9 Features We May See In Ubuntu 11.10

splitenz writes "Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' may still be occupying much of the Linux world's attention, but at last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, the next version of the free and open source Linux distribution began to take form. A number of decisions were reportedly made about Ubuntu 11.10, or 'Oneiric Ocelot,' at the conference, while numerous other questions are still being debated. ... Here's a roundup of what's been reported so far."

Comments

Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[rubycodez]

we sure hate it when 11.04's ssh client and sshd have all kinds of connection-breaking issues. That pisses me off way more than the half-baked Unity I can choose to not use.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Stormwatch]

Another radical GUI change couldn't make things any worse, could it?

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Trifthen]

I know one of the features is "me not using it anymore." 10.10 is probably the last version I'll ever use, and I've been looking at Mint or just going straight Debian.

I love apt, otherwise I'd consider an RPM based distro.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[butalearner]

Basing your choice of distro entirely on the package system it uses seems a bit short sighted to me. synaptic is definitely better than yumex, but not that much better.

Probably just a comfort thing, plus a bad experience several years ago. My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1 - then found Ubuntu way back before the alphabetical days...oh yes, Warty Warthog and it's nudie pictures. As a result of the distro-hopping I was a bit smarter so even though I hit dependency issues I was able to work around them. But the aversion to RPM distros stuck. Of course these days it hardly matters at all what you're using. I go back and forth between apt-get, aptitude, and pacman without any issues except for the occasional forgetting which system I'm on.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[gmhowell]

Another radical GUI change couldn't make things any worse, could it?

I've altered our bargain. Pray I don't alter it again.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using the "classic desktop" in Ubuntu 11.04. It's similar as the Gnome 2 desktop on Ubuntu 10.10.

I might consider Gnome3 later this year, but not the 3.0 version. The Ubuntu desktop is moving in the wrong direction. Do they have the resources to run their own projects alone over time? The other distros share resources and costs by making software together.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[martin-boundary]

It's not apt that's so great about Debian, it's the legions of volunteers who create the packages and make sure they work. That's a lot of work behind the scenes.

For me what makes Debian a great distro is this: it has a *huge* library of packages, and I know that if I apt-get install blah, then I'll have a usable blah installation right away, with sane configs so I can get work done.

Lots of other distros don't have the manpower to package a lot of software, so the choice is either more limited, or the quality suffers on a per package basis.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[David Gerard]

Unity is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[DrXym]

Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different

Unity is sound in theory, it's just the implementation which is crap. They took a shell primarily designed for tiny netbook screens and didn't put in the functionality that would make it useful on large screens. It's not configurable enough, the defaults are extremely annoying and the intent behind some functionality such as the bizarro Ubuntu expanding panel is just unfathomable. Click on the Ubuntu icon and you get a large panel with some huge icons. Click on the expand icon within this panel and it fills the full screen by making the icons supermassive. What the fuck is it for? The apps launching panel is also horrible, where before you had a nice hierarchical list of apps, now you must filter them to see what you want.

I hope for the next release they focus on a preference dialog that allows the position and hide behaviour of the dock to be configured in realtime, for the global menu to be disabled. As I said I think the concept is fine - GNOME 2 is looking long in the tooth and is wholly inappropriate for the transition to 3D and surface based windowing, but the implementation is just not there yet.

IMO GNOME 3.0 looks incredibly attractive by comparison. It's clear a lot of thought has gone into it. However it screws things up just as badly in its own way. Why is the dock on a separate screen that I have to do some Expose like stuff to access? Why can't I just drag and drop icons around like I could in the good old days and enjoy spatial and contextual functionality? Why did they see fit to remove (not just hide) the minimize / maximize buttons and force me to complete a drag operation on the window to the top where I used to just have to do a single click? Where are the configuration options?

I think GNOME 3.0 is more radical than Unity. I think both are on the right tracks to being useful desktops but its obvious they both need a lot of work. It would be nice if the projects would actually cooperate on things like infrastructure. People shouldn't be forced to take sides to have a useful desktop.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Zebedeu]

My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1

It's funny that you didn't have the technical expertise to fix dependency problems on Mandrake and went on to try Gentoo instead.
I did the same, except with Red Hat instead of Madrake. That didn't last long (two days -- the time it took to compile Gentoo's UI and realize actually using it was going to be a battle) :-)

I also ended up on Ubuntu, and fell in love with APT.
This Unity deal might make me change distros, but if it happens, I'm pretty sure it'll be to another APT-based one.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[DrXym]

That's because the classic desktop is GNOME 2.0. It's the failsafe if your hardware doesn't have proper 3D acceleration but you can make it the default desktop too. There is a Unity-2D package which works on older hardware but at this stage I think classic is probably the more useful environment.

I also welcome Ubuntu upgrading to GNOME 3.0 on the basis that it motivates Ubuntu & GNOME to share tech and will probably work out better in the end when dists dump X and go to Wayland or similar.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Gaygirlie]

There's only one feature that I'd like to request: that it doesn't screw up the installation anymore, requiring me to whip out LiveCD just to fix the system and get it bootable again.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[RoboJ1M]

Can I just take this opportunity to VERY LOUDLY AND ANNOYINGLY TELL EVERYONE HOW MUCH I LIKE THE NEW UNITY INTERFACE.
Just because the people who like Unity and it's design changes are quietly sitting at home just using their new OS doesn't mean there is universal hatred of 11.04
Remember that only the people who hate it get riled up enough to post smart arse comments on forums.
Not that the OP is bad, I've seen worse, but as every single post on this thread (except me) is by a hater then what difference does it make where I post?

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[thetoadwarrior]

yes let's never move forward and try something new. Innovation is for terrorists and communists.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Haeleth]

synaptic is definitely better than yumex, but not that much better.

That's because they both suck. Yumex sucks more, though. The only good package management UI I've ever found is aptitude, and it is the only thing I miss since moving to Fedora. All the Yum frontends I've found share the same fundamental problem: they don't even think about performing dependency resolution until you've finished choosing packages and hit "Go". Aptitude is constantly resolving dependencies as you go, warning about conflicts and alerting you when that one innocuous-looking package is going to pull in an entire desktop environment you don't use.

(As for PackageKit, the less said about that the better. Adding yet another layer with even fewer features and a whole load of questionable design decisions of its own does not make Linux better.)

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Dystopian Rebel]

I like Linux Mint. It's designers aren't chasing a "New UI Paradigm", they just want better usability.

I like Gnome 2 and Metacity (with the "reduced resources" setting), though. If Linux Mint follows Ubuntu into New UI Paradigm Hell, I will probably go with Lubuntu. I don't have as much time as I used to for setting up computers with my UI preferences.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[DrXym]

In the past GNOME has offered a fair and sensible set of configuration options and relegated the remainder off to an advanced config tool like GConf. This is the way it should be as opposed to KDE which throws the kitchen sink at you and the simple settings get lost amongst a bunch of esoteric ones.

In GNOME 3, even things like the default font are not configurable as are some of the other behaviours in the shell that should be.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Britz]

I personally use Debian for servers and my personal desktop and it IS awsome. Though you have to know what you are doing. I am using apt-pinning to get some recent packages. KDE packages in stable have numerous bugs that are fixed in the current KDE for example and I would like to pull in the KDE from experimental and so far have not been able to, because apt pinning sounds better than it sometimes works.

If you want fresh stuff you can always use Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE) or Lubuntu (LXDE).

That being said, there are numerous tutorials on the web on how to use either Gnome2 or Gnome3 with the default Gnome Shell instead of Unity on Ubuntu Natty. So where is your problem?

If enough people end up liking the default Gnome3 shell they might even create an Ubuntu spin of their own.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[DuckDodgers]

You might like Aptosid, it's based on Debian unstable. You have to use command prompts for your software updates, so that can be annoying, but other than that it's excellent.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[tehcyder]

Another radical GUI change couldn't make things any worse, could it?

Two words: Microsoft Bob

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[DrXym]

Mac and Windows offer considerably more config options than either Unity or GNOME 3.0. In both you can choose where your dock goes and also it's hide / show behaviour. Apple actually received a heap of criticism for its first incarnations of the dock and will-it/won't-it spatial behaviour and fixed it. It seems these two OS X wannabes didn't get the memo and are repeating the exact same mistakes.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[martguy]

I guess I'm part of the minority that actually likes the new Unity desktop. I'm not saying it's perfect, but for the last 10 years or so, no one has addressed the fact that monitors are rectangles, not squares. Anything at the top or bottom of the screen is stealing valuable vertical space, and the menubars need to move to the side. What have Windows and Apple done about this for the last 10 years? Nothing. Gnome got their nose out of joint when Ubuntu suggested the idea of a Unity-style interface, and now look at their interface. It's almost an exact copy! Everyone will have a vertical sidebar of some sort within a couple of years. Ubuntu is just making the (semi-painful) transition first.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[GameboyRMH]

Going to Debian myself. I use whichever distro needs the least customization to make a good desktop OS, and Ubuntu isn't it anymore.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[doti]

this

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[GameboyRMH]

The only good package management UI I've ever found is aptitude

Ubuntu's old add/remove GUI was nice, before they went to the ultra-dumbed-down Ubuntu Software Center that forces you to install software serially.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Omestes]

I futzed around with Gnome Shell and Unity, and moved on to OpenSuse with KDE. I can't stand the fact that I can't customize my GUI anymore. The Gnome team's comments on this make Apple seem open and egalitarian. They sound down right arrogant about "making it right, so no one should change it, since we know better". Both Unity and Gnome Shell are less customization than OS X now. Hell, you have to wait 6 months to a year, with Gnome Shell, just to be allowed to change your screensaver. While KDE's screensaver abilities are continually broken, they at least pretend that you can modify them and add new ones.

Unity is just ugly, clunky, and completely breaks how I want to use my computer. Yes, "simplicity" is nice, but its now the only way to do things. Forcing it down my throat is annoying. I could be simplistically "task oriented" in Gnome 2, if I chose to be. If I wanted to be complex and cluttered, that was perfectly fine too.

On the whole I like Gnome Shell better. KDE annoys the hell out of me, but so far its better, their team doesn't seem quite as tyrannical about how I "should" use my PC. If the Gnome team ever decides I should be permitted to customize their meisterwerk to fit my aesthetics and work flow, I'll give it another chance. As for Unity, if I ever decide I want to use it, I'll dust off my old Mac and use it instead since Apple at least took the same philosophy and made it work (and not look dog ugly).

