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Comment by abbot2 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest "what's new" page looks, well, not very convincing: https://help.ubuntu.com/13.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html

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As someone who doesn't use the dash, I am wondering what's in it for me.

Personally I've tried a few distributions over the last year or so because I've been unhappy with unity but Ubuntu's ease of use still makes me return to it, although right now I'm typing this from a Debian box. I didn't like the dreadful* gnome3 speed so switched to i3. Now if I could just work out how to stop the lazy window focus...

The trouble is is that it looks like a bag of crap right now. The font rendering is all over the place, I'd be embarrassed to use this at home although it is more productive for work than anything else I've used lately.

This might all be "my fault" because I haven't properly installed the right modules or drivers or whatever, or maybe I've not properly set up my Xorg.conf or ~.i3/config but ubuntu always just worked which is why I kept returning to it.

*Possibly because this is a VM running inside windows.

> As someone who doesn't use the dash, I am wondering what's in it for me.

All other packages are updated as well. (Freshly rebased on top of Debian unstable.) So it really depends on what you are doing and which packages you are using.

>I am wondering what's in it for me.

If you're on 13.04 support ends in January.

So Continuing security patches, bug fixes, and updated features are in it for you.

Assuming you are running 13.04 currently then you'll have a 3.8 kernel. 13.10 has a 3.11 kernel so you also get:

(3.11) http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.11 (3.10)http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.10 (3.9) http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.9

What do you mean by 'lazy window focus'?

I'm guessing that it has to do with the focus behaviour of the mouse. If that's the case then it would be the 'focus_follows_mouse' variable. It is set thusly:

http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_focus_follows_mouse

Then again I may be sadly, sadly mistaken.

If you want more information about new features/packages have a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SaucySalamander/ReleaseNotes#New_fea...

It's a bit sparse maybe. And as "early" adopters, we probably don't care about the social crap etc. But as long as I can yank those packages whenever I want, I'm fine with that.

What I'm really excited about this time around is the launch of Ubuntu Touch, being able to use an open-source OS on my mobile phone.

> an open source OS on my mobile phone

You can do that now with Firefox OS, and unlike Ubuntu Touch, it's actually developed openly. Ubuntu for phones is open source in the same sense as Android -- developed behind closed doors by a company that doesn't particularly care about community input.

If you think that Ubuntu for phones is really going to be any more open than Android, I expect you'll be disappointed.

- All Ubuntu Touch development happens publicly on a mailing list and in IRC.

- All the Ubuntu Touch specs are public and discussed during a public developer summit online.

- Daily images and snapshots for everyone

- Weekly hangouts with community members and status reports.

- Nearly all of the core apps shipping on the image are community contributed.

It's nice that you are excited about Firefox OS (me too), but seriously there's no need to go around making things up about another OSS project.

> All the Ubuntu Touch specs are public and discussed during a public developer summit online.

Interesting. Can you point me to the online discussion of Mir that took place during the first six months of its development?

> Nearly all of the core apps shipping on the image are community contributed.

... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.

> seriously there's no need to go around making things up about another OSS project.

The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious. My criticism isn't about promoting FFOS, it's about calling Canonical out on their bad behaviour.

[1]: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

> Interesting. Can you point me to the online discussion of Mir that took place during the first six months of its development?

Ubuntu Touch switched to Mir a week ago and was using SurfaceFlinger up until then.

Sure Mir began life as a close proof of concept but has been OSSed for a long time now, certainly long enough to see if it was a good fit for Ubuntu Touch. We could argue whether Mir is now part of Ubuntu Touch or just a component of it but that's just arguing semantics.

> ... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.

If you don't like signing a CLA you don't have to sign it. You don't have to contribute if you don't want to. You're also free to fork any of the CLA'ed software as you see fit.

> The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious.

Wayland isn't a fit for Ubuntu. In order to deliver the things we want in time for 14.04/14.10 we prefer to maintain our own stack. That's not being any less open than anyone else, it's just how it is, shrug.

Neither does the 13.04 version either:

https://help.ubuntu.com/13.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html

or 12.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html

and 12.04 is even more sparse!:

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html

The requested URL /12.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html was not found on this server.

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