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Canonical Could Switch To Rolling Releases For Ubuntu 14.04 and Beyond
massivepanic writes "For the longest time Canonical has slapped an LTS ("long term support") moniker on some of their Ubuntu releases. Currently, a new major release of the operating system happens every six months, and is supported for 18 months after release. Whereas in the past when LTS versions received two years support or more, the current model — starting with 12.04 — supports new LTS releases for five years. However, a recent public Google Hangouts session revealed that Canonical has been thinking about switching from the venerable LTS model to a rolling release, starting with version 14.04."
I like the idea of rolling releases, but given the amount of massively stupid crap that Ubuntu springs on us by just rolling it into a new release (unity, I'm looking at you), I also like the idea of freezing a Ubuntu box at a non-ugly release and having a box that at least receives security updates for a few years
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
That is, if Canonical didn't already shoot themselves and their distro in the foot in every way possible.
Ubuntu already has frequent updates, with the packages I have installed it's a rare day that doesn't have at least one, and a week with no updates is just about unheard of.
a rolling release would just mean that there would be more things changed in the update, and that the updates would go to new versions of software rather than old versions with backported fixes (a combination that's not tested outside of Ubuntu)
I think this would be a very interesting thing to do
David Lang
It doesn't surprise me, considering how shit their stability and reliability has been lately, they might as well stop wasting resources pretending like they care about testing their releases.
There's a reason why nearly all OSes have releases that they update only sporadically as needed, it makes it much more efficient to identify bugs, security flaws and not break things unexpectedly.
Although, there was this in the article:
Assuming switching to a rolling release between LTS versions doesn’t disrupt Ubuntu’s growth in any way, the casual Ubuntu user doesn’t really have to pay too much attention to the switch should it happen, though they might get a little annoyed at the probably-higher frequency of software updates. To satiate the more in-depth user, Canonical could theoretically put out a test version in between the LTS releases, which would also help cut down on bugs in the LTS.
Which leads me to believe that this is targeted at the desktop builds, but the article was a bit skim on details.
If they dropped LTS for their server builds, I guarantee Ubuntu's popularity would drop faster than a whale out of the sky.
But how will the alliterative critters be named then?
Rolling Release is just the new catchphrase. All the cool kids want it, so it's natural Comical would jump on the bandwagon.
the amount of bitching i hear about unity versus the amount of time it takes to install something else (TM) is ridiculous.
too lazy to apt-get install, but too vehement to shut the fuck up about it online.
nerds are strange.
Now broken code will get release much faster!
Tell me, have they ever addressed the LDAP bug that's been sitting in a queue for 2+ years. I mean, it's not like anybody would want to use LDAP or anything...
google "gsettings LDAP ubuntu"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnss-ldap/+bug/974938
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gsettings-desktop-schemas/+bug/873403
Last I checked 2 months ago, this same shit happens on a fully up to date 12.04 machine and the first reports were rolling in back in 2011 about this issue.
It's a joke distro.
If they're going to dump LTS, they need to be REAL careful about what shit they push out. I used Linux for many many years, but finally I just got tired of stuff breaking all the time, and switched to Mac OS, where Apple seems to be reasonably careful not to annoy me too much with their updates. Maybe Linux got better since then, but I doubt it judging by some of the discussions I read about on Slashdot, like massive controversies still going on about KDE vs Gnome, as well as major about faces going on WITHIN KDE and Gnome, AND talk of distros even going away from KDE and Gnone entirely. I don't mind things changing, even largish changes, but you ought to be REAL careful to make it smooth, and I don't see it happening.
Updating systems every few months was very time consuming. Why do you have to re-download every single application just to do an operating system update?
from what i see the users that currently don't mind updating/prefer to update every 6 months would rather it be a rolling release. this is what i had recommended/requested back when i used ubuntu exclusively. the 6 month releases are not especially bleeding edge or stable right now anyways it might as well be rolling and remove the hassle of trying to guess when it's safe to move to the new version. for these users ubuntu's package versions are too old anyways. the users who just want their security and stability updates but for things to stay the way they are can stay on the lts for 5 years. i think this would be clearer to users and give canonical some wiggle room for testing. maybe have two tracks on the rolling release: testing and stable
Probably the best solution is to standardize on a set of applications as is done now and then set critical packages that need to be updated (think firefox), hplip (HP printers), and kernel to rolling.
