New Ubuntu in 9 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes and 29 seconds
thisisthecountdown.com
thisisthecountdown.com
Some meaningless marketing spew, some social network stealth tracking widgets, and not a single link to any meaningful information. After the recent interresting design choices, the unity disaster and now this it is probably time to look for a distribution that doesn't think of it's users as mindless drones easily distracted by empty shiny things. Any recommendations?
On the other hand, if you're looking for something not too far from Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora might be better options.
The machines are also fairly ageing, and don't support the composited desktop. I did test Ubuntu 11.10 beta on one, but it was so slow (with what I assume was Unity 2D) that it would be unusable for day-to-day work. All we use at work are Chrome, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and Audacity - why would we need Unity? Why can't we turn it off?
For me, Ubuntu definitely peaked at 10.04 and I'm going to be looking elsewhere in the near future.
Now, Sir, Just what do you call 'older'?
Our older users are in their 60s and 70s. We're a non profit radio station and several of our volunteers have never used a computer before, or have had only a passing involvement with them.
What sound software do you use? Does it involve Jack?
Looks like you may be able to keep Ubuntu with a current release and configure Gnome Fallback, looking like Gnome 2 to your users.
(Apologies for multiposting - just saw this)
Well it.... did... make it to the Top spot on...ummm.. HN....
Oh well, I always thought archlinux has a interesting philosophy of simplicity and I also like rolling releases
And the Gnome people seem to have gotten at least some of the message gurkendoktor mentions in another thread - they have screenshots of the core features of the product in action and videos showing how different UI flows work.
Even softpedia provides a way to do it: http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-GNOME-3-on-Ubu...
That might partly be because Ubuntu has thrown its effort into its default Unity, while Fedora has put effort into its default Gnome Shell.
How hard is it to type "ubuntu" in your browser?
It's a countdown.
Even without any other information about it, it's safe to assume new and current versions of everything.
> why they're making a fuss
Because they are launching a new version in 9 days.
> why I should care.
That's one question only you can possibly answer.
This site is a big dollop of hype. Should I expect anything to back it up?
Or are you actually answering 'no' and I'm too dense to pick it up?
I just moved the PC to Debian Squeeze as the package management methodology is familiar. Gnome 2 supported for another 18 months or so (perhaps longer depending on the time it takes for the testing version to become the new stable). I suppose it depends on the versions of the software you need access to.
I also moved to a tiling window manager, dwm, prompted by the need to purchase a new monitor and getting a largish widescreen one. The 'stack' of windows runs down the right hand side, the 'main' window is on the left. I've set the split to 60/40. There are 9 tags (aka workspaces) and hibernate to disk works well, so I have stable window layouts that work for weeks...
Xubuntu is fine on the netbook, students can understand the one panel at the bottom.
As a developer, Unity's handling of multiple terminal windows is extraordinarily ham-fisted. Say you have a web browser and three terminal windows; when you Alt-Tab from the browser, only one of the terminals appears in the list. And when you switch to it, all of the open terminals gain focus. So when I want to have one terminal open on top of my browser (e.g. so I can see part of the page underneath) I have to minimize all of the other terminals. If I don't, as soon as I focus the one terminal, the others also pop up over top of my work.
And on top of that, much of the (desktop) system is still very unreliable. Unity crashes, Compiz crashes, the battery status applet crashes, etc. (Yes, all have been reported on Launchpad, some for well over a month now.)
I'm unfortunately committed at this point, but perhaps my words of warning will save others who think "it's almost done, so I'll help out the community by installing and testing the beta". There's only 9 days left to go, and I don't see how they're going to deliver a reliable and robust release on time.
That seems incomprehensible: They're (presumably) developers. But they make these choices or changes, and instantly and persistently I am stumbling over the results of those decisions.
I often run into that exact problem with OSX. That is partially why I'm considering trying out Xmonad.
