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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."
Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different
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.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
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 do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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
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
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.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
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?
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
...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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Isn't that exactly why people like OSX?
It's exactly why I hate OSX.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
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/
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.
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.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ doesn't work?
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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.
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.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
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.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
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
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
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.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."