Actually what I'd probably suggest is give the user the option of subscribing to a backports repository which would provide updates to critical packages. These would not be security updates but regular updates. IE the latest stable kernel, the latest stable hplip release, the latest stable firefox release, etc.
Things like the desktop manager should remain static.
ThinkPenguin's solved the problem though of supporting hardware. They simply stock the parts which work with current LTS releases. So even though you may not be able to get a printer that works out of the box with the latest LTS release from HP any more you can get it from ThinkPenguin. Without ThinkPenguin the hardware support for Linux really sucks.
The thing is, there was a time when Debian Testing was very unstable and the ability to install drivers and property software was very convalescent. This days are no more. Now you can even run Unstable, let alone Testing mostly troubles frees and you'll find separate packages with very good integration for property stuff.
One example is the nvidia driver which was packages into Experimental the same day it was released and after updating worked bug free.
There's also now the fracturing of the firmware drivers (ralink, realtek...) that are now found in multiple packages so you don't have to risk all your stack just for one WAN driver.
Most importantly however is the the multiarch is mostly mature for the end user: Almost all the packages were transitions and now you can install foreign libraries of all kinds troubles free. The cross compile is still a work in progress but that just means it's either equal or surpassing other distributions.
Honestly, Ubuntu is choosing to start rolling because it's more than likely within the next few month the Debian base will be so rock solid it won't make much sense to fork out every few month so they might as well start pulling from Debian's repositories directly or on a very regular - weekly - basis.
they're already scraping the bottom of the barrel for names.
What makes you think that people who criticize Unity still run it?
Anyway people who for some reason feel the need to defend this shell online seem far more angry and aggressive than its detractors.
Me thinks you miss the whole point. If you piss off most of your user base the answer is not "just install something else" the answer is FIX the dang mess you made.
But I see Ubuntu swirling the drain, They are making moron decisions, and getting worse. But everyone else is as well. . Fedora 18 is also a steaming pile of doo-doo..
So Linux follows it's normal cycle of every 7 years making it crappy to the point that it get's reborn again. Mandrake was king until they pooched that one, then they died and Ubuntu rose from the ashes... Ubuntu is now pooched, so let's see who rises from the ashes this time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And yet instead of shutting the fuck up about it online... you choose to bitch.
If they don't run it, then why do they care enough to come on Slashdot and post about it every time Ubuntu is mentioned? Do they have some sort of psychiatric issue that prevents them from behaving like normal human beings?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's not about that, it's Linux, we use Linux because of its flexibility. Unity is an attempt to force Ubuntu users into something (worse) than say Gnome-Classic. They have dropped the support and "swagger" they used to have for Gnome-Classic and now its an unpolished hack job. That's the problem!
Canonical dropped a POS with Unity, lost over half of their user base and destroyed any credibility they have.
Solution? Have a way to update all of the LTS's to remove the rubbish unilaterally and thoughtlessly forced upon those users who couldn't stand it.
The problem isn't that Canonical can't undo the mistake they've made, the problem is that Canonical made that mistake in the first place. And here comes the next mistake, rolling releases. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion where everything that made the train great is slowly being crumpled under the weight of the impact.
If you think people commenting about Unity while not actively using it is bad, you'd better not look into the Windows 8 threads. You'd probably have an aneurysm.
So, they sucked up the UI, making it roughly on par with Windows 8.
Now, they're going to emulate Firefox, I mean, Chrome's rapid versioning system.
What's next? Zero day exploits left unfixed? Excessive licensing/support costs?
It's like Canonical is trying to be MS in a Linux world.
You over-credit normal human beings.
you don't get it, do youj? Canonical doesn't spend time refining a good UI to be the default of their wares, instead they dissipate energy polishing a turd. so they are abandoned.