I think Canonical's days might be numbered, personally. I see the Debian flavor of Mint winning as the popular, new user friendly, distribution. Ubuntu might run off of its popular capital for a bit, but I don't see them really winning on design merits anymore.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[kimhanse]

That could be a problem with an overzealous firewall/IDS, see http://schplurtz.free.fr/wiki/envrac/reseau-bizbiz-ssh

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNOME 3 buttons are hidden, not removed. It's a quick one-line fix in gconf to bring them back again, and in any ordering/positioning you want.

I was using GNOME 3 on Ubuntu 10.10 and now I'm using Unity on 11.04, and I have to agree that as of now GNOME 3 is the superior interface.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Knuckles]

+1 from me, I did this in the previous Unity topic on /.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Joe Jay Bee]

You've posted the same comment more or less in virtually every GNOME 3 thread. While it was amusing the first time, after the fifth or six time it's just sad. Please, stop.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Grishnakh]

While you certainly have the right to have a screensaver if you really want, I've abandoned the entire idea, as it's no longer needed for anything, and is just a throwback to the days of the CRT. With today's LCD monitors, burn-in doesn't exist, so there's no reason to have a screensaver. Moreover, a modern LCD monitor comes out of sleep mode very, very quickly (again, unlike the old CRTs), so there's no reason to bother with a screensaver. Instead, I just set my system to turn off the monitors after 20 minutes, and that's it.

Again, as I'm not a Gnome architect who thinks he knows better than everyone else, I have no problem with KDE keeping screensavers there, but they're easily disabled if you're like me and don't want to bother with them.

I'm not so sure about Mint, however. AFAICT, they just add a little refinement to Ubuntu, and don't have a whole lot of manpower themselves. But you're right, Canonical's days are probably numbered unless they get their heads out of their asses.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Omestes]

While you certainly have the right to have a screensaver if you really want, I've abandoned the entire idea, as it's no longer needed for anything, and is just a throwback to the days of the CRT.

I know that they really aren't technically necessary, I just like them. On my main PC I have all my photos showing as a screensaver, and sometimes I sit in a big comfy chair on the other side of the room and zone out to it. On my smaller laptop I used to have the Xscreensaver "photo mosiac" going, and would often just stare at it when I was pondering work and working through ideas. On my HTPC/Media center box, I have all my album art and disc covers cycling, for much the same effect. On my old Mac I used the "flip clock" screensaver, since the room it was in didn't have any time telling devices in ready view (that and it was pretty good looking too, there is nothing wrong with aesthetics, after-all)

I also use the screensaver as a "sleep timer", since when my monitor falls asleep I know that I have around an hour before my box suspends. I suppose this knowledge isn't terribly useful, but I like to have it.

I find it odd though, that none of the three major Linux environments have deemed it necessary to support the feature, even if it is one of the most common things people fiddle with. Linux used to be for people who enjoyed endless tinkering and customization, now it seems its falling trap to the "get things done" problem, where everything needs to be a mere, joyless, appliance. Yes, GUI is seen as superfluous in the more gung-ho bits of the community, but that never stopped Gnome and KDE from being vastly more tweakable than Windows or OS X. Now we have a reversal.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Grishnakh]

I know that they really aren't technically necessary, I just like them.

Yes, that's exactly why I was careful to say that you have the right to have these things if you want them. Everyone has different preferences, and different ways of working, so just because I don't care for screensavers any more (I have my desktop background in KDE set to rotate through my photo collection) doesn't mean I should tell you that you don't need them any more. However, that's exactly the kind of mentality the Gnome people have. I might not care about screensavers, but I do want my minimize button, and there's other things I'd like to be able to configure.

Linux used to be for people who enjoyed endless tinkering and customization, now it seems its falling trap to the "get things done" problem, where everything needs to be a mere, joyless, appliance. Yes, GUI is seen as superfluous in the more gung-ho bits of the community, but that never stopped Gnome and KDE from being vastly more tweakable than Windows or OS X. Now we have a reversal.

Yes, this worries me a lot too. I'm not sure what the deal is, but whereas back in the 90s and early 2000s, it seems like Linux people loved to be able to hack and customize anything on their systems, now it seems like they want an appliance. Maybe it's a victim of its own success, and hordes of appliance-lovers have gathered to it, outnumbering the customizers. I would have thought this would cause a giant boost in popularity for KDE, at least among the die-hard Linux customizing type people, but I haven't seen that much of it. KDE, after all, still lets you customize it greatly (though honestly, it could still use a lot of work; I tried to set it in 4.6 so the titlebars of active windows would be bright green, and never was able to figure out how to get that to work), unlike Gnome, which appears to be doing its best to remove all configurability whatsoever.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Bitmanhome]

Settle down, it's still new to four of us.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[lennier]

yes let's never move forward and try something new.

Sometimes, when you take something which is already working just fine and change it in random and bizarre ways, the direction you move isn't "forward".

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Billly Gates]

Ubuntu is not real stable like a traditional Unix and caters more to the eye candy crowd.

Try Fedora? It is stable enough like a real unix yet not very out of date. One issue is like Unity is that it comes with the crappy Gnome-shell. I use the outdated Fedora 14 in virtualbox from Windows 7.

It seems Linux steal shines best in the server room. You can install its role as a server very quickly with Anaconda which is awesome.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[Omestes]

would have thought this would cause a giant boost in popularity for KDE, at least among the die-hard Linux customizing type people, but I haven't seen that much of it. KDE, after all, still lets you customize it greatly (though honestly, it could still use a lot of work; I tried to set it in 4.6 so the titlebars of active windows would be bright green, and never was able to figure out how to get that to work), unlike Gnome, which appears to be doing its best to remove all configurability whatsoever.

I've pretty much moved on to 100% KDE now, as well. I like KDE, but it often frustrates me on a low level, it works but sometimes things could work just a bit better. I think most of the people who are alienated by Gnome Shell and Unity moved to XFCE and LXDE. I tried to use them, via Xubuntu, but it was too much like Gnome, so when it stopped being 100% Gnome-like I got annoyed. Better to move onto something truly different, I suppose. I've been on the verge, though, of switching over to mostly KDE for awhile, OpenSuse's implementation is very seductive. Once I got beyond apt, and realized that RPM wasn't completely evil (just mostly), I get along fine with my obscene amount of customization (but still the broken screensaver functionality).

The one down side, I've had this one installation for over a month now, and still haven't tweaked it quite to my liking. Which on Gnome would have been done within an hour or so. Go KDE!

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[thetoadwarrior]

True and sometimes you can take something that worked perfectly and completely change it and improve it.

Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change!

[danieltdp]

It would have been nice if users had the option to click on something called "Ubuntu Classic Desktop" at the login screen ... Oh. wait...

Killer App?

[TheStonepedo]

Ubuntu has gone soft. Its recent changes pushed me back to Debian. Why does it have to be targeted at social media, online music sales, etc.? Unless it has something to give that isn't better-known on another platform, there's no incentive for users to switch.
TFA is slashdotted or I'd cross my fingers hoping for just that feature.

Re:Killer App?

[0100010001010011]

Same here. I was locked to 10.04 because that was the last XBMC Live that worked well. Except because of Ubuntu's non-rolling update nature I was stuck at everything that came with 10.04 unless I started adding special repositories.

With Debian. I choose to run Sid, Testing, Stable. Stuff gets pushed forward all the time. Personally I run Sid (not experimental) and I've almost never had a problem.

My girlfriend may get introduced to XFCE because she's not having a fun time with Unity.
Day 1) Oh, it looks so Mac Like
Day 2) It Doesn't work like your Mac, how do I make it go away.

Re:Killer App?

[MrEricSir]

Unless it has something to give that isn't better-known on another platform, there's no incentive for users to switch.

But that's just the thing; if it's on Ubuntu it's free/open software, and therefore will be on other distros if not other platforms, if not now then eventually. The very idea of a "killer app" for Ubuntu is in many ways contrary to the idea of free/open software because such software can always be modified, forked, and/or ported.

Re:Killer App?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Still Using 9.10 here, and considering moving to Debian given the direction of Ubuntu. Some of the handful of recent converts I know stick with 9.10 because it Just Works(TM). The others who installed the 10.xx versions are suffering from stability bugs and inconsistent behaviors related to managing multiple user management (among other things) as well as those awful default Mac-style window controls which were totally unnecessary. (the ones I know who have almost always used Linux use RPM distros because it's what they work with, and/or window managers like Enlightenment because that's what they're coding).

Hey, Shuttleworth - how about a little less Steve Jobs in the next distro, huh?

Re:Killer App?

[Shark]

Well, I wouldn't fault Ubuntu for trying to appeal to the masses. I think their aim is linux on the desktop. I don't use Ubuntu, I also don't use Facebook or social media beyond the occasional Slashdot post (and that's hardly social). The reality is that the masses do.

I'm fine with Ubuntu turning into 'Linux for people who don't care that it's Linux'. There's plenty of choices for people who know what they're doing otherwise and it grows the market, which means that hardware vendors pay a tad (not much) more attention to the fact that linux exists and sales can be made by supporting it, etc.

Re:Killer App?

[DadLeopard]

Well, at least it worked for her! I'd have been willing to give it a try, BUT, they broke the Nvidia Driver I need to use it at all! Tried the Classic and it was full of bugs and glitches like disappearing and reappearing window decorations, and many other things! Luckily I have a separate /home partition, with that and a 10.10 CD, I got back up and running again! Have been trying Xubuntu 11.04 out and it works pretty well, but I miss some of the things that are in Ubuntu 10.10 by default, plus the ability to customize things there!

Re:Killer App?

[Compaqt]

Isn't the latest Debian Squeeze (6.0)? Why would you run Sid? (An Ubuntu user looking to get into Debian).

Also, on debian.org, it says (somewhere) that stuff is pushed into testing automatically (according to some given criteria), therefore they don't recommend it as a distribution. Comments?

Re:Killer App?

[Nerdfest]

As long as I can still install and configure what I want, I can deal with it. I don't like Unity much, partly because there's very little that can be changed and the OS X style global menus annoy me to no end, but mostly because it's extremely buggy. Compiz crashes or behaves poorly frequently, some panel widgets stopped working, and my wireless card is slow and flakey. I've developed a certain amount of trust for Canonical ... my previous upgrades have all been relatively trouble free, but 11.04 really wasn't ready for release. Even the fonts in the unity title bar are fuzzy and poorly rendered. Perhaps it's time to stop the 6 month release cycle when the product is really not ready.

