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Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Out Now; Raring Ringtail In the Works
An anonymous reader writes "The six month cycle that Canonical adheres to for Ubuntu releases has come around again today. Ubuntu 12.10 'Quantal Quetzal' has been released. There's a whole range of new features and updates, but here are the most important: WebApps — treats online services as if they are desktop apps (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook); Online Services — control logins to all your services from a single window and get them integrated into search results (e.g. GDocs for file searches); Dash Preview — right click any icon, get a detailed preview of what it is; Linux kernel 3.5.4; GNOME 3.6; Nautilus 3.4; latest Unity; No more Unity 2D, fallback is the Gallium llvmpipe software rasterizer; Default apps updated (Firefox 16.01, Thunderbird 16.01, LibreOffice 3.6.2, Totem, Shotwell, Rythmbox); Full disc encryption available during install; Single, 800MB distribution for all architectures." It's now available for download. The next version, due in six months' time, will be called Raring Ringtail.
But really found the integration with webservices annoying. Switched back to Debian and I'm happy with that.
Most of them are campy but not ridiculous. Quantal? Really? Not only is that silly sounding, but it doesn't even follow along the kind of names they have been using.
quantal, adj.
1. Physics
a. Of or relating to a quantum or a quantized system.
b. Existing in only one of two possible states.
2. Biology Of or designating an all-or-none response or effect: a quantal reaction.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I am waiting for the Zapping Zebra
From the announcement:
The timing is such that users can experiment before deciding if they want to invest in Windows 8 or go with an alternative and bypass that confusing new user interface Microsoft will be shipping.
(emphasis mine)
I'm even more eager for Trolling Tuna, which will usher in the year of Linux on the desktop.
If you switch to Debian you hardly ever have to update. Well, I did have to update libexif this a.m. but, just saying.... ;)
Honestly, I kind of miss the old days of having to edit and recompile the kernel just to get sound, printing and, if things were going really well, a network connection. After 15 years, Debian is still a happy part of my life and will be to the end.
Now that both Unity and Gnome have their own completely separate APIs for online accounts, it's time to start thinking about making life easier for application developers (instead of harder.)
Why haven't we created a single, standard shell API? Is it that so much to ask? Us app developers shouldn't have to spend extra time customizing our applications so they work under each shell.
Users shouldn't have to worry about whether or not their app's features will work with their shell. Why should they be forced to care?
No, it's time to put standard APIs in place and stick with them. Linux is supposed to be about choice for the user, not about preventing interoperability.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I vote for Stubborn Sturgeon.
You know, since they seem to be so insistent on all this UI "revolution" nonsense.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It was always available, you just had to download the "alternative" install disk that would run the text-based debian-installer.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Honestly, I tried Ubuntu countless times, recommended it to a bunch of people, used it on some computers for a while, but they should really concentrate in getting the bugs worked out. Unfortunately, I am afraid, I will not use Ubuntu anywhere myself anymore. Don't take it wrong, I like the fact they want to put the linux desktop where it should be, but each release breaks more often that the former one, and I really don't understand why. As sad as I am to say that, each Ubuntu release looks more and more broken, in fact it even reminds me of Windows.
I will stick with Debian on my desktops/laptops, I am currently using testing/wheezy, which is way more stable than any current Ubuntu, even the LTS releases...
And yes, I know I will be flamed to give my opinion and I am repeating myself, but Ubuntu should really work out bugs instead of pushing eye candy.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Why haven't we created a single, standard shell API?
Not disagreeing with you, but... http://xkcd.com/927/
"Is that dad? Either that or Batman's really let himself go."
You know, I've been down on Unity as much as the next guy, until a wild thing happened: my 13 year old son sat down in front of it, never having used it before, and started navigating and using it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I was shocked, he didn't have any of the old UI paradigm hangups that I have, he looked at it with completely new eyes, and was immediately productive with it, using it in ways that had not been obvious to me.
After seeing this, I really had to reconsider my Unity griping. These guys really know something about usability, and while yes, there are flaws, they seem to be getting ironed out.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
http://xkcd.com/927/
To get rid of the annoying adware/spyware in Unity.
$ sudo apt-get remove unity-scope-musicstores unity-lens-shopping
what do real nerds run? i was running fedora but it didnt support my logitech keyboard properly.
i reinstalled ubuntu for their software center, which reminds me of coolgames.
I recently to a spin on the PPC linux road, after aquiring a free, used PPC platform from a friend.
