Ubuntu, Kubuntu 13.10 Unleashed

llebeel writes "Canonical announced its free Ubuntu 13.10 Linux operating system (OS) release, on the same day as Microsoft's remedial Windows 8.1 service pack update. We speak to Canonical founder and Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth who tells us what to expect." Adds reader jrepin: "Kubuntu Linux 13.10 has just been released and is available for download. It comes with KDE Software Compilation 4.11, a new application for discovering and installing software, a simpler way to manage your system users. and a new Network Manager applet gives a simpler UI for connecting to a range of network types. You can now setup Wifi networking from the installer making it easier to install updates and extra packages during the install." ZDNet has a fairly tepid review of the incremental rather than startling improvements of the new release, and notes "Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, due for release on 17 April next year, will now perhaps come as even more of a shock if its promised big changes are fully realised."

Comments

ZDNet Article

[imnes]

Just me or is this a circular link?

Re:ZDNet Article

[telchine]

It's not you... this is the link:

http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-13-10-a-desktop-tour-slideshow-7000021826/

Re:ZDNet Article

[gabereiser]

And how is the linked ZDNet "review" a review? It's just a glorified slideshow...

Re:ZDNet Article

[Stewie241]

Yeah, but think of all the page views they get by simply taking a bunch of screen shots and writing two sentences for each screen shots. Gone are the days when you have to write 15 full paragraphs to get a five page article. Now all you have to do is take a few screen shots and make up inane sentences to go with them.

What's more, is that they don't even manage to ruin the surprise of what the experience is actually like.

Proper ZDNet Link

[mike.rimov]

ZDNet link was bad. Proper one is Here

Ubuntu good for linux?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I think in the early days Ubuntu was very good for linux. It showed that you could have a linux install that was fairly user friendly. Then it got better and better. But then suddenly it seemed to become Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu. Now it seemed to be a Red Hat envying I want to become a tech billionaire Ubuntu. Next it was an iPhone envying I want to be Steve Jobs Ubuntu. The key symptom of this being that it was both trying to appease the Linux crowd all the while annoying them to death all the while making sure their PR department was working overtime.

Then along came the Linux Mints, they saw what Ubuntu had been and focused on that. As someone who is asked by many people "What kind of computer should I get?" I will only be advising Linux mint for those people where Linux is a good fit; that is those people who surf the web, send gmails, watch YouTube, and type the occasional document.

The worst part of this for Ubuntu is that with all the hype hype hype they could make Ubuntu pretty awesome and I still wouldn't believe it and ever go back.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[SJHillman]

Ubuntu was my first real exposure to Linux, mostly thanks to being able to boot to a live CD from a high school computer to get around the Internet filtering. Once I actually started doing more than web browsing, games and word processing, I quickly moved on to Mint.

I still use Ubuntu Server once in a while if I need to set up a basic, no frills server for some limited task. It's well documented, so it's pretty easy to get something up and running quickly although I'd likely never use it in a business production environment.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[Maskull]

These days, I prefer to think of Ubuntu as being akin to Mac OS X or Android: it's an operating system which is built on a Unix core, but it doesn't want to be a "Unix OS". So you shouldn't expect it to act like a normal Linux distribution, because it's intentionally trying to hide all the things you expect to be there. Personally, that's not what I want.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[umafuckit]

I think in the early days Ubuntu was very good for linux. It showed that you could have a linux install that was fairly user friendly.

Other distros, like SuSE, had achieved this before Ubuntu was released.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[div_2n]

It's not rocket science. Rightly or wrongly Canonical has decided that the future of general computing is in the mobile space and they are working on getting Ubuntu there and bridging the gap between the mobile computing experience and the desktop computing experience.

In simplest of terms, they're trying to make a distro that can be both a phone and a desktop all in the same device. Again -- rightly or wrongly -- they have decided that they needed to move certain things in house to best accomplish that goal (Mir) and needed a specific interface they were in control of to scale between display form factors (Unity).