Re:Killer App?

[O('_')O_Bush]

Well, it's stupidly easy to switch out of Unity and forget about it. When you log in (once) change from Unity to classic in one of the log-in options. Tada, better Ubuntu.

Truly though, the only problem that I've had with 11.04 that wasn't present in 10.10 is that Google Desktop doesn't search as efficiently, do to what I suppose is some indexing issue. Nothing that would cause me to revert back a release.

Re:Killer App?

[cwebster]

The release version is frozen in time, essentially. The only thing that a named release will get is security and some other important updates. As for stable, testing, and sid:

stable always points to the current named release (today squeeze, later something else). When the new release is released, if you are running stable, an apt-get dist-upgrade will pull down the new release.

New package versions are pushed into sid. Sid can be frustrating because you might update to a package with broken dependancies or other issues that will not install. Give it a few days and it'll probably be fixed.

After some period of time in Sid, those packages move to testing. Testing is where I run, as it is continually updated and I have not observed many instances of breakage. When its time for a release, testing goes through a freeze and then becomes stable. Or something like that.

If you want stability, run stable.
If you want cutting edge, run sid.
If you want a reasonable mix of both, run testing.

Re:Killer App?

[oakgrove]

Sid, i.e., unstable is the bleeding edge rolling release. For historical reasons, it actually tends to break less than testing which is called Wheezy right now. While Squeeze is indeed the latest stable release, it is frozen and will only get security updates until Wheezy becomes the new stable thus repeating the cycle. Debian usually runs on an eighteen to twenty four month cycle but it's really an Id-esque "it's done when it's done" kind of release pattern. The bottom line is, if you want traditional rock solid Debian stability, you go with stable which right now is called Squeeze. If you want a still relatively stable system that is constantly updated, go for Sid bearing in mind that you can't just download a Sid CD. You have to get stable or testing and upgrade it. I hope I haven't been unclear.

Re:Killer App?

[0100010001010011]

Sid is always "Unstable". (Like in the Movie).
"Unstable" (IMHO) has always been 'more' stable and newer than any Ubuntu release. As time rolls on each Ubuntu release gets farther and farther out of date while Sid continually gets updates from experimental.

By time stuff makes it into Stable, it's that STABLE. People that run high end websites would stick to stable. For my desktop, Unstable or Testing is just fine. And if something doesn't work, you can easily roll back a single package to testing or so with the '-t' flag.

Re:Killer App?

[Compaqt]

Inconsistency and hypocrisy are what kill me.

Mark Shuttleworth pushed through the left-side window control buttons change by using the excuse of "less mouse movement" (which is ridiculous since the scrollbar is on the right side, so you're often on the right side).

Then he goes and puts the menu all the way on the top of the screen. How much mouse movement does that take? And what does it do for keyboard control?

Re:Killer App?

[kvvbassboy]

Actually, Debian recommends running Sid over Testing, simply because bug fixes could potentially take longer to get into testing.

From personal experience, for a normal user I would recommend Sid too, because you get the latest software, and breakages happen very rarely.

Re:Killer App?

[Risen888]

Well, it's stupidly easy to switch out of Unity and forget about it.

Indeed it is.

Re:Killer App?

[Nerdfest]

Instead of the top global menu, I've been thinking about a 'better' way. Have the menu where it normally is on each window, but only show it on a 'hover' (or click for touchscreens) over the title bar. Saves space, but puts it more easily in reach. I think I could deal with that a lot more readily. It could be left configurable to always show as well.

Re:Killer App?

[iggymanz]

yeah, but the next release there won't be a non-sucky alternative. best take the next 5.5 months to pick your next distro.

Plus, other major things are broken with 11.04, if you have certain routers or NAT devices, the ssh/sshd/ssl combination they put out will bite you in the ass. Spend a couple hours compiling a proper replacement from source and putting in the upstart and /etc/init.d - rc.d files and you might get cranky.

Re:Killer App?

[Osgeld]

who uses the scroll bar since the wheel mouse became standard over a decade ago?

our UPS rep came in today to fiddle with my departments station, it has no wheel mouse and I had to actually point out the scroll bar to him

Re:Killer App?

[wrook]

Well, it's stupidly easy to switch out of Unity and forget about it. When you log in (once) change from Unity to classic in one of the log-in options. Tada, better Ubuntu.

For those that like to feel like they are in control, run the Compiz Settting Manager (ccsm) and unclick the Unity plugin. Unity is then gone. You can run gnome-panel, or whatever the heck you want. What would be nicer is to have "Unity" as an option in the Appearances settings application, but they seem to have made it difficult to find that application...

The more I think about it, though, the more I find that Ubuntu really isn't for me. Originally I switched because I wanted a non-rolling distribution with fairly frequent releases. I felt that it didn't matter how it was set up because I would just set it up for myself anyway. But Ubuntu is increasingly making it difficult to choose a different setup than they like. I think this is fair. They are focused on creating a brand and want a single identifiable look and feel for people who want an "Ubuntu computer". But I'm not the customer they want and I think it might be time to move somewhere else (maybe back to Debian -- starting to miss the rolling updates).

Re:Killer App?

[icebraining]

Sid continually gets updates from experimental.

Nitpick: Most updates go to Sid directly, experimental is more for dangerous stuff, like major upgrades (Firefox 4, Gnome 3, etc).
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/resources.html#experimental

Re:Killer App?

[Frater 219]

The easiest place to reach with the mouse is the current position. The second easiest is the four corners of the screen. The third easiest are the four sides of the screen. The hardest place is a square in the middle of the screen. Ancient UI guidelines are still relevant today.

Yep. This a corollary of Fitts's Law and while it's often associated with the design of the Macintosh menu bar, the underlying research dates to 1954, thirty years before the Mac.

Sadly, it hasn't been well learned on a lot of systems. Although Windows and Ubuntu both put a useful menu in a corner, few systems but the Mac make really effective use of the screen edge. Windows and many Linux desktops occupy much of one whole screen edge with a rarely used application switcher; but most users switch applications by pointing and clicking, or using keyboard shortcuts like Alt-Tab.

One big win that a lot of systems have benefited from, though, is contextual menus, which take advantage of the current position.

Re:Killer App?

[nappingcracker]

They moved the buttons to the left so that per-window indicators can be used on the right. The keyboard window menu still work (Alt + whatever). The "why we did this" seems to change but AFAIK aptana + Apple OS are the reasons for the button change.

Re:Killer App?

[smash]

Pretty much this. Linux will never get significant hardware driver/vendor support unless it has significant market share.

However, one Linux does not fit all. Trying to make a single distribution of it fit everyone is never going to work. Ubuntu fulfills a niche; those users out there who don't CARE whether its Linux (or Windows, or anything else for that matter). They don't CARE whether or not the UI is theme-able. They don't care to be configuring every aspect of their system.

They want something they can just boot up, log in to (optionally) and just use to connect with people, read their email, watch funny cat videos and pay their bills.

However, if that is built on top of Linux and gains significant share, there's nothing to stop the community taking the "good" (or perhaps, "useful" is a better word) parts and making a more focused network tech of programming nerd distribution out of it for those who want more control.

If Ubuntu was to get 50 million (or some other large number of) users, that would be an awesome win for everyone else in the Linux community, due to the increased level of hardware vendor driver support for the underlying kernel.

Re:Killer App?

[Compaqt]

Great idea, now that's actually might be usable.

Again, it would be great for a netbook, but not really needed for a desktop, where you both have space, and are doing serious work.

Of course, the whole global menu thing makes sense for netbooks, because you barely have space to have 1 application maximized.

Continuing to shake my head at where Mark Shuttleworth thinks he's going.

Re:Killer App?

[smash]

"Unstable" in debian terms has never been about crashes. Its "unstable" in the sense that your platform that you installed this morning on one machine may not actually be the same as the machine you install this afternoon (assuming you're pulling packages with APT).

And yes, if you're willing to live with occasional short term breakage on your desktop, unstable is just fine and always has been.

If you're running a server, you better be prepared to get your hands dirty (or live with downtime until the SNAFU is fixed) when it all goes horribly wrong if/when you happen to be updating.

Re:Killer App?

[maxwell demon]

who uses the scroll bar since the wheel mouse became standard over a decade ago?

I do. I also use the mouse wheel, but the mouse wheel is useful only for scrolling small amounts. If you want to move a large amount, the scrollbar is vastly better than the mouse wheel.

Re:Killer App?

[jedidiah]

Yes. The "well this is only for drooling morons and not really for you" argument only goes so far. Stuff still needs to be useful and usable even for the drooling moron crowd. Unity isn't that. It's someone's HID fetish run amok with perhaps a little unwarranted Apple worship thrown in for good measure.

Re:Killer App?

[Haeleth]

I think their aim is linux on the desktop.

No, their aim is Ubuntu on the desktop. They would ditch the Linux kernel in a flash if they thought switching to something else would better match their vision.

Re:Killer App?

[hellop2]

Dunno. I run Kubuntu. A bar at the top and the bottom? Sorry, but you don't have to be a genius to see the flaw there.

Re:Killer App?

[canistel]

Dude... scrollbars are visual only; if you're still dragging that thing around you're doing it wrong. Any mouse / trackpad built in this century have support for scrolling built right in.

Re:Killer App?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"They would ditch the Linux kernel in a flash if they thought switching to something else would better match their vision."

I believe you are correct - they've already made sure to scrub the ubuntu.com website of all references to "Linux" as far as I can tell. (Is it a case of "Linux is our friend, but we don't want to be seen in public with it?")

Re:Killer App?

[shish]

Linux is ubuntu's friend, but the users don't care; and why fill marketing materials with details that the users don't care about? While many distros have chosen to emphasise the open-source philosophy, ubuntu emphasises making users happy; IMO both are valid approaches, and indeed both must exist for either to succeed

lightdm is in natty but doesn't work

[drinkypoo]

boo I say, boo

at least it didn't work here, yes I installed a theme

chromium

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the idea to replace Firefox with Chromium. How anyone can surf the web without NoScript?

Re:chromium

[websitebroke]

Using NotScript? NoScript is nicer, but NotScript does mostly the same thing.

Re:chromium

[pspahn]

How anyone can surf the web without NoScript

I tried using script blocking tools before. I found it more of a hassle to constantly white-list web sites where I want javascript running.