I'm a big fan of long-term releases, only because I may be one of those individuals who might be responsible for systems that do not have access to the internet in order to support the "rolling release" model.
It's nice to be able to have a stable, known-good server installation on several isolated networks that just need an occasional update of dpkgs and completely expect it to work fine after it's been restarted. I don't think the same is expected in a rolling release model.
The idea that a rolling release maintains binary compatibility is, so far, been proven false. In our world, long-term releases make sense.
Kriston
Unity was so bad, I couldn't even figure out how to open a shell/terminal in Unity to apt-get-rid of it.
Sure...why not.It really has worked for FireFox, hasn't it?
I don't know why they don't just try a variant like Kubuntu or Xubuntu...
http://i.minus.com/iU8wJETUUACV1.png
I'm amused every time Unity is discussed. That is hilarious, though.
"apt-get-rid unity"
Hilarious!
I suppose that I should point out that if you couldn't alt-F1 to get a terminal, then you're not really a Linux guy at all. But, hell, you made me laugh, so I'm not going to beat up on you!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I hate it when half your shit breaks because you upgraded Ubuntu and too many things changed at once. Maybe with rolling releases they can do more gradual package upgrades that won't hose your system every six months.
The amazon search bar will re-install itself every 6 months!
the best thing about Ubuntu are the forks made from it
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
If you are looking for quality and stability might I recommend FreeBSD?
I've run FreeBSD releases with -release ports installed. I don't have to monkey with the system until the next time a release is tagged. You could track changes (-releng) and compile them for a specific release if you wanted to have the "LTS" experience. The APIs are stable with a major release number so I just do binary updates with each minor release. I am at most 6 months behind on things like XFCE and LIbreoffice, but then I have to do very little putzing with my computer. I just use it.
Regards,
Jason C. Wells
We would, but your bladder is the size of a thimble. Best we could master is stepping on a drop here and there. Good luck though!
mug funky is my hero for saying what needed to be said!
Look into OpenSUSE, then.
The 11.x/12.x releases have been pretty consistently good for me.
Even better... no Unity to complain about.
(Never saw what the big buzzy was over Ubuntu in any case. I tried it a couple of times and found it marginally acceptable, but annoying.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Wrong. The default key binding for Yakuake is F12. Alt+F1 brings up the KDE menu.
I guess if you don't know that, you're really not a Linux guy, after all, are you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
the amount of bitching i hear about unity versus the amount of time it takes to install something else (TM) is ridiculous.
I volunteer for an organization that collects old and used PCs then builds new ones with the good parts from the old ones. We then install Ubuntu. Until the start of 2013 we used Ubuntu 10.04, however with the new year we switched to Xubuntu 12.04. Some of the people in the organization don't like the new DE Canonical is using, Unity. As ease of use is one of the criteria we use, I suggested that we use Linux Mint as studies and surveys rate it as the easiest. However no one replied. Not right now, as I'm booted into Snow Leopard, but I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my Mac to dual-boot.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
gnome-shell user here.
I'm running 3.4 on 12.04, and will be using XFCE when upgrading because 3.6 breaks all my extensions.
because it sucks, and they had to use it for 3 seconds before installing something else. Its kind of a wish that things would "just work" out of the box, like they did in 11.10 and 11.04.
Normal human beings aren't allowed to have negtive opinions or critize things?
I think you might need the meds actually.
You guys need a Penguin key.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Purely speculation here but part Steam seems to be promoting Ubuntu for their Linux-based Steam client. Games often require patching to get acceptable or optimal performance. This announcement for Rolling Releases might be directed at keeping Valve / Steam happy.
Anything that improves Linux distros is good news. However, if Steam suddenly gets 100 million Linux gamers, the sudden popularity of Ubuntu (assuming at some point Steam might only work with Ubuntu) might not work in favor of other distros. I'm concerned that it might push too much development resources to get X & Y working which is popular for the gaming community but not for all other Linux / ''Nix users (personal, business, enterprise...).