If you are a person that thinks this direction is wrong and will hurt Linux in the long run, then you belong in the "bad for Linux" category. I'm a person that thinks this is absolutely the best way for Linux to finally have its "year of the desktop" similar to how Apple made their comeback but with a twist -- by providing a compelling mobile experience with a device that just so happens to be able to double as someone's desktop when they want a bigger screen.

Pay attention to plunging desktop sales numbers. As people find ways to make mobile devices and tablets their only computing devices, this strategy will start to look smarter and smarter. Whatever else you think of Canonical (and by extension Ubuntu), this will either make them or break them.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[Kjella]

Well, Red Hat found a profitable market. Apple found a profitable market. Google found a profitable market. Has Canonical? They're a private company so we don't really know but as late as a call this year announcing Ubuntu for Tablets they said they were not. Nor can I spot any big and obvious cash flows to indicate they would be, they're a contender in various areas but no big cash cows. It's the same as when Red Hat shut down Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux) in favor of the Fedora project, sure RHL was great for the community but Red Hat didn't see how they'd make any money on it. About ten years down the road and Ubuntu is exactly in the same spot, they have the same market and it's still not making any money. I think Canonical is suffering the investor's itch, they don't want to wait another decade to see returns.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[JohnnyMindcrime]

Not at all. I hardly ever recommend Linux to non-techies because I've seen the issues it often causes.

I have absolutely no problem with intelligent discussion with anyone on the pros and cons of Linux, but why do so many of the anti-Linux people make these generalised, sweeping statements about Linux without putting any meat into their points?

Precisely what issues have you seen Linux cause?

I've given a number of friends and family the opportunity to try Linux out, mainly because they themselves tell me they don't want to end up having to use Windows 8. All of them still have Windows to use, I've either done them a dual boot on their hard disk, or made them up a bootable CD or USB stick to use when they feel like it.

I get questions asking me how to do certain things or find certain things in Linux, in which case I tell them the answer or give them a bit of help to get something to work right - but none of it's an "issue" because I help them fix it.

It's just strikes me as very selfish to say "I can't recommend it to you because I haven't got the time to help you out when there's a problem" and, to be honest, you probably are best off staying away from Linux completely if that is your attitude to helping others with it.

Re:Ubuntu good for linux?

[everdred]

I have absolutely no problem with intelligent discussion with anyone on the pros and cons of Linux, but why do so many of the anti-Linux people make these generalised, sweeping statements about Linux without putting any meat into their points?

Precisely what issues have you seen Linux cause?

"Anti-Linux" is among the least-accurate labels you could use to describe me. However, I've been using it as my primary desktop OS for long enough to develop a memory of a range of bugs that range from "minor annoyance" to "headache" to "complete showstopper." As my Linux knowledge has increased over the last eight years, and as my skills have improved, the issues have become easier to deal with.

However, what is today a "minor annoyance" to me would be a "complete showstopper" for non-techies like, say, my parents. I have a specific example from the last month.

I'm running Debian on a recent model ThinkPad. Things should be pretty smooth, right — geek use these! It's normally not a problem, but surprisingly, there are times that the machine fails to suspend properly. That sucks, but not as badly as what happens next: my root partition suddenly becomes full. It seems my syslog, kern.log and messages files get repeatedly filled with the same error message, until they are each multiple gigabytes in size and the root partition has no free space left. Now, because I've learned things over the years, I wrote a small script with sed that cleans out instances of the error from the log files. The problem is, because my root partition is full, the script can't clean up the files unless some space is first freed up. So I first move some large files to another partition, then run the script. Annoying, but with that and a reboot, it's good as new.

Here's another one from a few years back: I remember having some kind of problem that would cause an error message when logging in to my Gnome desktop. I'd click OK and it would send me back to the login screen. The solution was to edit or delete some file from my home directory before restarting GDM and logging back in. Simple, right? Right... if you know how to use vi or nano or something.

My parents will never, ever have the skills to diagnose and correct a problem like this. They would be completely screwed until I come by to perform a magical 30-second fix. It's not that I don't want to help them; I just can't always be around to fix what to them would be "complete showstoppers."