Re:chromium

[RobbieThe1st]

So set it to block from third-party sites and run with everything else? That'll speed up your browing a bit, increase your safety too, and you won't have to mess with it.

Alternately, I've gone with going between run scripts globally and block - Sometimes I just want to use it, sometimes I /don't/ want ths JS functionality.

Re:chromium

[smash]

If your browser doesn't slow to a crawl and have the UI lock up when a dodgy script runs (like uh... chromium doesn't) then you don't really need to block scripts explicitly.

Re:chromium

[ChrisMaple]

I was ready to use Chromium until I read the terms of use. Essentially, the user loses control of his computer.

This is news?

[msobkow]

Man, I can't believe I waited longer for the ads to load than to read the so-called article.

Ad sponsored fluff piece. This was worth mentioning on Slashdot?

I have an idea!

[atomicbutterfly]

Fix Unity. If you're not going to have GNOME 2 as a selectable option in future distros, at least work to make Unity a bug-free and far more configurable experience. Provide an easy to find and select option (i.e. not a shell command) to disable the global menu for those of us who prefer a traditional menuing system.

Oh who am I kidding. Mark has gone on record stating how he doesn't like having too options because it increases the number of permutations in which something could go wrong, plus he wants Unity to look the same on all desktops (a consistent look). But hell, Windows 7 has the ability to dock the superbar on any side of the desktop, and Unity doesn't. How did they miss that feature?

Re:I have an idea!

[Missing.Matter]

But hell, Windows 7 has the ability to dock the superbar on any side of the desktop, and Unity doesn't. How did they miss that feature?

They didn't miss that feature; according to Shuttleworth a configurable launcher does not fit in with their "broader design goals" and they have no plans to make it configurable in the future.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2

Re:I have an idea!

[atomicbutterfly]

Well that just reaffirms my concerns then. Ubuntu's UI is in some areas far less configurable than Windows 7.

I suppose there's a reason the Ubuntu web site barely mentions the word "Linux". The traditional benefit of everything being configurable in Linux does not translate to Ubuntu's philosophy, even if there's very little reason why it should not. Maybe Canonical just doesn't have the manpower/skill?

Re:I have an idea!

[getto man d]

Mark has gone on record stating how he doesn't like having too options...

Too many options is why I was drawn to Linux in the first place.

sigh

Re:I have an idea!

[thegarbz]

Well that just reaffirms my concerns then. Ubuntu's UI is in some areas far less configurable than Windows 7.

Isn't that exactly why people like OSX?

A configurable user experience makes for a very difficult to learn system when everyone's looks different and everyone shows you a different way of doing something.

Re:I have an idea!

[Risen888]

Isn't that exactly why people like OSX?

It's exactly why I hate OSX.

Re:I have an idea!

[wrook]

I just switched to Natty yesterday and gave Unity a whirl. Like you say, I really don't think it's ready yet. But I was very pleased to discover that it's a Compiz plugin, so it was really easy to disable. On thinking about it, I think two fairly simple things could make Unity a friendly player in the desktop environment world:

1) Split it up into two plugins: one for the menu thingy at the top and one for the launcher at the side.

2) Don't make dependencies with other plugins that I might not want to use (like the viewport switcher: I like my cube desktop!!! :-) )

I actually like the menu thingy and would use it in preference to gnome-panel if I could, but I don't like the launcher (Docky is better). Also the app search/menu is horrible and I would *really* like to get access to the normal Debian menu list somehow. But there are some good ideas hiding in there. IMHO, making Unity a compiz plugin is exactly the right thing to do, but execution is lacking. I'm more than half tempted to start writing some patches. I wonder how accepting they are about outside help... Or possibly just write my own menu/panel.

Re:I have an idea!

[The Dawn Of Time]

But there are sooooo many other Linux distributions you can choose. This particular distribution isn't aiming to be everything to everyone, it's aiming to be a lot of things for a lot of people. Allowing total configurability tends to not be helpful in achieving that goal.

Re:I have an idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that exactly why people like OSX?

It's exactly why I hate OSX.

You're not thinking outside the box hard enough! Once you're outside the box, you'll see how great it is when everything is the same.

Re:I have an idea!

[Jahava]

Well that just reaffirms my concerns then. Ubuntu's UI is in some areas far less configurable than Windows 7.

I suppose there's a reason the Ubuntu web site barely mentions the word "Linux". The traditional benefit of everything being configurable in Linux does not translate to Ubuntu's philosophy, even if there's very little reason why it should not. Maybe Canonical just doesn't have the manpower/skill?

If you want configurability, you will not find it in Ubuntu, old or new. Neither GNOME nor Unity are highly-configurable user experiences. Granted, GNOME is more configurable than Unity...

No, for the Linux desktop, KDE wins the gold for configurability and integration. If you like the rest of what Ubuntu has to offer (bleeding-edge packages, Debian-based repository, etc.), use Kubuntu, an Ubuntu distribution that defaults to the kubuntu-desktop package instead of the ubuntu-desktop one. If you want a heavyweight desktop environment, the only reason to use GNOME or Unity over KDE is a simplified streamlined experience.

Re:I have an idea!

[smash]

Ubuntu is not targeted at you, nor people like you. You're already a linux user, whether or not ubuntu exists or not.

Its targeted at the other 95% of the population who don't even know or care what Linux is.

Ubuntu gaining more users is a good thing for Linux market share (and thus, leverage regarding hardware support) whether or not you personally end up using it or not. Ubuntu attracting less technical users doesn't mean the rest of the Linux world "loses".

Re:I have an idea!

[atomicbutterfly]

But there are sooooo many other Linux distributions you can choose. This particular distribution isn't aiming to be everything to everyone, it's aiming to be a lot of things for a lot of people. Allowing total configurability tends to not be helpful in achieving that goal.

Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. That comparison might sound bad until you realize that it also means Ubuntu has the greatest attention of all Linux distros, which means you'll find troubleshooting and information tailored to it far more than other distros. Heck, I've seen software (not on the repos) with a seperate download link for Windows, OS X and "Ubuntu" (not Linux, Ubuntu, even though it's a straight .deb file).

That focus and attention translated into more vendor and hardware support, and hopefully better defaults and polish, a goal achieved with varying levels in other distros. At this point in my life I want to be able to use Linux without having to deal with 90's era problems, which is why I'd like to still use Ubuntu as a power user. The way things are going though, I'm not sure how feasible that is without a lot of post-install tweaking.

Re:I have an idea!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Except I don't like Ubuntu for bleeding-edge. I like Ubuntu for being reasonably up-to-date (that is, not years out of date, as Debian seemed to be), but also relatively stable, since it's not on a rolling-release model. I like having a modern web browser so I can keep up with the Internet, modern eye candy to impress friends with, modern reverse-engineered clients (say, IM clients) to keep up with what people are doing with their networks, and I like being able to patch absolutely everything all the time for security, and expect no major breakage, or even time wasted looking at a diff between old and new config files, except when I have a week off from work and school.

Even then, I'd appreciate it if it was somewhat more stable. I tend to grab new releases at least a few weeks if not a few months after they come out, and I still find major functionality will just disappear, and I'll have to enable some random PPA to get it back.

And by the way, if you're a Kubuntu or KDE developer, and you think this way, that explains a lot. Generally the first part of my Kubuntu setup to start smelling like "bleeding-edge" and otherwise ruining my whole day is KDE. For that matter, Kubuntu has a reputation for being among the worst in terms of packaging KDE.

Re:I have an idea!

[gl4ss]

canonical is a branding company, not a tech development company.

because it's less configurable, it's bigger news when they clone a feature from windows(that might have been available on linux all along for a longer time than on default windows, but because ubuntu is aimed at "newbies" it seemingly wouldn't matter that their pr is aimed at.. actually I don't know who they're aiming with it, ui designers who aren't willing to code? that's how it seems. oh and inexperienced people, but why would those be reading their press stuff in the first place?).

the features I would have been looking for in this feature list would have included more of things like "flash works with video acceleration on more machines out of the box" and such stuff, you know, actual fixes, not "we preconfigured alt-tab to work like it should".

Re:I have an idea!

[smash]

UI customizability or function (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with why i like OS X.

So many seem to get caught up in what OS X looks like, but its what's underneath that makes it work for me. Shit like the services menu, applescript, automator, and hardware that i don't have to fuck with to make work.

If anything, I actually dislike a lot of aspects of the Apple UI (fucking window resizing!!!), but there's a lot to like underneath.

Re:I have an idea!

[gbjbaanb]

Dear Mark, as you don't like too many options, we've decided to help you out by not giving you the option to provide us with lots of UI configurability. Job done :)

Re:I have an idea!

[Risen888]

What are you sorry for? I don't care.

Re:I have an idea!

[Risen888]

What you say may well be true. I will never know, for two reasons:

1. The UI is too atrocious for me to get past. There, I said it.
2. It's non-free (which you may or may not care about, but I do).

Does that make me shallow? I don't think so. It just means we have different priorities, and that's fine.

Re:I have an idea!

[smash]

That's a shame, because I think the open source world could learn a lot from the way OS X does various things - beyond trying to copy the surface UI details like gnome seems to. I'm talking about systemwide automation tools like automator, applescript, etc. Application bundles. Various other small things that all add up.

1. Yes, the UI can be painful in some areas, but overall its no better/worse than Linux in my opinion, with its proliferation of a million different toolkits and UI paradigms. The problem with the linux UI is that no one seems to be able to decide on any sort of standard toolkit. So everything looks and behaves slightly differently. Sure, i can deal with it, but its irritating
2. I used to care - I ran desktop Linux as my primary work OS (I'm a network admin type) between 1996 and 2003. But now I'm more concerned about open standards (for interoperability) than explicitly free software. Apple use open standards for their stuff - thats good enough for me. If the product is decent then I'm willing to pay for polish.

If Linux works for you, great. I use it from time to time, also - and my PC hardware is likely to end up running either Linux or FreeBSD when its no longer capable of 3d gaming as well.

Re:I have an idea!

[smash]

oh awesome, OL tags are broken...

Re:I have an idea!

[Risen888]

automator, applescript

Can you give me a bird's eye view of what those are? I'm uninformed.

Application bundles

I am informed about this. It's just not as good as repositories and shared libraries. It's not.

its proliferation of a million different toolkits

By a million, you surely mean two.