I've tried using LTS on some machines, but it hasn't worked out well. The trouble with it is that Ubuntu's quality is crap, and that applies to LTS releases just as much as non-LTS. For instance, they started gratuitously breaking sound with Jaunty, and as of Precise it's still broken on some machines I use. When important stuff is randomly broken in an LTS release, you end up upgrading to a non-LTS to see if they've fixed the bug.
For almost 2 years I'll been volunteering for a branch of Freegeek and in that tyme I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 on hundreds of PCs and most of the installs have been fine. So I don't know where you get LTS hasn't worked out well or that Ubuntu's quality is crap. You may not like the DE, Canonical, or how Ubuntu is run but that's different than saying the distro is crap.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I agree with you, and I tried unity on a couple versions of Ubuntu, and then switched to Gnome Classic. I get what unity is for. It is for hand-held devices and tablets. In his flawed vision, Mark Shuttleworth somhnow thinks that the desktop is dead and that he can single handedly force Ubuntu users to behave differently. That is simple arrogance and the result of a business model where decisions are made by a small cabal that doesn't have paying customers. What is worse is that Canonnical muffed it and pissed off users. The changes were too sudden and the product didn't really work and the design was an obstruction to a reasonable workflow. They should have made Unity available on non-desktop test beds, and then when there was a real tablet for it, made it more available.
Besides that Ubuntu is bloatware. There is too much in it and some of the core stuff is poorly documented and of questionable value. My pet peeve is Gnome Tracker. If you have a slow USB drive with an NTFS filesystem and do a kernel upgrade, tracker can keep your system busy for a day or more, and there is no documentation on what metadata it is gathering. Do you trust that a company based in the security-paranoid UK might be using the tracker data in spyware?[ I am looking into an alternative distro because I'd like to be far more selective in what I run, anyway. Slax is looking god. Even Puppy looks good.
I like the idea of running linux in pieces from any available disk and filesystem type. Why not boot linux from a core image on an NTFS filesystem and load archives of added applications and user files backups into memory and and save the changes back to the same disk? I don.t just mean a USB stick, but any old filesystem on a disk, and I don't mean virtualized but from the bootloader which looks for a directory in some filesystem and boots what is there. No partition bull, not booting Windows first, no clobbered grub configs. That is all bull.
Ruby programmers know a lot about polishing turds.
Someone please mod this +5 hilariously true.
Windows 8's only failure was it's inability to be so awesome that the benefits outweighed people's natural fear of change.
I've used it. It didn't really impress me, but it wasn't bad enough that I would want to downgrade back to 7 if I had to use a machine that came with it. It's just Windows 7 with a tablet/media server interface duct-taped to it from what I could tell playing with it at Best Buy.
Well, either that or CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a TTY. but hey, who cares?
gnome-shell user here...I'm running 3.4 on 12.04, and will be using XFCE when upgrading because 3.6 breaks all my extensions.
Looks like Gnome-Shell will be down to its last user soon.
Anybody know what the policies are for the other major distros? Debian, Mint, Fedora, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Gentoo, Slackware, et al? How about the BSDs - what's it for FBSD/PC-BSD, NBSD, OBSD and so on?
MS Shill
Not necessarily. I know quite a few former Ubuntu users that switched to Mint or even plain Debian because of the last few horrible releases. I wouldn't be surprised to discover Ubuntu is losing ground fast to other Linux distributions.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Canonical did not abandon users who want a traditional desktop. You might have heard of Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
One small thing: Xubuntu, Kubuntu or Lubuntu. All Official, same OS Different GUI. Educate yourself.
My keyboard has a penguin key instead of those wonky squares.
I think the most sane approach would be too keep doing releases for the "core system", i.e. kernel and libraries. Applications are the "leaves" in the package dependencies graph and could be made rolling without compromising stability.
Check out my cross-platform apps
Yes.. I switched to xubuntu 12.04 and made the desktop look almost exactly like gnome2. It runs stable and fast.