I hesitate to defend Unity, but why would you open multiple terminal windows? gnome-terminal supports tabs natively, and tmux offers an even better multiplexing solution that works with any terminal emulator.
> I'm unfortunately committed at this point
I assume you mean you're committed to Oneric, but you can stay on Oneric without sticking with Unity. Gnome 3 and XFCE are both viable options that feel a lot more finished than Unity.
I have used Ubuntu betas before and I can assure you the last couple weeks or so are the worst, but with everything straightening up nicely in the final days.
My bet is it will be ready on time, this cycle being no different than previous ones. Some kinks may remain, as the user base is not that big to stress out everything that can go wrong, but I am filing bugs as they hit me (they are more or less automatically filed into Launchpad) and the current update version I am running is much better than the out-of-the-box beta 2.
As always, if you can't waste time, I would advise you to only install a month after the launch.
The point is not that I can't find information on what it is about. But why make it so hard and so little fun?
I probably missed it; what's so radical about this release? It's not even an LTS.
Unity is probably getting more usable. It's now got a pretty built-in backup tool. The App store thingy is better. There's something called juju, which is a "DevOps" branded deployment package, or something. It uses words "cloud", "DevOps", "charms" (wtf?) and so on, and is probably just a wrapper on apt-get, but hey, we all need new buzzwords (and I'll look into it if it stops me shooting myself in the foot too much).
Also, the lightweight distros are probably getting to the "heavy enough to use, but not too Spartan" stage that the Gnome haters want, but will become bloated in 2 years time (and the anti-bloat crowd will jump onto xmonad or something ... why can't they just maximize a terminal?).
The more things change ...
Not at all.
Juju is for quickly assembling servers or clusters on AWS or any OpenStack-compatible platform. The charms are what you use to define what the machines provide and what they require to work in order to let juju assemble the whole thing for you. I was with some of the guys working on it until yesterday, at the PythonBrasil conference. They made a couple presentations on it.
Unity is new and it's probably going to take a while to work out the kinks. I'm very pleased that Ubuntu is looking to move past the GNOME vs KDE paradigm that has dominated Linux desktop development for the past decade. I think they will be successful in Unity.
I was really impressed with 11.04 when I installed it. About 2 hours later when I had to do some real work it was less useful and I started using Xubuntu instead but I'm confident that they will get it right because they have made it a priority and they are trying something different.
As a matter of fact, Ubuntu's getting so much buggier and buggier with each release, that I'm just downgrading from Natty to Maverick.
What a huge disappointment.
My favorite superswitcher features is that I can change to an opened window by typing its name. Switching windows this way is very fast and has improved my work flow greatly. http://code.google.com/p/superswitcher/ I have superswitcher set to capslock key since I don't usually use capslock.
I also use and like unity super+NUMBER key launchers.
I like not having to spend the time keeping packages up to date, and to know that my system is approximately a 2011 vintage.
Of course I install my most frequently used programs from source.
It looks like it's a countdown for something else.
Ubuntu is turning into such a mess.
When I tried to have gnome-panel overlaid on Unity, I wasn't able to right-click the panel to configure it... there went my idea.
Another major hit: I noticed they officially brought in a central control-panel concept for user settings. Great! Except that to change 'obscure' things like your system fonts or your SCREENSAVER, you need to manually download the 'gnome-tweak-tool' package. That's right, most people won't even be able to change their screensaver settings.
Ubuntu seems to be doing some really neat stuff on the server side, so my interest is still piqued there. On the desktop, though, I might be going with Linux mint Debian Edition or straight-up Debian very soon.
That all having been said, it's really, really hard to beat the simplicity of Cardapio and Docky[1]. I feel very comfortable here.
Now, if we could just fix the font debacle that is Linux. [2]
[1] Caradpio+docky http://i.minus.com/iA94EsbEeR2fz.png
[2] Note how the menus are different here in each application. http://i.imgur.com/ER4pR.png (Firefox, native gnome-terminal, qt VLC)