Switch to a DVD

[CastrTroy]

It's 2011. There's no reason they shouldn't switch to a DVD release. TFA said they might have to drop LibreOffice, or go with 2 CDs, or a DVD. I say stick with a single DVD image. That doesn't mean they have to fill up the full 4 GB, but it gives them quite a bit more room to play with. 2 CDs would be inconvenient. Also, who doesn't have a DVD burner these days.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[zonky]

My current ubuntu device doesn't even have an optical drive....

Re:Switch to a DVD

[WeatherGod]

Ditto to this. Ubuntu really got my attention originally by making it dead easy to set up a USB stick with a live image. This was perfect for my netbook.

Also, for the GP, I think they are heading towards DVD. I have noticed a couple of DVD images for natty on their cdimages website.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[cwebster]

Then you can probably just load it onto an 8 gig USB memory stick which is even more storage than a DVD!

Re:Switch to a DVD

[Just Some Guy]

Ditto to this. Ubuntu really got my attention originally by making it dead easy to set up a USB stick with a live image.

Only if you already have Ubuntu up and running. Otherwise it's a complete bitch that makes me want to throw things. Fun situation: you have an Ubuntu netbook with no optical drive, an old PPC Mac desktop, and a FreeBSD server. The netbook hard drive dies and you replace it. Pop quiz; think quick! How do you use OS X or FreeBSD to copy the downloadable USB image to a flash drive to boot the netbook? Ha-ha! Trick question! There is no downloadable USB image! You have to create one yourself using the Linux or Windows usb-creator GUI, which happens to operate directly on a flash drive (meaning that you can't SSH into your Ubuntu desktop at work and run the X program there to create an image file you can scp back to the house).

And that's how I ended up driving to work to make a bootable USB stick and cussing myself hoarse.

Seriously, Ubuntu: forget the damned cutesy usb-creator tool and just put a downloadable image up on your website. Almost no one ever wants a custom boot image with a writable partition, or at least to the point that you have to make it configurable at image creation time. Pick an easy-to-manage small size (say, 2GB), use usb-creator to make a bootable drive that size, use dd to copy the image back off the USB stick, and put the damn thing up on your website. I guarantee that everyone who owns a computer without an optical drive and who wants to install Ubuntu will thank you for it.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[icebraining]

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ doesn't work?

Re:Switch to a DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Just dd the iso to the stick, they are hybrids now.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[smash]

Then spend the 20 dollars on an 8 gig memory stick.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[SanityInAnarchy]

And I really, really don't see the point in Ubuntu including all that crap on the disk in the first place. Where's the netinst option?

Give me a small option that can be booted from a CD or USB, which downloads packages as needed for the installation. They're likely to be patched anyway.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[jawtheshark]

Why don't you use PXE Boot to install your Linux operating systems? The last time I burned a CD (Debian/Netboot) it was because the NIC didn't support PXE and that was on a P-III 800MHz. From what I can see, any later Pentium IV / Athlon XP (~6-7 year old) motherboard comes with PXE integrated. All netbooks I've seen also come with it.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[CastrTroy]

The point is, is that the only disk they produce is also a LiveCD. This means it has a to include everything that you'd want to run a whole desktop, or at least enough to get you familiar with what it has to want to do a full install. They really should offer a couple different images. One small one for basic net installs. A DVD with everything and the kitchen sink. Other distros do it, I don't know why Ubuntu is so insistant on only having 1 choice, and requiring that choice to be a LiveCD

Re:Switch to a DVD

[horza]

It's 2011. They should keep it to the size of a 1GB USB stick. Who wants to burn CDs or DVDs any more? Are there still any PCs without USB?

Phillip.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[Just Some Guy]

It might, but it isn't mentioned on the Ubuntu download page. I'm sure there are other ways, too, but I'm surprised that Ubuntu hasn't spent 5 minutes addressing the problem so that their would-be users don't have to.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[Just Some Guy]

[citation needed] That may very well be true, but the Ubuntu download page goes into detail explaining how to convert the ISO into a bootable USB stick. Side note: following the OS X instructions to the letter didn't work. I don't remember the details, but it had something to do with the PPC version of the disk utils not using a compatible partition format, or something else seemingly unlikely like that. I just remember having a severe bout of "you've got to be kidding me" when it failed.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[icebraining]

Why haven't you? They're all unpaid volunteers.

It's one think to criticize decisions like choosing Unity, which you have no control about, but criticizing volunteers for not fixing something seems a little hypocrite.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[SanityInAnarchy]

I don't know why Ubuntu is so insistant on only having 1 choice,

Well, that's actually been one of the core themes of Ubuntu -- if you want another choice, you go elsewhere. It was very early that they removed the "GNOME or KDE" choice by fiat -- if you want KDE, either install it yourself, or use Kubuntu, which is at least presented as an entirely different distro.

However, even this LiveCD option seems broken -- it seems like they also include packages, which means anything they expose in the LiveCD environment has to be on the disk twice, once in the LiveCD filesystem, and once as a deb. This is also confusing -- wouldn't it make more sense to be able to store those just once somehow? Either do it the old way, where the deb must be installed to a ramdisk (or the LiveCD's unionfs+tmpfs), or store the metadata and a list of files and let the system construct a deb from the LiveCD's filesystem as needed.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[Just Some Guy]

Why haven't you? They're all unpaid volunteers.

LOL. Are you kidding around, or did you really mean that? Ubuntu isn't Red Hat, sure, but neither are they Debian. There's a real, paying corporation behind Ubuntu.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[WeatherGod]

I could, but I wanted to have a "Linux-on-a-Stick"-like LiveCD on hand. It has been a very useful tool for diagnosing troublesome Windows and Linux computers where-ever I go. Also, it is useful for doing trial spins of alpha and beta releases of Ubuntu, especially with its persistent storage feature allows me to test the update programs as well. Nothing against PXE, I just find the USB image to be more useful for my purposes. Admittedly, the startup times are killing me...

Re:Switch to a DVD

[WeatherGod]

Note, I was talking about how Ubuntu originally got my attention, 3 or 4 years ago. Admittedly, USB sticks were cheap back then, but I only had a 1 gig stick at that time. At this point in time, they can probably consider going up to DVD sized, but is sticking to a CD size really that onerous? It does force Ubuntu to improve its software download process, and I have seen some nifty features where they are making it easy for users to know what software is available for immediate download and installation. With broadband speeds becoming more common, size limits (whether it is CD or DVD) seems fairly arbitrary.

And like I said, I think Ubuntu is heading towards making DVD sized images available as well as CD-sized "core" installs as well.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[icebraining]

How many paid developers in the Installer Team? Two? And even those work on other stuff at the same time.

But that's largely irrelevant; even if they are paid, they're paid by a "financial volunteer" - Canonical is far from profitable.
At most, Shuttleworth gets to criticize them, in my opinion.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[lennier]

At most, Shuttleworth gets to criticize them, in my opinion.

So nobody who actually uses the software is allowed to criticize it?

That's not how "freedom" works in my experience.

Re:Switch to a DVD

[icebraining]

You're allowed. I just think you shouldn't.

Re:When is...

[rubycodez]

Ubuntu is animal-centric in release naming. For release naming with sexual connotations, I suggest migrating to Gaybuntu, Archhole, Hoin'SuSIE, Ephebian or maybe OpenBSD&M

unity

[darjen]

I'm sure I am in the minority here, but I don't mind unity all that much. It even works well with my magic trackpad.

Re:unity

[WeatherGod]

You arent alone. I rather like unity on my eeepc, but that might be largely because unity came from netbook remix. I haven't tried unity on a larger desktop, but I have a hard time imagining it's current incarnation to work well. But I certainly do see the direction it is heading, and I think it will work well.

Re:unity

[darjen]

I use it on my 8 year old Asus laptop, which was fairly high end for the time. Looks and feels fine on my 1080p monitor. Wife uses it via netbook remix on her eee PC as well.

Re:unity

[Sepodati]

You aren't alone. Squeaky wheels and all that. I'm just as functional using Unity as I was with a dropdown menu.

The only issue I had wasn't Unity related. My PCIe wireless card in my desktop would drop out after several minutes to an hour and not reconnect. So I stuck with 10.10 on that machine, but 11.04 is running great on my netbook (2d unity) and my other two laptops. Kids picked it up quick, too, so it was barely a change for them (they never even asked me about it).

Unity passed my parents' test...

[mathfeel]

All my machines are Arch or Gentoo, except two I leave home for my parents to use, which run Ubuntu. I recently upgraded to Nauty remotely for them, forgetting to tell them that the default desktop is now Unity. So far, besides slightly slower start up after login (the machines could use more RAM anyway), they like the new Desktop. Their commonly used apps' are automatically set up as big and visible icon on the left-edge dock. (I used to put AWN, a bottom-screen dock, up for them, but they always find it obstructing even with auto-hide). They also like that menu item for all apps consistently appears when the cursor hovers over the top edge. I am ambivalent myself toward Unity, but if it pass their test. I would say it can't be all that bad.

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[nnull]

I actually had to uninstall ubuntu from my mothers computer because she hated it (Upgraded from 10 to 11, I know big mistake). It kept crashing with skype (it never did before), the interface is messed up, there's no option to turn off desktop effects other than manually setting up metacity --replace, and a host of other stuff. And yes, this is after using the "classic desktop" option. I ended up installing Mint and she's not calling me anymore about problems. So my parents don't like it, so it didn't pass their test.

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[kvvbassboy]

On the contrary, the real test of a UI is how people who use various obscure aspects of it, feel with the new UI. Your parents (and my parents, I am sure) would use an openbox WM without any problem, as long as you put big Pidgin, Firefox, FileManager and Skype icons on the desktop. It definitely doesn't mean openbox is better, does it? (Okay, well it is pretty damn good for someone who can customize it :))

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[blind biker]

Well, I hate Unity desktop and I am a parent :) I hope my opinion counts for a +1 Informative.

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[iggymanz]

I am likely your parent's age; I tried Unity and completely hated it. Gnome3 is also horrible. I'll be looking for another distribution in the next 5 months.

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[Zantetsuken]

Switch to KDE or XFCE with a default panel arrangement similiar to GNOME 2 and write a couple of configurator widgets to also look like the GNOME 2 ones?

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[nnull]

Good question. Luckily Mint provides an XFCE version, so I'm not too worried about it.

Re:Unity passed my parents' test...

[nnull]

That's pretty much what I did with my parents, just gave them big icons of their commonly used applications (Firefox, skype, pidgin, film manager), so I'm sure it wouldn't make any difference if it was openbox or gnome, the problem with me was the new interface is crashing all the time with skype unless I explicitly turn off desktop effects (have fun finding that option, metacity --replace in the terminal). So I uninstalled ubuntu and comes Mint to the rescue.