The problem is Unity isn't even good on tablets or phones or whatnot. There was a story a few weeks back that revelead that much. So, the problem is Unity is a piece of crap that sucks for regular desktops and for tablets. It is just awful and should be "taken to a farm upstate" (read: shot in the face with a .50 gauge rifle)
These distros are funny. They keep changing how they work and do things. "We're going to do something fresh and different" - abandoning what works. Then they fail. Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu... they've all done it.
Guess what? Debian is still pretty much the same as it was in 1998 (but yes, with newer packages, you jokers).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The idea of rolling releases is by itself a good one, as there is really no point in trying to get thousands of packages, that are in large part completely independed of each other, "stable" at the same time ("stable" mostly meaning we won't ship the fixes upstream provides). However far to often new packages also break stuff, be it just little things or Unity and Gnome3 comming along and wreaking your whole desktop environment. So could we please get proper support for downgrades or the installation of multiple versions per package first? If stuff breaks and I could just go back to the older version in a single click I wouldn't mind if stuff breaks. But right now I have to search for the .deb via arcane means, twiddle with raw dpkg and in the end might completely wreak the dependency tree as a result (try install old Gnome2 on modern Ubuntu, not easy). As long as upgrades are a one way street, rolling releases really sound like a bad idea if you want a stable system.
...because they were running out of bad names for 14.04 and beyond.
Between Unity and GNOME3, I switched after 10.04 LTS and never looked back. Hello Cinnamon.....
Ubuntu has lost its way, as is typical with many open source projects.
I hope they find their way back, but I am neither expecting them to nor waiting for them to do so.
Specifically: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It reminds me of what Ubuntu was before Cannonical lost their minds and decided to become Cupertino 2.0 (or is that Too?).
the amount of bitching i hear about unity versus the amount of time it takes to install something else (TM) is ridiculous.
It depends about whether you give a flying fuck about the long-term success of Linux. If you don't, sure, switch to KDE, MATE, XFCE or whatever, or just switch distro.
However, if Linux is going to be a contender, then the 'out-of-the-box' experience of one of the most popular and widely publicised Linux distros is pretty damned important, however easy or not it is for an existing Linux-head to fix. In its heyday, Ubuntu was both a 'safe pair of hands' for newbies and a solid distro for everyone else, and Canonical deserve a large slab of kudos for hlping raise the profile of Linux.
UI design has always been the weakest part of Linux - and just as the GUI was beginning to mature the folks at Gnome and Canonical suddenly dump it all in favour of a dumbed-down netbook/tablet-style launcher when even Netbooks had dumped the whole "launcher" idea. OK, Microsoft has done the same, but they have such a huge market share and a big stack of cash that they can piss off users and get away with it.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Hear, hear.
My bad - as AC points out, it's actually CTRL-ALT-F1. Just ALT-F1 brings up my Mate menu.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Xubuntu and Kubuntu are community respins. It is laudable that Canonical lets these projects exist in the same repo's as its flagship product Ubuntu, but Canonical is not actively involved in these respins.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
So they're going to have one frozen release and a continuous rolling release... just like Debian.
*** It depends about whether you give a flying fuck about the long-term success of Linux. If you don't, sure, switch to KDE, MATE, XFCE or whatever, or just switch distro. ***
Do you suggest that people use (and keep using) something they detest, so they help make the thing they detest the biggest success in Linux out there, because Linux needs to gain somewhere and Canonical with its harebrained ideas was at some point in time the most popular? Even when you yourself lambast them for their UI-cide?
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
Hi,
I'm absolutely pro rolling releases but I'd like to know how you feel about that.
Please vote here: pollator.com/polls/are-you-pro-contra-rolling-releases-in-ubuntu/votes/new
Thanks for your opinion!
Control-Alt-T?
Yes....curse people and their opinions!
Kubuntu is no longer official, and the KDE packages have been moved from main to the universe repository. http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/kde/
This is why I switched to Debian. Might as well get the packages straight from their source.