Dropped on Ubuntu PPC. Completely unusuable with the Unity UI, because it gobbled down resources like an amphetmine junky. I am talking, unusably slow here. Like click the mouse and wait 10 seconds slow.
Boot to a root console, nuke unity, and install gnome 2. Oh, what a releif it was!
I'm sorry, but I am of the opinion that software should be be written to take as little horsepower way from user applications as is inherently possible, while retaining reliability and quality.
Unity seems to operate under the premise of "resources are abundant ad cheap, and I can squander them like mad all I want and get away with it. It's revolutionary!"
Seriously. If you search for 'titanic' and don't type fast enough you may see adult content.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/18/ubuntu_12_10_review/
Or see the bug "No obvious way to restrict shopping suggestions from displaying adult products".
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shopping/+bug/1054282
I think the devs and the people responsible are underestimating the degree to which this is a major fuckup.
Real nerds run whatever the hell they feel works best for them and don't bother with trends.
As great as open source is that indeed is one of the two elephants in the room (the other being documentation*.) Bugs get completely ignored as new versions get rolled out and then later marked as "Won't Fix". Firefox fixing their memory leak "any day now" is the running joke.
The only other option is start publicizing the old (critical) bugs that the devs conveniently keep ignoring.
How about starting by listing the bugs?
* Obviously there are exceptions: FreeNAS has done a fantastic job with there 8.2 User Guide!
It was more an idle curiosity thing. And yes, ancient crapple hardware.
But you know, linux is presumably more friendly with antiques than other OSes... so, why does OSX 10.4 run waaaaaaaay better than ubuntu?
Maybe I'm a wide-eyed optimist, but I see a lot of potential in Ubuntu to bring desktop Linux to a whole new level.
Mint Maya with XFCE is out, and simply useable. 'nuff said.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
This tweaked my interest with the mention of no more Unity 2D? I used to have an old version of Ubuntu on my desktop (10.04) then after several upgrades to 12.04 that eventually screwed up the kernel along with startup/shutdown issues I had to switch to Unity 2D for some sanity. Replacing it now with some kind of software rasterizer seems to me like such a kludge fix in my mind designed to piss off pepole even more and force them to switch to an alternative even quicker.
At any rate I've been using Linux Mint 13 KDE tweaked on my desktop and love it and have Kubuntu 12.04 on my girlfriends laptop and currently using Xubuntu 12.04 on this old clunker of a laptop (Dell Inspiron 1300) from 2006. Point is I love KDE and its stable on Mint (apparantly even more stable then Kubuntu) and heck even XFCE is a lot more usuable on an old laptop.
Old habits die hard when you're like me and 34 yrs old and using computers since the early 80's... Unity just offends me. :P
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I already had Randy Racoon shirts printed!
I was testing out and as soon as I saw ads popping up, I moved to Mint (after a brief and very painful visit to Fedora).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
"Productivity" for 13 years old and for productivity for adults are different. Unity works as long you are 13 and the only thing you need is facebook.
I can't say I'm comfortable with the direction Ubuntu is heading regarding privacy, online services and "apps" and more.
The whole Amazon shopping "lens" is by far the most blatant issue. I'm sorry, no operating system (or truly, any program) should build in covert, opt-out only targeted adware/spyware/affiliate, especially without informing the user. The error is all the more egregious because it is made by an OS that is supposed to be respecting your privacy, tuned for the user's benefit, and generally operating under the ethos of Linux and the open source community. How much trouble could it have been to let the user decide for themselves which elements the search/lens system would use? Those that had any sort of affiliate/financial benefit, upon its first activation would provide a notification to the effect of "Please note that the Amazon lens appends the Ubuntu referral/affiliate ID to searches made on the website. This means when you purchase an item on Amazon that you found using the lens, Ubuntu will receive a small portion of the proceeds. Please note that we at Ubuntu do not receive any record of what item your purchased or any other personally identifiable data related to your Amazon transaction. We encourage you to leave the affiliate ID opted-in as it helps us to bring all the great software in Ubuntu to you without cost, but if you wish to opt out simply uncheck the box to your right. You may also enter another affiliate ID if you check the box below and enter the information of your preferred supporter". With this honesty, I can gather that many users would leave the affiliate ID intact. It is completely unacceptable to not provide this information.