Jeez, Ubuntu? Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where would they be without the subjunctive...

My take

[Compaqt]

1. A Refined Unity
>"icons in the launcher will be able to display count badges or progress meters to reflect the state of the underlying application"

2. GNOME 3

Will people now stop posting "you can just choose class Gnome before login!"? Prediction: Neither Unity nor Gnome3 will have the functionality that Just Worked fine before, and was letting people get their work done.

3. Evolution -- or Thunderbird?

Even though I use Thunderbird (I prefer to have the same client across computers, plus it has great dynamic folders), I don't agree with switching applications on a whim every few releases.

Pitivi to be dropped
F-Spot => Shotwell
Evolution => Thunderbird
Firefox => Chromium

4. No LibreOffice?

First they drop GIMP, now the OpenOffice clone, too? So what exactly will you be able to do with a live CD? I guess they had to make space for Unity chrome.

5. Chromium Instead of Firefox?

See #3. Also, it's not as if there's actual functionality missing from Firefox (unlike, say with the move from Pidgin to Empathy). Gratuitous changes. The Ubuntu trademark. "Ubuntu is safe, intuitive and stable " haha.

6. No Computer Janitor or PiTiVi

They just added it (Pitivi) a few releases ago!

7. LightDM Instead of GDM

Good if it works. But Ubuntu has a history of messing these things up.

8. Deja Dup by Default

It's a backup utility. Could be good, depends on integration. Does it work with Ubuntu One?

9. Ubuntu Software Center

>"the Ubuntu Software Center is also slated to get a number of enhancements, including improved integration with Unity and a simplified user interface."

How much simpler could it get?

>"I don't know about you, but I'm already champing at the bit to test it out."

Dreading it already.

Re:My take

[Arancaytar]

How much simpler could it get?

It's not MacOS yet.

Re:My take

[lennier]

MacOS? You wish!

It's iOs they're shooting for.

I gave up on them...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when they went with the wimpy sounding Maverick Meerkat instead of Masturbating Monkey. That's when I knew I could not take them seriously anymore.

Re:I gave up on them...

[lorenlal]

I'm hoping that in two releases they can come up with something better than an ocelot... Of course going with your theme, I'm sure they can find some name that may be kitteh related....

Re:I gave up on them...

[thedarknite]

Maybe it could be pulsating ...

Re:I gave up on them...

[UnresolvedExternal]

I was astounded they didn't go for Lusty Lesbian, I hope I am not the first to suggest Oscillating Orifice?

Re:I gave up on them...

[gbjbaanb]

the next one will be Pugilistic Puffin. You can install it, if you think you're hard enough to have a go.

Re:I gave up on them...

[Custard Horse]

I doubt there will be much take-up for 'Perverted Peodophile' (or 'Pedophile' for you chaps across the pond).

Re:I gave up on them...

[Blackajack]

Orly Owl?

Re:I gave up on them...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

The part of me that is still snickering in the back of the classroom in kindergarten thinks it should be:

• Micturating Monkey
• Naughty Narwhal
• Onanistic Ocelot
• Perverted Pangolin
• Randy (or Raunchy) Rhino
• ...

Someone else will have to finish this, teacher says it's naptime.

Re:I gave up on them...

[ElderKorean]

Seeing it's /. and all, my suggestion for the following version is Petrified Portman

Re:Ignore it

[MichaelSmith]

Also note that gnome 3 breaks anything which uses GTK including gnome 2 and XFCE.

Re:When is...

[ArcherB]

Ubuntu is animal-centric in release naming. For release naming with sexual connotations, I suggest migrating to Gaybuntu, Archhole, Hoin'SuSIE, Ephebian or maybe OpenBSD&M

You forgot GayToo, FlapWare, DamnSmall and Yelper.

There are more, I'm sure

Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[Nimey]

I'm sufficiently unimpressed with 11.04 (and especially Unity) that I'm tempted to reinstall with LTS and keep at least until next year.

Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[Gazsi]

Many people are forced to upgrade because old Linux won't with new hardware easily. This is because APIs change too often.

A good discussion thread on this topic started with a comment from bmastenbroo here:

Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 User Comments#Sandy Bridge

Unrelated to your question, but related to Unity, which is the main topic on the site, let me quote JEDIDIAH from the same user comment area. He summarized Unity in one single sentence:

It isn't quite like Windows 7 and it isn't quite like Snow Leopard but it steals just enough bad ideas from both to look like an incompetently executed clone with no identity (or value) of it's own.

Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[geminidomino]

Bad news. 10.04 IS the latest LTS. There wasn't one in 09. So you'll need to go back to 8.04 and its pulseaudio clusterfuck.

Go with arch, my friend.

Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[wordsnyc]

I'm sufficiently unimpressed with 11.04 (and especially Unity) that I'm tempted to reinstall with LTS and keep at least until next year.

I did, and I plan to stick with 10.04 LTS until the cows come home, then (sadly) switch to something else. Ubuntu is definitely in that "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is" loop, and people who just want a simple system that works in order to get actual work done are clearly not the target audience. There's also a creepy "Change purely to differentiate from other forms of Linux" going on here. If Shuttleworth thinks he's going to forge some sort of open-source Mac phenom, he's barking up an invisible tree.

Nuke this crap and make what works boot faster and be more stable. If I wanted dysfunctional Playskool eye-candy and a lame music store, I'd buy a Mac.

Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[Nimey]

I've got an ATI card, so I don't care about Nvidia drivers.

Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit?

[Nimey]

That first link looks like the poster's talking about SB graphics, which I'm not using.

I suppose I'll just need to boot with a livecd and see for myself.

Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[Errtu76]

I don't run Ubuntu. I don't quite like it. I do however recommend it to my friends/family who want to experience Linux and have only used Windows so far. It's by far the easiest and most complete distro available to newbies. And if you want more (or less, depends how you look at it) you use Fedora or Debian.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[grcumb]

I don't run Ubuntu. I don't quite like it. I do however recommend it to my friends/family who want to experience Linux and have only used Windows so far. It's by far the easiest and most complete distro available to newbies.

If you do recommend it to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release.

10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working after returning from a suspended state or new window positioning that's completely counter-intuitive. Some of them, like changing sides for window buttons or listing indecipherable package descriptions above package names in Update Manager, were deliberate (and conceivably, in some universe, necessary), but most of the changes were clearly mistakes. When these are combined with long-standing bugs (like Network Manager arbitrarily deciding to disable the Save button) and inconsistencies, they begin to weigh against Ubuntu's many virtues.

Unity, combined with an increase in the number of stupid bugs (that spiffy state-of-the-machine motd message is FUBAR'ed now on console login) clearly indicates that Ubuntu is more interested in new and shiny than they are in quality. A quick scan of Launchpad (itself a new product designed to simplify bug maintenance and supplant the competition, but which has done neither) shows that there are, on average, 100 open bugs per project.

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. They've stopped listening and - more importantly - working with the community. The number of defects are growing, but Canonical's response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they're confusing leadership with control. They're simply imposing their views because they don't value the discussion. They're treating criticisms as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Worse, they simply don't have the number of skilled developers they need to achieve their goals. When I look at the bug queues on some packages, I shudder in sympathy with the poor souls who are expected to wrangle them. Ubuntu is clearly embarked on an impossible task, but nobody's either got the guts or the vision to spell this out to Shuttleworth and co.

Getting buy-in and active participation from the community is a pain in the arse at the best of times, but the alternative is far worse. Heaven knows that the GNOME dev camp are... special, to be nice. But it's clear that, given the choice between getting a partial but workable success through compromise or taking their ball and going home, Canonical has consistently chosen the latter.

This cannot end well. It will, however, end sooner than later.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[icebraining]

That doesn't take anything away from what parent said; Ubuntu is newbie orientated - providing an OS for common people is their whole goal. Does that mean that only newbies can use it? No, of course not.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[int69h]

1.1? Get off my lawn.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[Martin Soto]

Well son, my first install was SLS on a 486 (from a bunch of 3.5" floppies) and it ran a pre-1.0 kernel. My first Debian install was also pre-1.0. I kept upgrading a Debian system for longer than 10 years, moving it from computer to computer and from hard disk to hard disk as technology advanced (and money allowed) without ever reinstalling it. I finally ditched it in favor of Ubuntu, and don't regret it at all. I don't want to fiddle with the computer anymore, I want to use it and that's what Ubuntu allows me to do. And, for the record, Unity is not perfect, but isn't an abomination either as many people here want to believe, and I'm currently happily using it on two machines, one netbook and one regular desktop.

Now, please draw your own conclusions from this as well...

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[shoor]

I also use ubuntu nowadays, currently still using 10.04 Lucid Lynx, the last long term maintenance release. During the 80s my jobs mostly involved using some form of Unix. I got introduced to linux through a 50 diskette distro of slackware around 1994. I used to be a real fan of slack, but I tried other distros, including Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch. Finally I got tired of all that. It's a bit like what happened with a guy I used to know. When I knew him he was a mechanical engineer fresh out of college who was really into cars. He'd buy old ones cheap and fix them up. Then one day he bought a brand new car with an automatic transmission so he could just drive it and not have to think about how it worked or whether or not it would work.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[polyp2000]

If i had mod points I would mod you up. Been through various distro's since the late 90's learned a lot about Linux from Gentoo in particular- but ultimately nowadays I just need things to work and fit together in a coherent way. Thats why I use Ubuntu at home and at work.

  You speak for me and probably a lot of other people here too. "It just works" (tm)

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[smash]

I use ubuntu occasionally also. I was helping build an ISP with Linux 1.2 way back when.

Eventually there comes a point where the tasks you're doing are platform agnostic - and if ubuntu or whatever other OS provides the quickest easiest way of getting shit done, then that's what gets used.

I couldn't give a fuck if the UI is customizable, theme-able or whatever. So long as it provides a stable application platform and an xterm, it is usable.

However... on another tack.... If bitching about lack of UI customization is the biggest problem, there's a serious "why the fuck isn't linux on every desktop?" to be answered.

Its free (beer), open source (free as in RMS) and clearly the biggest problem is the user interface (or so people would have you believe).

Why isn't it dominating the desktop?

Hint: its not the UI fluff.

Re:Ubuntu is a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[JoeCommodore]

I bet you still think programming a PL/1 plotter driver is cool.