Too little.. too late.. I'd been a staunch user/supporter of Ubuntu since 7.04, when I was introduced to it after using Slackware/Redhat/Fedora since 1994. But the Gnome3/Unity b.s. soured me on Ubuntu, and caused me to move to Debian/Mint, which AFAIK, already implements "rolling release"..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Do they have some sort of psychiatric issue that prevents them from behaving like normal human beings?
Umm.. THAT'S what normal human beings DO when they don't like something.. They complain about it, and hopefully stop using it.. AND if you don't
like them complaining about it, don't read the comments.. Otherwise, YOU are the one with the "psychiatric issue"....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I upgrade quite a few older systems with malware-infested XP installs, and up until about a year ago, I'd been installing Ubuntu 10.04, with the users of said systems happy and content with the classic Gnome UI, as I'd theme'ed it as close to XP as I could. When 12.04 was released, I decided to see what this new Unity looked like for myself, since I'd heard all the grief online about it in earlier 2011 versions of Ubuntu, but I only install/use LTS versions. I installed it on a spare drive and put it in my laptop, and after a week of coming close to tearing my hair out by the roots when trying to use it, I decided it was DEFINATELY not for me, BUT perhaps one of my less-techy users might like it.. This was not to be.. I prepared two base installs of 12.04 and installed the drives on two of my XP-to-10.04 users, and after only a few days, they both called me and said "get this $@%#$Q!# off my machine!!" .. I put their 10.04 drives back in their machines, and began to think what I'd was gonna do when 10.04 EOL'ed.. Since then, I've begun moving these and several new upgrades over to Mint/Debian with Cinnamon.. Once again, they're happy as clams..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
and it pays VERY well.
I've used Arch for years, which uses rolling release as well.
I've noticed that rolling release doesn't tend to carry the breakage that dist-upgrade carries, because changes are gradual to the system, one at a time, and don't need to be tested in some arbitrarily defined time, which means they usually get tested more thoroughly too.
I use a fairly old LTS on an Ubuntu workstation at work because that's the same LTS that the hosting company providing our production server supports, which allows me to replicate as much of the production environment as I can.
How is removing the non free as in speech wifi/graphics driver repos supposed to help me when it means my laptop can't connect to the internet or display properly?
I guess FSF's rationale is that it encourages you, going forward, to patronize laptop manufacturers that respect your freedom.
shut up liberal scum
(Never saw what the big buzzy was over Ubuntu in any case. I tried it a couple of times and found it marginally acceptable, but annoying.)
It Just Worked. Debian's ease of upgrade without the headaches. Frozen libraries so shit didn't break as often. No need to wipe and reinstall like Fedora recommends (and yeah, I ran RedHat/Fedora for YEARS, it was practically impossible to upgrade to the next release without wiping and fresh install).
Then Canonical lost sight of the goal.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Guess what? Debian is still pretty much the same as it was in 1998 (but yes, with newer packages, you jokers).
From what I hear, the breakage isn't as bad these days now that some of the developers managed to crawl out of the Stone Age.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
As other posters have mentioned doing, I keep my /home on a separate partition, and I NEVER bother with upgrades: I just back up /home (never actually had to use the backup in such a case, but better safe than sorry), then let the installer reformat all other partitions and do a fresh install. Takes the same amount of time, and I don't worry about those slipups I'm always hearing about where some one little thing somehow doesn't actually get upgraded during someone's upgrade (older version of a library doesn't get replaced, whatever), and hilarity ensues.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Having negative opinions and criticism is all well and good. Posting dozens of "UNITY SUX!!!!1" messages every time Ubuntu is mentioned is neither "having a negative opinion" nor is it critical; it's just dickish and pointless.