Re:Also: Xubuntu 3.10

[binarylarry]

Xubuntu 3.10 now has support for virtual memory!

Awesome! Maybe my new 56k modem will have a working driver!

Left out an important one

[wjcofkc]

Ubuntu GNOME, a version of Ubuntu that replaces Unity with GNOME was also release as a 13.10 final derivative today. I've been using it since the beta and it's pretty nice. While it ships with GNOME 3.8, it can be upgraded to 3.10

http://ubuntugnome.org/ubuntu-gnome-13-10-is-released/

Re:Left out an important one

[binarylarry]

GNOME is the only DE more fucked up than Unity.

Re:Left out an important one

[wjcofkc]

I can only guess that binarylarry has not used GNOME in a great while. Personally, I hated GNOME for many years and for many reasons. It was 3.8\3.10 that brought me back. They provide an elegant experience with everything you need minimal clicks or keyboard shortcuts away. I challenge anyone to spend a week with either and not come back having had a good experience.

Re:Holy Coincidence Batman

[SJHillman]

That's a good one, now how about a crazy theory about why the moon landing and the last public Beatles performance were in the same year?

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[armanox]

It's a much nicer interface then GNOME. I'd install Unity on Fedora if it worked.

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[DeathToBill]

I agree. I don't get all the Unity hate here. It's a GUI that lets me do most things without moving my hands from the keyboard. What's not to like?

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[freeze128]

I didn't like it because the application bar on the left only had a teeny little arrow pointing to the icon when the app was running. It wasn't obvious at first what that meant.

All the HATE that you refer to is probably because unity sends your local search query out to the internet. That way, Canonical can see when you're searching your own hard disk for "Hot llama porn.mpg".

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[fph il quozientatore]

People like what they're used to, even if it's not necessarily the best thing.
That's why it takes an awful lot of work to convince someone to switch from Windows to Linux, especially when they are at a point in which regedit-hacking is "natural" and "easy" to them.
That's why neither Emacs nor Vi have adopted standard rest-of-the-world shortcuts such as ctrl+c, ctrl+v, after they've been around for, like, 30 years?
That's why you can't remove an option or change something in a software without disrupting someone's workflow (I'm too lazy to look up the relevant xkcd).
My answer is: forget about these old get-off-my-lawn users grumbling and go on, especially if what you are doing makes sense from a usability point of view. Focus on making things easy for new users instead.

(I guess I can kiss my karma goodbye - I have probably offended every possible category of Slashdot users here.)

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[rotaryexpress]

Right now it's fashionable to hate Unity/Canonical.

I use Unity on all of my desktops/laptops and find it fast, stable and productive. Incremental updates is what you want from a mature, well designed product, not massive changes every single release.

Incremental improvements underwhelming?

[HalAtWork]

Operating system updates should only have incremental improvements.

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[Mathieu Lu]

oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.org/1172/ ;)

Lubuntu

[forpeterssake]

Don't forget Lubuntu. The LXDE variant of Ubuntu is, in my opinion, and under-appreciated distro. The stability and community support of Ubuntu, with the speed of the lightweight LXDE and without that distracting Unity stuff. For older PCs or machines with modest specs, this has repeatedly been my distro of choice. 13.10 added Zram for the live CD too, which will help with low spec machines. By the way, Lubuntu is a good choice for former windows users because of the familiar taskbar, window, and menu layout. I never did get used to having the buttons on the left when I used Ubuntu.

Re:"promised big changes"

[0123456]

linux 'fragmentation' is a real problem.

as soon as some distro gets their gui for mgmt working, they change it and start all over again ;(

Windows fragmentation is a real problem. As soon as we get used to the latest version of their GUI, they change it and start all over again.

Re:Biggest problem with Ubuntu: Upgrades

[0123456]

It's a GUI that lets me do most things without moving my hands from the keyboard. What's not to like?

You don't quite get this GUI thing, do you?