Seven Reasons to Upgrade to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
linux.com
linux.com
I tried the beta on a laptop and a desktop, the laptop with an ati card worked great with no real problems (I'm actually still using it),but the desktop with nvidia failed to load without doing an alternate install and changing from free to proprietary drivers but they may have fixed that.
It's labeled Beta because things don't work quite right yet. I find that waiting 3 days is usually enough to get a stable as hell release.
Of course, I'm going to a release party today and am upgrading, so no waiting for me.
Two: 2.6.32 lucid kernel has huge backported patches (especially the DRM code). IMHO, the better kernel is going to be 2.6.33 and later (what with Linus fixing really quirky issues http://lwn.net/Articles/383162/)
I ran fine in 8.4 and thought an upgrade would be nice so I could get all the latest software. I was wrong. At 9.4, Ubuntu broke half my laptop's functionality. 9.10 had the same issues. I read that the patches I needed for some of my problems were already in Lucid, so I upgraded to the latest beta. Lucid fixed my resume issue (with network reconnection! imagine being able to resume but not being able to bring back your network without rebooting).
But still broken since 9.4:
(1) I must close my lid twice in order for the OS to recognize that I want to go to sleep.
(2) I must remap volume keys to other keyboard keys because someone forgot my laptop's situation of having different events for the same key.
(3) I must forget about seeing any kind of splash screen or console display during boot until I get to X login... and forget about using grub2.
I want to get other people to use linux, but if you make your common user have to download and compile random patches from random people on random forums just to get the OS to recognize SLEEP, you failed to provide a working OS. If you provide an Upgrade button in your updater GUI, suggesting an official supported release, you most definitely need to avoid breaking basic working features.
And I have tried out the patch path, tried the uncommon user approach... These things break other features or do not solve the problem at all. I do not have the time to understand the full situation and then fix things that new releases broke because someone thought their refactoring or their new and cool updated driver was better for everyone (I am talking to you, evdev).
It is 2010, and we still cannot get 5-10 year old laptops to work? Sleep? Wireless networking? Video? It makes my old Windows XP installation feel like a breath of fresh air after playing with Ubuntu. The only reason I persist is that I love linux as a development environment.
This is interesting. On 8.10 and 9.10, my laptop won't sleep unless I keep the laptop lid open until it's done.
Premature blogging.
Edit: ... and pulseaudio