Hate Unity? Fine. But that's not what this topic is about, so save it for a time when that's relevant.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
i'm not sure who "most of the user base" is in this case.
it could be said that there just aren't enough ubuntu users out there to get good data (*rimshot*).
personally, i made the switch due to a munted HDD on my netbook. in this case, i downloaded 10.10 netbook remix (which came with unity default). it was my first real experience using any form of linux outside of poking at the scientific linux running on a piece of hardware at my old job, and using terminal in OSX. unity wasn't bad. it was clunky, but several updates later it's a lot better (but still a little clunky).
i launch most stuff from terminal, so beyond the first few seconds of mouse movement, i don't interact with it much.
only upgrade problem i had was with xrandr from 11.04 onward being broken.
that's still not fixed btw. almost a dealbreaker. almost.
the linux ecosystem is in a unique position to innovate. breaking things is just an experiment that didn't work, but the lessons learnt can be integrated into something not broken.
let's face it, if we were real Linux users, we would probably just have posted listings of our XKeysimDB files at each other. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm booted into Snow Leopard
At first I misunderstood that you were violently forced into using SL.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Unity does suck though - there's no denying that.
If rolling releases mean that I can keep upgrading the installed packages (including KDE but NOT including Unity) with the new better shinier versions of the software without ever having to do another major upgrade, reconfigure for the window manager I want and ditch Unity yet again, I am all for it.
However if rolling upgrades means that you might suddenly have Unity (or something similarly horrible) forced on you with a regular upgrade, then I am dead against it.
Before Unity, my pet peeve with Ubuntu was the forcing of Pulseaudio onto the system, before it was anything like stable enough to work properly. Unity isn't the only thing that Ubuntu has dunped on users before it was really ready.
If rolling releases do more of that kind of thing, it will be a disaster for Ubuntu.
I'm booted into Snow Leopard
At first I misunderstood that you were violently forced into using SL.
Only partially. After using MS Windows for years I was getting fed up with constant crashes, BSODs, and new installs when it came tyme to get a new PC. Then I found out MS was treating its customers like criminals. If I buy software I should not have to let that software contact the mother ship to see if it can run. And that's what Activation does. Even on a brand new PC with MS Windows installed, if Windows is not allowed to contact MS servers or an MS phone number is not called, after 30 days Windows will not allow full use of the OS. So when I got a new PC it came with Linux preinstalled, and when I got a laptop I bought my MacBook Pro. Now unless MS stops this if I have a choice I will not buy another MS product.
I wanted to buy Photoshop but because Adobe is also requiring activation I won't be buying it if I don't need to. For now I plan to install Arch Linux, which comes with CinePaint, in a Virtualbox virtual machine.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Let us celebrate your near-success, then.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Anyway people who for some reason feel the need to defend this shell online seem far more angry and aggressive than its detractors.
Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.
But besides, you're missing the point: it's not about whether Unity is good or not (I don't like it). The point is that it's so easy even for a n00b to install something else that it's just annoying and boring to see every Ubuntu-related article filled with discussions about Unity as if it mattered.
--
....I have one thing to say.
The nerdrage is strong with this thread.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
Someone please mod this +5 hilariously true.
Windows 8's only failure was it's inability to be so awesome that the benefits outweighed people's natural fear of change. I've used it. It didn't really impress me, but it wasn't bad enough that I would want to downgrade back to 7 if I had to use a machine that came with it. It's just Windows 7 with a tablet/media server interface duct-taped to it from what I could tell playing with it at Best Buy.
UM, why don.t you try Linux or BSD, then? Too wedded to M$ Office? Please wine!
shut up liberal scum
Shut up republican or liberaarian scum!
Good, points. I like the "upstate" remark but I have a suspicion that it should be applied to Shuttlworth who is too rich to give a damn. I haven't seen Unity run on a tablet. It just seems that was the intent of the design because I just can't see how the one level of indirection to Dash to get at an app that is not on the Unity bar makes any sense, otherwise.
Canonical did not abandon users who want a traditional desktop. You might have heard of Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
True, but there is a problem in the the KDE design too, and some of the tiny window managers trade readability for speed. I am visually impaired and I liked what Gnome 2 did for me. I find the light blue KDE design with the transparent application box to be quite distracting, visually. I do like Mint's interface and Slax too, but I settled on reverting to Gnome Classic and sticking with Ubuntu for these and another reason as well.