Thanks to Canonical demonstrating their lack of ethics when it comes to the Amazon lens, I'm increasingly suspicious that the OS is not designed with user preference and privacy, but instead puts covert financial benefit ahead of everything else. For instance, I think the lenses and web-apps themselves are dangerous from a security standpoint as it seems that by incorporating both local and remote/Internet results and programs, without the discreet choice of the user to do so, it obfuscates what data resides where, especially amongst the less technical users who need the most protection. There should be clear definitions of local, offline data and remote, online data and all users should have to make the conscious choice to say "Yes, I want my desktop search or application to interact with and pull data from the Internet, and this is exactly how". I also have to wonder how much of the data prevalent in these searches is being harvested - if Canonical is willing to covertly include their Amazon affiliate in the default desktop search of their OS, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't just as covertly take any information that their WebApps/OnlineServices/Lenses etc... and make it available for sale.
Users of a Linux OS, much less the vanguard desktop Linux OS which acts as the face of Linux to many newcomers, shouldn't have to worry their OS is being designed to undermine user experience, preference, and privacy for profit. It damages the entire Linux and open source community, which have brought many users to their distributions by saying "Hey, we're not like those guys. We put user experience and ethics before profit. Look, its all Free and Open etc...". While it isn't exactly fair to the entire Linux and FOSS community, Canonical's actions will bring down judgements of hypocrisy and be an easy sticking point for critics and competitors. I know many will say "Just apt-get remove XXXYJASDJFDFDSD if you don't like it" or "Switch to another distro", but realize that especially for those who are new to Linux/FOSS, they aren't going to stick around for that if they have a bad experience - they'll just leave.
Linux and FOSS have made some huge gains in the past few years, especially on the desktop. Look at all the new development and interest brought simply by the announcement that Steam will be coming to Linux.
OSX does have one big advantage. It's written for a very limited range of hardware, which allows for far more extensive testing and optimisation. It's also high-volume enough to get the full support of the hardware manufacturers. If PCs only came in fifteen different models, you can be sure linux would run just as perfectly on them all.
Try MintPPC http://www.mintppc.org/ - it works well even on the old G350 iMacs. It's essentially Mint Debian with LXDE.
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
As great as open source is that indeed is one of the two elephants in the room (the other being documentation*.) Bugs get completely ignored as new versions get rolled out and then later marked as "Won't Fix". Firefox fixing their memory leak "any day now" is the running joke.
It's no different from commercial version in that respect; only commercial software vendors won't communicate that they're not going to fix it or that its a bug at all to start with, and you have no visibility to their bug databases.
And, FYI, many security vulnerabilities present in Win7 have been reported or related to reported bugs in Windows going back over 15 years.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
That is indeed true -- the differences is that companies (tend) to go out of business if they don't value their product, i.e. fix bugs.
Maybe the point is open is just as bad as closed but open has one small advantage: transparency.
In the end, that is what will eventually win out.
That, and sharing of software / algorithms.
Thanks, but no thanks.. More than happy to stick with 12.04LTS till after 14.04LTS is released.. Been on that schedule since going from 6.06 to 8.04.. I usually wait till at least the .1 update on each LTS before I migrate to it, as I have better things to do then upgrade every damn six months... When Canonical announced that Unity was going to be the default WM in 12.04, and after I tried it out for a couple of weeks and damned near tore my hair out by the roots, I began looking for a replacement for my soon-to-be-EX-favorite distro.. Fortuantly I found Cinnamon, and with it installed on Ubuntu 12.04, it makes Ubuntu usable again, and its again my favorite distro.. Sure hope the Unity fiasco is a one-time burst of insanity and not a precursor of more insanity at Canonical/Ubuntu...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
WebApps — treats online services as if they are desktop apps (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook)
Do. Not. Want.
Well maybe you don't. But millions of people use gmail, and some of them use ubungu. I know several people who have made the jump of forwarding all of their email accounts to gmail and using that exclusively as a mail client, because honestly it is a better client than the desktop alternatives (thunderbird/evolution/kmail). Making gmail a full-fledged citizen on ubuntu means it can behave just like a desktop app, with a gmail icon in the launcher, notifications arriving together with those from other applications in the system, etc. I for one am looking forward to this feature.
Dash Preview — right click any icon, get a detailed preview of what it is
Why? Should this not be the job of the file manager? Doesn't it already do this?
