to tell us today that one of two distributions had releases:
the new Ubuntu sports the Unity interface, marking a 'radical departure' from its UI of old. Now the more ancient and bearded amongst you might be interested in Patrick announcing the latest Slackware release which clearly has the most 1337 version number to date.
Doesn't both news deserve a separate note?
La culpa no es del chancho...
Most of what it does is Compiz, it has a menu bar and a dock. You still log in through gdm and it still pops up on the wrong monitor when I have 'em both active.
On the other hand, it is awfully more mac-like, what with Unity stealing menu bars left and right, but not always.
Still the same theme from Maverick with the gadgets on the wrong side but now it makes sense because it makes sense for the gadgets to be on that side when they get snarfed into the top bar.
I'm just glad that they managed to get the dock pop-up/click behavior ironed out before the release, I noticed they finally fixed this in the last day or two. And the Applications place seems to actually have stuff in it every time I click it now. For a few days there I had to type to see anything the first time I used it.
All in all if you're not married to a particular interface it's not an unpleasant change, and it does look nice. Amusingly, to me it is reminiscent of the Zune Desktop Theme for Windows XP. That's nice for me because I'm a dual-boot user again, and that's my XP theme of choice :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I find Kubuntu Lucid LTS stable enough for me these days and cannot really see any reason to upgrade to Natty. I think I'm going to stick to the LTS releases from now on since the new features just aren't compelling enough. Anyone else feel the same?
Summation 2
Do either of these support installing to a GPT partition?
Yes, but you need a BIOS that will boot from it. I have my Ubuntu 10.04 MythTV server installed with a GPT partition table, but I have to boot it from the other disk which has a DOS partition table because the BIOS can't find the GPT boot partition.
Um. Debian has for... a while now. So has Ubuntu. I've not had any problem with either. Just remember to leave a 1MB chunk at the bottom and set the bios_grub flag so grub has somewhere to install to.
I don't know anything about GPT, but every linux distro I've used will happily install to a single partition. IMHO there's no very strong reason to have separate swap and boot partitions and so on.
I really don't care for either Gnome Shell or Unity, so I'm going to give xfce a whirl for the next 6 months.
More specifically, you need a system that uses uEFI firmware in place of BIOS.
I tried using Unity while Natty was in beta and it caused me to jump to Fedora 15. Unity has always struck me as a train wreck of usability. Global menus that are always present... unless they're not, because it depends on the application. A dock that is always there on the left, unless it isn't in order to get out of the way. It's a little too busy, a little to buggy, and a little too inconsistent with itself. I know I'm in a minority right now but I think Gnome-Shell is a better approach. I'm not starting a flame war here, I know GS isn't readily configurable, has issues with network manager, and has countless other things that need to mature. I can't help but think Canonicals reach has exceeded their grasp.
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IMHO there's no very strong reason to have separate swap and boot partitions and so on.
There's at least one good reason to have separate / and /home partitions: Linux really, really hates bad blocks on the / partition, so if you use the entire disk for / then one bad block can stop you booting until you manually perform a long fsck to fix it.
While you're at it, ask the guy what is he doing on a linux powered website, inside a linux story thread, if nobody cares.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Not to mention that, although it's not needed often, it's great when you can wipe out all the system partitions but leave /home intact during a reinstall.
I learned a long time ago how helpful it could be to move My Documents on a Windows machine to a separate partition from the Windows and Program Files folders. Reinstalling is much easier without having to back up personal stuff first. Even though I use it a lot less in Linux old habits die hard and I always try to keep personal files separate from system files, no matter what OS I am using.
Off to fire up Virtual Box and try 'em both!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Only if you suck at arithmetic.
Almost makes me want to give Slackware a go.
Just as a heads up, if you are running an NVidia card that is not handled by either Nouveau or the nvidia-current, do not upgrade. There is a major bug where the wrong dependancies are called. I imagine now that Natty is out it will get fixed fairly quickly but just an FYI.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
"This is the only way for Slackware to remain relevant in 2011 onwards"
Slackware is still relevant. Plenty of people still use it. If you don't like the way its done then pick a different distro. I use it precisely because it doesn't use rpms or yum with all the attendent dependency hell. I can use slackpkg if I want but I'm perfectly happy with tar and administering my system manually thanks.
"I am sorry but the fact of the matter is user(non geek) don't want to run make clean install in 2011"
A non geek user would choose slackware in the first place. Slackware is FOR geeks and thats the way it should stay.