I have made a suggestion to Canonical that they allow for users to use three partitions in an install. These would be one for the swap area, and you my not need to have a swap partition or swap files to run it with 3 GB of ram on your system. There would be one for / and another for /home. The reasons should be obvious. Having to backup /home to reinstall Ubuntu is a pain. even
though I do backups of my files, most of my home dir is filled with cache crap put there by poorly documented configurations set up by Canonical. Ubuntu is full of poorly documented pieces, man pages aren't there that should be and depndencies exist for things that are not documented at all. I mentioned gnome tracker. There is no description of what the metadata is, or means to manage it. You can turn off tracking and have unknown effect on file manager operations. In frustration I once did kill -9 on
the teacker daemon and couldn't use some file managers until I rebooted and let tracker run. On my system my disks are busy for a day and a half after any upgrade because of tracker.
These distros are funny. They keep changing how they work and do things. "We're going to do something fresh and different" - abandoning what works. Then they fail. Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu... they've all done it.
Guess what? Debian is still pretty much the same as it was in 1998 (but yes, with newer packages, you jokers).
Please, no name calling.
Debian install is tricky. I've has troubles getting it to work, especially the X11 stuff. I can run from a console and use shell commands, but I want a window manager for some things.
I've used KDE, But I like the older versions of it better. I have vision problems, and I find the light blue and transparent boxes to be difficult to use. I like Slax KDE, and actually liked running KDE under Mandrake from a laptop about four years ago. I like Knoppix and KDE there too.
I still like Gnome, and even after the Unity mess, but I have settled on Gnome Classic.
Yes, my opinion. And unlike in China or America, here in Europe we're free to have our opinions *and* express them without being put in jail or psychiatric hospital.
I did not miss the point though. The point is that the default Ubuntu shell has received heavy criticism, that many users have switched to other distros because of that shell - but that no amount of online abuse directed against them by the fanboys will silence their criticism.
Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.
This is a line by the Dude in The Big Lebowski. It was a joke, never mind. I'm European too, and I express my opinions. I shall proceed to do so thusly:
Complaining about Unity in this comments thread is:
+ Off-topic, because the article is about moving to a rolling release system. Unity has no greater significance to this point than any other package in Ubuntu.
+ Flamebait, because it will provoke a strong negative response, and it won't create interesting, informative or insightful commentary.
+ Retarded, because if you want somebody to take your criticism seriously, you do it at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner.
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For a fan of that movie I've never seen, you sure seem very uptight about rules of conversation. Relax a little on the offtopic worry. Offtopic happens.
As for the other two points you make, I submit that nothing's as retarded as a strong negative response to somebody's opinion expressed on teh internet.
A clever combination of light trolling and misdirection, but you won't distract me from the fact that you haven't addressed my points at all.
Complain about Unity when it's relevant, and then, talk specifically about what's wrong with it. Otherwise, people who need to hear won't listen.
That, drankr, is my message to you. Take it or leave it.
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Well, I think that I did address your point. You want to channel the debate away from the criticism by imposing curiously (for a random comments thread on the net) strict rules, I think this should not be done. Freedom to rant surely must be one of the four freedoms..?
Anyway I don't care about Unity enough to criticize or praise it myself. So I never do. However I strongly defend everyone else's right to criticize it as they please, whether the subject is narrowly related to the shell, or to Ubuntu in a more broad sense, and this considering that Unity is so essential, so central to Ubuntu's identity and what differentiates it from the 400 other Debian-based spins.
The reason I even posted here originally was that the personal insults hurled at people who dislike Unity/Ubuntu are highly disturbing, imo. If that is the quality of the Canonical fanboydom nowadays then I must say that the wine has indeed been watered down.
Freegeek?
Because if he claims it's not bad enough for him to want to downgrade back to Windows 7 why would he think it's bad enough to change operating system entirely?
Have you metaroderated recently?
but debian testing has freezes. Will Ubuntu-Rolling have Freezes half a year before a new LTS?
I don't think Ubuntu will be using alpha releases for normal downloads. It makes sense that alpha releases would be for testers and those who know what they're doing just as with Debian alphas.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?