Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

For what is worth, suspend/resume works on my laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 (a Dell Inspiron 1525) and it was completely broken in Debian testing.

Poor sleep/wake stability was the single biggest reason I gave up on Linux. I was running Ubuntu on my HP nc8430 and had to rush out the door so I closed the lid and didn't wait to make sure it went to sleep properly. I tossed my backpack into my car and when I came back a few hours later I found out the machine never went to sleep. It got so hot that the enclosure actually melted and warped. Probably lucky it didn't catch on fire in there. Amazingly the machine still worked but the physical damage to the enclosure prevents the lid from closing properly and it won't sit flat on a desk anymore.

FWIW, I've been a problem free laptop user of Ubuntu for two years running now. I have an older Dell laptop with the Intel Centrino chipset, Intel wifi, Intel graphics, etc, and everything on it has just worked out of the box since 8.04. It's also the only Linux machine in my house that uses KMS [1], so I get a nice, fast, high resolution display/splash/vte from the moment grub initializes the kernel. All of my desktops have Nvidia cards which also work out of the box with KMS, but enabling the official binary drivers for 3D performance breaks KMS.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting

That's not true.

I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu.

Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra configuration required.

Not only that, but I also got an external 3G modem from Vodafone, that also worked out of the box.

As I've said before ... there are plenty of configurations that are running just fine with Ubuntu, but if you're going to shop at random of course you're going to have problems. Heck ... my external 3G modem wasn't compatible with Vista out of the box, you had to search for an updated driver on the Internet.

I'm trying to make that call at the moment. I've been using Ubuntu on laptops since 5.10 (Badger) and Debian before that. 10.10 has by far the most regressions in it that I've encountered during this time.

If this were my project, I wouldn't be releasing it in this state. I know it's the 10/10 release and presumably 10/10/10 they will hit -- 42 and all that -- but they really need to get some stability into this thing. It's starting to alienate folk.

By raising bugs and doing the legwork I've helped fix quite a few, but two unresolved issues, both involving hardware that worked flawlessly until now, are making me wonder how well my time is being spent.

In addition, Shuttleworth is clearly starting down the road of monetizing Ubuntu, and if I'm going to support that then I want my show-stoppers fixed. Quid pro quo.

Because of this, moving to the Dark Side is looking more and more attractive. I wish it wasn't so.

[Edit: I also have an old Acer on 9.10 that works flawlessly, including the hardware that causes issues in 10.10. I won't be updating it.]

Not true at all. My Lenovo T400S runs Ubuntu Lucid Lynx flawlessly.

In my experience, suspend/resume breaks because of device drivers failing to put their components to sleep properly. The biggest culprit is wireless drivers.

It may be that as they improve wireless support by including more drivers and making it easier to use proprietary ones, they're making the suspend/resume problem harder and harder.

I've fixed several problems like this on a per-machine basis, but the fixes are specific to each piece of hardware (read: "this obviously would break something for someone else if included in the distro").

Most modern fonts are designed to work around limitations of the display medium. It even seems reasonable you could design a font to account for a bad display algorithm.

I've always preferred Window's font rendering because its very readable on a low DPI screen, which is most of the screens out there.

How is FreeType intrinsically better than the Windows font renderer? Microsoft has the advantage of subpixel font rendering (aka ClearType) although admittedly that because it's patented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering#Patents).

It's not shocking to me: people often get used to something, and anything different is "wrong." It can take to adjust to something, even when it's better.

I call it cargo-cult because Shuttleworth makes UI decisions like "move the window buttons" to semi-emulate OSX, but seemingly without doing any research as to why such might succeed or fail. Originally they were even in a different order--his only concession to angry end-users was to arrange them like OSX, in a different order than originally envisioned. Or take the indicator applet: his complaint was that the regular system tray icons are cluttered and disorganized. Solution: reinvent the system tray (which had fairly clear HIG defined by Gnome, which for the most part were followed), almost bit for bit, but with different colored icons, no tooltips, and no default left-click action. If you look at the old system tray and the new indicator applet, they quite literally are almost identical in appearance/clutterdness (yes, he merged mail and IM, and with Maverick merged volume and the music player, so that's two less icons, but the usefulness of those changes is up for debate).

I call it a dictatorship because big decisions like that are made by him, seemingly by fiat. He even calls himself SABDFL (self-appointed benevolent dictator for life).

Shuttleworth is trying to be the Jobs of the OSS world--making design decisions because he thinks he knows software design best. Which is fine--like you said, he's paying for it all. But the difference between him and Jobs is that Jobs defines useable software where Shuttleworth just copies and reinvents. And in my opinion, Shuttleworth doesn't seem to have the insight into users' thought processes that Jobs has.

Again, you're right, the man is paying for it all, so who am I to complain? I can just pick a different distro. But the problem is that with all of these more serious stability problems remaining unsolved and stuff like windicators and indicator applets and fonts getting all the attention, I and others might eventually get fed up and switch to a more stable distro (does one exist? Will I go back to Windows?), or not recommend Ubuntu to friends.

What should I tell my friend: Yeah, install Ubuntu, it's great, but whatever you do, don't let it automatically update because your laptop might never suspend correctly after that?

it was already there in the 10.04, albeit not default

Anybody else think this is the first ever professional looking Linux distro they've ever seen?

Congrats to the Ubuntu team.

And another one: you can upgrade 6.06 (a Long Term Support release) directly to 8.04 (the next Long Term Support release), but to get to 7.04 you had to do incremental upgrades to every intermediate release (6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04).

I guess this is a tiny point, but is there really no supported way to update from the command line?

And before people complain about the command line, this is possible in the GUI as well.

System - Administration - Update Manager

Click "Settings"

Under "Updates" select "Show new distribution releases: Normal releases"

By default if you are running an LTS release, Update Manager assumes you want to update only to the next LTS release. This setting will cause it to prompt you to update to the next non-LTS release and each other from then on.

Youtube is rendered by Flash. Entirely. As in, Ubuntu did not write the software, has no control over it, and can't make it run any faster. Just like Apple and Microsoft can't.

There are also slimmed down Ubuntu versions for older hardware, e.g. Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Those run much faster on aging systems, allowing Ubuntu to support people with newer hardware.

Not to mention that nobody's forcing you to update if you don't want to. For example, 8.04 is still officially supported through April 2011 for desktops and 2013 for servers. Please feel free to continue using that if it works better for you.