Dont underestimate the usefulness of such ancient skills, with 3D printing and CnC trends that skill would be in demand.

the debian stable

[formfeed]

"Unstable" (IMHO) has always been 'more' stable and newer than any Ubuntu release. ... By time stuff makes it into Stable, it's that STABLE

So if I switch from Ubuntu to Debian I could run Unstable to get something more stable? Or run Squeeze and wait for it to become stable, or Sid which would be stable, but will be frozen and could become quite unstable once I break it with newer packages. Testing would be unstable, but more stable than a new ubuntu release, which becomes stable over time, and as long as you stay with an LTS will be updated quite some time. Except when software you use goes to new versions, ubuntu LTS tends to have dependency problems and then it would be more stable to mix debian stable with unstable or even go with unstable and add the cutting edge you need from testing. Adding software from testing would make the traditionally stable debian-unstable quite unstable. But maybe less unstable than staying with ubuntu LTS and adding an untested ppa. Which could make your whole system unstable, and makes you wish you went with unstable to begin with so at least you would have a stable system.

Right?

Re:the debian stable

[icebraining]

Squeeze is actually the Stable release now. Testing is Wheezy.

The best option for stability with occasional upgrades of certain packages is Stable + Backports. Never mix Stable with Testing or Unstable.

Re:Sorry to be the guy with the "who cares?" comme

[Osgeld]

that is what I ended up doing

small annoyances in U8 started to grate at me in U9 and 10 was just too much fiddle dicking to get back the way I liked it, but whatever time to "move on"!

the problem is I do not know where I could ever find a debian/ubuntu/ remix (cough mint)

other ways to avoid suck

[iggymanz]

Yup, that's Ubuntu before the suckage added.

  Or Unbuntu with the suck massaged out: http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Too light to contain suck: http://www.archlinux.org/

    Too tiny to hold suck: http://puppylinux.com/

    Got their suck fixed a few releases ago, it's all good now: http://www.fedoraproject.org/

    fixed their suck a while ago too, lookin' good: http://www.freebsd.org/
 
    supports all kinds of desktops that don't suck: http://www.mandriva.com/

    roll your own without the suck: http://www.gentoo.org/

   

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[bemymonkey]

Are any of these plug-and-play in VMWare, like Ubuntu? I tried Linux Mint (regular, not Debian ed.), and VMWare wouldn't even boot it... a quick Google told me it would take longer than 5 minutes to get running, so I went back to Ubuntu 11.04 (Unity doesn't run in VMWare Player anyway, so I haven't seen that horror yet)...

Since I only need Linux for Ubuntu kernel compilation, it needs to run in VMWare... but Ubuntu is a bit annoying - the update manager keeps crashing (OK, probably because I only gave the VM 512MB of RAM, but isn't Linux in all shapes and forms supposed to be lightweight in terms of memory footprint?), there's weird graphical glitches (windows fading in and disappearing), and the elevation prompt (admin password when you change system settings and stuff like that) sometimes just freezes or disappears (try installing updates, authorization window pops up and crashes before you can enter your password, and then the update installation window won't respond because it's waiting for the authorization window)... meh.

Any recommendations for stuff that works OOTB with VMWare?

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[kvvbassboy]

Use debian without X which is the net-install image. If you only compile kernels after writing code elsewhere, or you are comfortable with Vi, you don't need Ubuntu or Gnome or KDE or anything. Just do it on the command line.

Unless of course, you need a window system to test your kernel, in which case use Debian + XFCE or LXDE from netinstall image.

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[TheStonepedo]

If you don't have more than 5 minutes to work out a problem, how do you have time to compile kernels inside a VM?

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[iggymanz]

I only know they all work in vmware workstation 7 and vmware 3i and 4. VMware virtualization is part of my job. But oddly enough I've never used vmware player.

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[bemymonkey]

Bash scripts. I fire up the VM, type 20 letters and twenty minutes later I can flash my new kernel. For some reason I seem to have written Ubuntu kernel... my head must have been confused - I'm actually compiling Android kernels for my smartphone. I'd assume the Ubuntu kernel is bit more complicated and takes a lot longer to compile...

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[bemymonkey]

Not a bad idea - all I do after Ubuntu's started up is open the terminal and run a few bash scripts, so there's really no need for a GUI.

However, I really don't want to have to do a lot of low level driver setup stuff to get the system running - I do need Internet access, for instance, for Github... is there a command-line only distro that's similarly config-free to Ubuntu?

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[bemymonkey]

VMWare Player is the toy edition, for people like me, who only need the VM for 15 minutes every few days... so no wonder you haven't used it if you use VMWare professionally ;). No snapshots, no special features of any kind - just a simple VM that's a lot snappier and responsive than Virtualbox.

I did try installing Linux Mint (32-bit standard ed.) though, and that didn't work very well - first VMWare-boot after install just hung. Installing it straight on my old Thinkpad worked fine... :(

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[kvvbassboy]

As long as your host machine is connected to the internet through wifi or ethernet, the debian VM should connect too.

Re:other ways to avoid suck

[bemymonkey]

I was thinking more along the lines of whether Debian would recognize VMWare's virtual Ethernet adapter automatically, like Ubuntu does... but I'm just going to assume it does :)

Re:The beginning of the end.

[hedwards]

I'm actively looking for a new distro. I wasn't particularly attached to Ubuntu to begin with, mainly because I do my tinkering in FreeBSD and just need Linux for a few applications which don't yet work in FreeBSD, such as Crashplan. But this unity crap and major change slipped into a stable release pretty much eliminates any point of using Linux. Thankfully, there are other distros, but still, it's a serious PITA.

I kind of like SUSE, apart from the headaches with getting some software packages which aren't available in the repository. Most likely, I'll try Slackware and then a couple other ones to see if I find something that's going to be stable, with a good repository and somewhat resource efficient.

Re:When is...

[Dracos]

Aye... but if they keep pushing their existing users away, no one will be left to enjoy the ravages of randy rabbit.

I'll always be greatful to Ubuntu

[Beelzebud]

Ubuntu has a special status for me, because it's what I learned the basics of Linux on. These days I use a mix of Arch (for bleeding edge) and Slackware (for stability), and I doubt I would have ever delved in to learning Linux as deeply as I have if it weren't for Ubuntu. Although these days I really don't like the direction they're heading in. Too much re-inventing the wheel, not enough refining.

The last time I played around with Ubuntu I actually found it had more quirks, bugs, and stability problems than my Arch Linux install, which is a rolling release. I think these days, if I was going to set up a Linux box for someone, that only wanted to use it and not tinker with it under the hood, I'd just put Slackware on it and configure it for them.

Re:I'll always be greatful to Ubuntu

[Beelzebud]

ATI drivers are not currently supported in the official repository. Go to their forums and find the "ati bar and grill" thread. (at this point the info could already be in the official Wiki, check there too) In there are instructions for enabling a community ATI repository. I haven't had ATI in Linux for a few months, but the last time I used the community ATI repo, I had it all working great.

Re:Fix high I/O load in server distro when run on

[clarkn0va]

Odd. Have you tried changing the I/O scheduler?

Re:The beginning of the end.

[Dracos]

My advice: back down to Debian, or move forward to Mint.

Re:Sorry to be the guy with the "who cares?" comme

[icebraining]

Some people don't have Internet access, you insensitive clod, or might only have very limited 3G without the possibility to download LibreOffice, which is quite heavy. For them, asking for a mailed CD might be their only option.

B.F.W.! (TISM)

[Jimbookis]

Big Fucking Whoopee! Sick of Gnome 3 or Unity? Use Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Don't have Libreoffice on the CD? Get the DVD or use 'apt-get install libreoffice'.

new features

[hishammuteb]

I hope this time when I upgrade my box, find something new

Scrollbars

[Compaqt]

Well, lots of people? People use the various tools (arrow keys, space key, PageUp/Dn, scrollbar, scroll wheel) in various ways; I dislike the new fad of telling people that they have to use a specific, hipster-approved method of manipulating their computer anymore.

Four things the scrollbar do are:
-tell you how big the document is (depending on the GUI)
-tell you where you are in the document
-let you go up/down by pages instead of by lines (scrollwheel)
-let you go to a specific point in the document

Re:The beginning of the end.

[smash]

Google Chromium is NOT CHROME.

Re:Sorry to be the guy with the "who cares?" comme

[smash]

Ditto to that. Also to the fact that if Office was included with Windows or anything else, it would be considered "Bloat".

Its not like they're removing it from the repository.

Re:Ubuntu was a perfect Linux-newbie distro

[Compaqt]

Ubuntu was a perfect Linux-newbie distro

There, I fixed that for you.

I'll just switch to Windows 7 instead of upgrading

[Arancaytar]

Should be roughly the same thing.

I'm astonished: most changes are for good

[pmontra]

1. Unity: don't care, won't use. I'll apt-get install xubuntu-desktop.

2. Gnome 3: same as above.

3. Thunderbird: good, so they're going to fix that four years old bug preventing people from dragging attachments from a message to a folder?

4. LibreOffice: no problem for me, I'll apt-get it but I think most people would appreciate to be able to open .doc and .xls files in the initial installation. Maybe a small program could handle office files and prompt to install the office suite. Nevertheless people is more willing to wait some more minutes when installing the OS than when they have some work to do, maybe quickly. I believe that this decision is detrimental to the user experience.

5. Chromium: don't care as I install Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I'm using Firefox mostly because of Firebug.

6. Computer Janitor and PiTiVi: Computer What!? I use OpenShot as video editor.

7. LightDM: seems a good idea for a functionality I use for 5 seconds when I boot my notebook, which doesn't happen often as I suspend it at night.

8. Déjà Dup: very good idea. I'm using a combination of rsnapshot and duplicity and I don't think DD has the same functionality (it doesn't pull files from remote servers or runs scripts on them to dump DBs, right?) but it's good to offer a good backup functionality for the general public. However they should implement something like Time Machine to backup the whole system.

9. Ubuntu Software Center: don't care much. I find more convenient to use apt-get and apt-cache than using the GUI and what I usually see of the USC is only the updates window. However I'm sure that many people find more convenient using the GUI so those changes will be appreciated.

Summing up, I started reading TFA expecting some more stupid changes from Canonical but I'm surprised to see that they either don't affect me or they might improve my experience. It's a good change after at least one year of invisible changes that made my notebook perform better (i.e.: suspend always work, ext4 is fast) and too visible ones that I had to work around to be able to work the way I like (all the GUI changes).

Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[Sipper]

Please don't recommend Debian Sid for those that aren't ready for it. There is a reason it's called "unstable"; packages uploaded to Sid are "bleeding edge" and there is occasionally breakage, and the person running the box needs to be ready to handle that and know what to do and how to fix it. This isn't for everybody. Running Testing (currently named Wheezy) is a relatively safe bet.

Sid is not even a complete distribution -- Stable and Testing are, but Sid and Experimental aren't. I didn't realize this about Sid/Unstable either until I attended DebConf10 and was told so by a developer from Australia.

And if you continue to recommend running Sid, at least also tell people about installing 'apt-listbugs' so that they at least if someone else has reported grave or critical bugs on packages that they're about to install that they get warned about that. I.e. this is your "Debian Unstable condom".

The only downside to running Testing is that there are some source packages in Sid that you might need that aren't in Testing. For those situations I think it's fine to install JUST those packages from Sid onto your Testing box. That generally works fine.

Re:Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[pipy]

Parent might want to try aptosid.

Re:Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[MrHanky]

Actually, Sid is a complete distribution. Sure, there is no installation media, but if you upgrade from Stable or Testing, you should be able to remove any old crud not belonging to Sid without problem. Also, nothing is in Testing without having gone through Sid, so if Sid was incomplete, so would Testing be, and Stable as well, as Stable is old Testing (+ security fixes). Unstable couldn't possibly be incomplete, and it isn't.

As for buggy packages, I've seen more in a couple of months with Ubuntu pre-release than with years of Sid. Still, if you have no specific need for bleeding edge packages, I don't see why you have to use Sid. And these days, there are security updates for Testing as well.

Re:Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[m50d]

The only downside to running Testing is that there are some source packages in Sid that you might need that aren't in Testing

No, the big downside is you don't necessarily get timely security updates. Stable gets security updates quickly because specific effort is made to release them. Sid gets them quickly because it gets all new packages quickly. Testing has neither of these.

Re:Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[0100010001010011]

Debian Sid is a whole lot better than Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04 right now.

Re:Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid

[Sipper]

If you're running Sid, then try running 'cat /etc/debian-version' ; you'll see it reports:

      wheezy/sid

You're correct that packages normally go through Sid to get to Wheezy, but that doesn't mean that every package that exists in Sid also exists in Wheezy, and vice-versa.

Recently a friend in MHVLUG decided to try running Debian because he had recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 and hated it. So he asked me what I ran, I explained that I ran Debian Sid, so that's what he decided to try. Lo and behold, Perl is upgraded in Sid that week and there were package conflicts during this period, and he broke his system trying to upgrade things. [I found the upgrade tricky.] This is why for most people I recommend either Stable or Testing -- and not Sid. There's nothing wrong with running Sid experimentally and to learn more about Debian or how to deal with package conflicts and so forth -- but you need to be ready for that and to EXPECT that occasionally. And yes, Testing is covered by the Security Team, and that matters too.

Asking during setup

[Dave Emami]

Would it be too tough to simply ask during installation what UI is desired? Those that like Unity can pick that, and those of us who don't, can stay with Gnome.

I hate to go into grumpy old man mode (or perhaps grumpy middle-aged man, since I'm not demanding ditching the GUI), but I'm with the folks who dislike Unity. If I want an OS that tries to look like Vista/7 or OSX, I'll run one of those. In particular, the "search box to find things in the menu" feature is a step backward rather than forward relative to Gnome. The reason Windows needs that sort of thing is because of its horrible standard for arranging new items in the Start menu -- the "Start -> Company -> App" or "Start -> Company App" patterns. Because of course the most important thing about a program is who wrote it, not what it does. Only a crazy person like me would want Photoshop sharing a menu with Inkscape and SketchUp because they're drawing programs and Flex Builder grouped with Eclipse and VStudio because they're development apps, rather than together because they're both from Adobe. Combine that with Windows install programs' tendency to throw in a link to the product homepage, a link to the company homepage, and a shortcut to the uninstaller -- sometimes even if the program isn't an app per se (fx. drivers) and thus has no business adding anything to the Start menu at all -- and I can see how a "search the menu" capability would be nice to sort through the resulting morass. But Gnome never did that. When I started using Ubuntu that was one of the things I loved about it -- that it maintained the main menu more or less the way I'd always had to rearrange the Start menu to anytime I installed something new under Windows. You don't need a search capability for that sparse a structure; it only gets in the way.

As to Libre Office, if space is marginal they could keep everything except Base. It's probably less-used than Writer or Calc, and anyone intending to do database work is going to be able to figure out how to install new things anyway.

Re:Asking during setup

[Just Some Guy]

Would it be too tough to simply ask during installation what UI is desired? Those that like Unity can pick that, and those of us who don't, can stay with Gnome.

In fairness, they ask that at login time. Enter your username, then change your session to "Classic Desktop" (I think that's what they call it). Now you have a Gnome desktop.

Re:Asking during setup

[Zantetsuken]

If I recall correctly, the OO packages put pretty much everything the libraries and core packages that are required no matter which you have installed, and the individual packages for Writer, Calc, etc only taking something like 5MiB each.

Re:Asking during setup

[shish]

The option is available, it just happens before the install time. If you want unity, you go to google and type "ubuntu download"; if you want regular gnome, go to google and type "debian download"

News?

[Lakascity]

I can't believe I waited longer for the ads to load than to read the called article.

Re:When is...

[MrHanky]

Or perhaps he'll be just as pleased with Offensix, the distro where all standard tools have been swapped with more offending ones, such as fsck -- fuck; finger -- fist; OpenOffice.org -- goatse.cx; Gnome2 -- Unity.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How about

[drolli]

not being a beta version?

I am using 11.04 and i ham honestly a little disappointed.

Re:How about

[AmbushBug]

11.04 is a beta version. Anything not labeled LTS (Long Term Support) is beta. So if you want stability, etc. stick with LTS releases.

Sounds great

[horza]

Replacing Evolution with Thunderbird is a good idea, though they should also include Lightning. Shame Spicebird died a long time ago, that would have been a brilliant app.

Firefox to Chrome? I doubt it as Chrome can't really block ads.

Switching to LightDM is good, not that most of us will really notice much.

Déjà Dup? Why not. Removing Computer Janitor and PiTiVi because they are buggy? Again why not. OpenShot sounds a better default video editor anyway. Dropping LibreOffice? Probably a bad idea as a poster above pointed out, beginners will want to be able to click on a .doc and have it open.

The key thing is getting Unity debugged and polished. Very exciting new interface. Love the idea of the progress meters and notifications on the task bar, plus being able to drag files onto it. Hopefully it will eventually make it up to the usability level of Kubuntu.

Phillip.

nvidia

[drummingdemon]

Anyone else experiencing problems with nvidia gpus under 11.04? Especially when you try to hook up a second monitor...

Re:nvidia

[bejiitas_wrath]

I have had someone comment on my blog about this very subject, they had problems getting a second monitor to work on their machine, and I have heard other people say that when they did get a second monitor working, the windows were not decorated and they had to type metacity & in a terminal to get that to work. I thought it was pretty easy to get dual monitors working, but maybe not. Surely this is something that should be fixed.

I hated the speed of the Ubuntu system and I switched over to a KDE 4.6 / Gnome 2.32 Gentoo system. I have not looked back since. But yes, to reply to the parent comment above, yes there are issues with dual monitor support in Ubuntu 11.04, hopefully this can be resolved soon considering the popularity of dual monitors nowadays.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/661450 This is a link to the bug report concerning dual monitor support in Ubuntu. The comment I got was concerning zaphod mode, I am not sure what that is but it is something that needs fixing.

Re:When is...

[robot_love]

I didn't catch some of those references and, quite frankly, I'm terrified to google them.

Features We Want To See?

[JoeCommodore]

How about a thread on features we want to see:

Permissions upon mounting USB disks:
I myself would like to hook in an external drive with an ext files system and be able to use it (or at least get a popup to verify I want permission to use it) It is so infrequent I usually end up hacing to google what I need to do to set the user rights (and of course there is more than one way to do it), I consider this a big speed bump to general user acceptance.

Audio that just works:
It WAS working great with ALSA, then Pulse audio switch made things complicated again. Lets get sound stable, please?

ATI Video support
Could we get a good generic driver that works with ATI, and also has a good fall back method if we bork the video drivers trying something newer.

Install Partitioning
Sometime around Ubuntu 9 the installer's partitioning tool started to suck, what up with that? Also I like the encrypt partition install option, too bad its only in alternate install CD.

That's a start.

More Ludicrous Decisions..... Hope?

[crhylove]

And that hope I offer is called Linux Mint:

http://blog.linuxmint.com/

If you are still stuck in the ridiculousness that is the Ubuntu development process, give it a whirl.

Sensible default app choices, sensible OS structural decisions, sensible layout and design. Try it. If you are anything like me, you will not use Ubuntu again.

And for the hardcore geek, Linux Mint Debian Edition is awesome.

Re:When is...

[rubycodez]

making a few people go to google has to be the only possible way my stupid joke could have been modded informative

I switched back to Windows 7

[Billly Gates]

I will keep a copy of Fedora 14 because it uses Gnome 2 for my php/python web environment from VirtualBox inside Windows.

Gnome-Shell is truly truly aweful. Not even a minimize button!? Oh just drag the window title bar? Well Windows 7 has both. I can't find anything and one of the strengths of Gnome 2 was its simplicity and menus. They did a KDE and killed it!

Unity is ok for netbooks I guess. But it takes longer like 3x as long to do the same task and the interface gets in the way. My only question is why? What purpose does it serve?

Maybe for a iPAD tablet with a million little applets, but Linux doesn't have applets ... infact all the gnome 2 ones are gone. I tried KDE 4 and I was ready to lose my mind! Linux has jumped back 10 years in my opinion and it is such a shame. I am going back to Windows. It is stable, more consistent, and does what I need with less effort. You can take that Linux back to the server room.

Sun donated large amounts of R&D and usability studies and the gnome folks just threw it out without thinking.

LibreOffice

[DaVince21]

Dropping LibreOffice is not a feature...

Re:The beginning of the end.

[slydder]

Well, like my father told me about throwing it against a wall and taking what sticks.

If it sticks it's most likely shit and you should touch it. Instead, pick up what didn't stick as it seems to be rather solidly made.

just my 2 cents.

Re:The beginning of the end.

[slydder]

s/should/shouldn't/p