Well, maybe you're not searching through your file system. Maybe you search for an application to install, and can see a screenshot before clicking. Maybe you are searching for a song in your music collection, you get a preview of the album art, and a button to enqueue it or start playing it. And so on, with many third-party extensions likely to be coming. Is this useless eye-candy? maybe, but it is a lot more than the file previews in your file system browser, and I bet that after a bit of experimenting and tweaking some cool stuff will come out of this.
For the record, I use it too now and while I did need some adaption time, it's just fine for daily usage. The versions prior to 12.04 were horrible though.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Now try to open a second one.
ctrl + alt + t
ctrl + alt + t
ctrl + alt + t
ctrl + alt + t
now I have 4 terminals open, how many do you want?
Everyone knows how big of an abortion Unity is, and aside from that it seems that Shuttlebuntu continually tries to find new and exciting ways to piss of what's left of their userbase. It's all about the pretty, and not about functionality, unless it's to do with gathering userdata and showing ads.
Actually, many of us that actually like to get work done like Unity. I'm sorry if you're too stuck in your ways.. I like hitting my super key, starting to type "fire" and then hit enter to have it load firefox. To me, it much faster than taking my hand off my keyboard, using the mouse to go to some point on the screen, and click through menu's. (that is sooo windows 95!!) I also like that it only took a few times to realize when I type Calc I prefer Calculator instead of OpenOffice Calc.
I also like the side tabs, which are much more functional than along the bottom like the old gnome, especially since everything is widescreen now, and vertical space is precious.
You are welcome to use crunchbang (to be fair, I like Crunchbang too), Lubuntu, Xubuntu, KUbuntu, Fedora, Slackware, etc.. if you prefer.. but making a giant generalization about how EVERYONE KNOWS its bad is just plain wrong. For those that have taken the time to learn it, it can actually improve your workflow.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Yes, it's actually quite good for netbooks. My desktop monitor can rotate to work in "document mode", though, which is incredibly handy but would make the vertical dock incredibly funny.
I'm a couple score past 13 and use and learned to like the bomb, err, Unity just fine (admittedly didn't at first). I use it on decent hardware (latest 15" Samsung 9 with upgraded memory and SSD) and it's smooth and productive.
That is indeed true -- the differences is that companies (tend) to go out of business if they don't value their product, i.e. fix bugs.
Meh, there's plenty of proprietary software out there that is buggy but they stay in business because they deliver what most of the users want most of the time. Open source has a tendency to throw out the old and in with the new despite nobody actually asking for it, because it's supposedly in some way better - often supported by use cases written by their proponents that cherry pick the advantages and ignore the drawbacks. It's like saying DVORAK is superior to QWERTY, so let's just drop QWERTY support. You know what? I don't care, I got 25 years of muscle memory of QWERTY and it works more than good enough, if you start fucking with that you're only introducing pain. Maybe I'm just an old fart but my Win7 desktop (and before that KDE desktop) looks very similar to the Win95 desktop I had 17 years ago. And I like it that way.
It's great that you introduce new things, but for the most part there's no reason to remove things that work but far too often it's the victim of rewrite mania where you only implement the new way and the old way well you shouldn't be using that anyway so get with the program. Despite all the wailing over Microsoft's ribbon many open source apps decide to throw me a curve ball like that too and while in theory you can get around it there's usually a lot of pain involved in not using the mainline version that's actively developed and supported or switching distros that all tend to have their own quirks. It's something of a 90/10 rule, at least 90% of the time I just want something that works well in a way I know, the last 10% I can experiment with - but preferably not feel experimented on. I don't want to be a forced guinea pig for your (probably bad) idea.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> Still time to rename their next release to Roaring Ringwraith, though.
Yeah, but, what is the name of the release *AFTER* "Zippy Zebra"? Does Ubuntu shut down after that?
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
As great as open source is that indeed is one of the two elephants in the room (the other being documentation*.) Bugs get completely ignored as new versions get rolled out and then later marked as "Won't Fix". Firefox fixing their memory leak "any day now" is the running joke.
It's an old one, though. I think there was a benchmark a while back that showed that Firefox (14? 15?) was actually the most efficient browser for certain usage scenarios (namely a very large number of tabs open simultaneously). Mind you, it's still by no means lightweight but its memory usage does stabilize after a while and Chrome wouldn't be much better for extremely heavy use.
And yes, I do easily reach 100-200 simultaneously open tabs.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
You all should bow to Canonical and thank them for Ubuntu : the fact that it exists gives you the ultimate satisfaction of not using it.
Jicehix