Um, Unity is just another move toward cloning the Mac interface:
1. Global menu? Mac has had that forever
2. Monochrome notifications on the top right? Check
3. Dock? Check (except its on the *side*!)
The only differences I see so far are annoying ones:
1. The global menu is not always active, so it is non obvious how to access it ... not sure I want to attempt it on my main system
2. On mouseover the global menu obscures the window title
3. The maximize behavior with the close/minimize/restore buttons in the panel is just ugly and unweidly
4. The dock hides and appears in a nonsensical, semi-random fashion. It should be always on or auto-hide -- "dodge windows" is just weird
5. It has the dash, which is completely useless once you get the apps you use pinned to the dock
6. It crashed like crazy when testing in VirtualBox
I got an upgrade notice this morning and for the first time in 3 years I declined.
I care, but mostly because the new unity interface is goddamn retarded. I installed the beta a couple weeks back. Gave it a couple hours to try and get used to it, and just couldn't. I could see it working well for a tablet, but for my laptop it's completely useless.
The only good thing is that they give you the option to switch back to gnome, but metacity seems to be completely broken for me, and hardware acceleration no longer works. As far as I'm concerned, Ubuntu 11.04 is a step backwards. Now I'm looking at either switching to XFCE for the interface, or maybe ditching Ubuntu entirely and going with a different flavor.
no. that might be 11.10.
Yeah, I had wondered why they moved from the nice colored network icons to a monochrome set in 10.04.
Reason: their designers all use Macs. No kidding.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'll wait a little and see if there are some major bugs then update. I'll also apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and get a GUI that works the way I want and not the other way around.
You can't boot from an encrypted partition, so there's a good reason to have a boot partition. A swap file can get fragmented, so there's a good reason to have a swap partition. As for "and so on..."
Filling up root can cause all sorts of undesired behavior, so it's best to keep the subdirectories that are most likely to grow on their own partition. That tends to be /usr, /var, and /home. You want to keep /home on another partition anyway, in case you need to reinstall the system without touching /home.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I realize there is a classic mode, but that's being jettisoned in 11.10. I've tried classic mode, and all it does is add an extra click to get to everything.
And when I said "the global menu is not always active" I should have said "not always visible". Most apps I played with use the global menu, but unless you spasmodically throw your cursor around the screen and accidentally hover over the panel you would never know there is a global menu in the first place.
For the record, I like the global menu on the Mac. The active window title and menu are always visible. The window title is bold and the text is never cut off or obscured by the menu. The apple menu is always in the top-left and has all the system-related commands I need. The window title itself is always a menu that has the preferences for that app and any commands related to app window management. Intuitive and, most importantly, *consistent*.
If you want to save real estate and truly target mobile devices, you need to be revolutionary, not evolutionary. Consider:
1. Why do apps even need menus? Can we achieve the same level of functionality without cascading drop down menus? The mobile industry has shown that this is possible. We just need to re-think the application interfaces.
2. What good is that silly ubuntu icon in the top left? This seems to be a non-functional throwback to the concept of a "Start" menu. It's like the apple menu, but it doesn't actually do anything useful. I can get to the dash by clicking on the icons in the launcher, pushing the super key, or going to the top-left corner. It's a waste of space that could be used for displaying the active window title so it doesn't have to be cut off by the menu.
3. Why can't the launcher be some kind of overlay so it doesn't have to fight with the other windows for real estate, sliding in and out depending on state of the active windows? For that matter, does the panel need to always be visible? Can't that be part of the overlay?
Gnome 3 did a better job with these issues, I think. I'm hoping Unity will end up being a New Coke / Coke Classic kind of thing to make people ecstatic to switch to Gnome 3 in 11.10.
Nobody is forcing you to use Unity. Sure it's the default, but the "classic" Gnome 2 desktop is still there.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I see what you did there...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
There were _some_ improvements. In general, Unity is stable, fast and adjustable, but it lacks polish. Its size, inability to provide decent management for absolute paths (I have more favored applications than allowed by Unity default space, and I like them in groups, just fine) make for quite bad user experience, even with improved System Settings menu.
I wish I could access my little app park the same way I can do that with System Settings...
Anyway, there are fallback options, without Unity. They work fine and provide missing functionality.
In general, system feels a little faster than 10.10.
Regards,
Ruemere
So, it seems obvious to point out that Linux doesn't need to use up all those partitions if that's not how he wants it.