Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
ubuntu.com
ubuntu.com
The main beef I have with upgrading Windows though is the time it takes to do so. A while ago I updated someones PC from XP to 7 and when it restarted after the upgrade it just ran like complete crap. Took at least 3 minutes for the desktop to come to a usable state after it had appeared to be fully loaded. This is an experience I find all to often on windows but almost never on Linux. After installing about 8 hours (yes 8 hours) of updates including quite a few .NET frameworks and restarting multiple times, the computer was finally in a state that I considered "acceptable". Started up fast and was responsive within a few seconds of the desktop loading. I was missing a lot of drivers, but I had the driver disc, they were pretty painless for the most part. The resolution still looked a little funky and I found out I had to install the nvidia driver from the website. Was a pretty decent experience after a pretty awful ordeal.
Regarding the time it takes to upgrade windows, Ubuntu too takes the same time for me. I have a fairly good 12mbps connection but still I have never been able to do an upgrade in less than 6hrs.
Use dpkg/synaptic to backup your installed packages and backup your /home...then commit to the time to going fresh install. If you use LTS releases, you'll only be doing it at most every other year.
IMHO, it is worth the time.
how do you figure that?
98% of all configuration is retained, applications do not need to be reinstalled, all your files are where they belong, and it's overall very pain-free if you are tech-savvy enough to do the command line part.
So yes, I would totally rate this as better than upgrading between Windows versions. Even compatible ones like Vista and 7 required much more configuration work afterwards and took longer. Less technical skill required though, but users could just pay someone to do it for them on Linux.
Not sure what it's like to upgrade Mac OS X, I would actually expect the ease of Windows and compatibility like Linux there. I'm kind of curious now.
The upgrade itself completed successfully after I disabled them though.
This is the sort of fragmentation that makes popular adoption difficult, but is also what makes Linux awesome.
For "popular adoption", I'm sure the completely standard Ubuntu install is just fine.
To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.
Usually I just copy my configs over to a next box / laptop that happens to become my workstation, and continue nearly where I left. It worked more or less smoothly for last 7 years.
Yes, sometimes I do fiddle with my settings to make my experience more comfortable and thus my work more productive. I don't think that spending 5-10 minutes a month on it is such a waste.
Turns out there are technical terms for the behavior. For OSes, you and I are satisficers: we just want it to be good enough. I used to be a maximizer, where I wanted it to be perfect.
Learning to choose which approach to take in a situation has been really great. For example, restaurant menus. I used to be a maximizer, trying to pick the best thing. Eventually I decided agonizing over my choice was a fair bit of stress for little or no gain; it was easy to finish my meal and think, "Damn, maybe I should have gotten that other thing." Now I just skim the menu and go with the first thing that looks good to me.
So far the only other serious contender seems to be elementary OS, it is the BEST looking linux distro.
Is this a case of better defaults? Or is it just as simple as different themes and window managers?
I agree with this in principle, but it confuses me as to why FreeBSD is not, then, much more popular...
We use FreeBSD exclusively at rsync.net, and I used FreeBSD as my personal workstation from 2000 - 2007. Perhaps all the other FreeBSD people just switched to OSX, like I did.
Plus https://extensions.gnome.org/ is incredible.
P.S. - [2] this is my personal optimization script for a lean and developer friendly Gnome Ubuntu 14.04 install. YMMV.
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGNOME/GetUbuntuGNOME
[2] https://gist.github.com/sandys/6030823#file-lean_install_ubu...
Plus, if you dont like certain things - you can customize it within seconds using extensions.gnome.org (for example - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ )
I think all the design decision by Unity are a bit jarring for me - including all the left-window-close-maximize things. BTW, if you follow my script, Unity is not really wiped out, but certain heavy applications (like Nautilus/Gedit) are replaced by lightweight alternatives (like Nemo/Geany).
P.S. were you not surprised by the weird way Nautilus groups icons now ?
Same with Nautilus.
The main thing that's holding me back is that my machines aren't massively powerful - do you know if Gnome is as resource-hungry as Unity?
The only difference is that GNOME makes more serious use of your graphics card.
KDE with lots of effects >> Unity ~= KDE with fewer effects > GNOME ~= Xfce >> LXDE
One of the first things I recommend is aptitude over apt-get and that manages your stale packages much better. (for e.g. aptitude will offer to remove unused packages each time you remove an installed package, whereas apt-get will only do that if explicitly asked to with apt-get autoremove.)
Alt+Tab is completely broken: it gathers windows from all virtual desktops, ruining the very purpose of virtual desktops. There are plug-ins that help, but they keep breaking after version updates and they don't function as sleek as Unity's built-in default window switcher.
Gnome's "workspaces" are not as powerful as traditional virtual desktops. The biggest problem is that they're dynamic: for example Gnome won't let you have an empty workspace - it will kill it and re-arrange apps from adjacent workspaces to fill the space.
Last, but not least, Gnome's way of launching apps gives me nausea: it insists on animating every pixel on my 30" desktop every time I want to launch an application.
Finally, Unity is much more responsive and less buggy, at least on my (modest) hardware: 2 year old i5 with Intel graphics.
This is kind of an opinion. There is no rule book that says it needs to behave a certain way. I prefer this.
>ruining the very purpose of virtual desktops
I use virtual desktops to separate windows in overview mode so when they're presented for picking they aren't really small. And also for organization.
>Gnome's "workspaces" are not as powerful as traditional virtual desktops. The biggest problem is that they're dynamic: for example Gnome won't let you have an empty workspace - it will kill it and re-arrange apps from adjacent workspaces to fill the space.
Why would you need an empty workspace (except at the end, which gnome provides)? Seems to make since to me. It doesn't really "re-arrange apps" it just moves the work spaces to fill in the empty gap.
>Last, but not least, Gnome's way of launching apps gives me nausea: it insists on animating every pixel on my 30" desktop every time I want to launch an application.
Eh.. Animations aren't for everyone. They have not bothered me though, and I think for most users it provides a better experience than just having things "happen".
>Finally, Unity is much more responsive and less buggy
I'm running gnome 3.11 on an i5 with intel graphics also, and it seems pretty snappy, after all, it's just javascript. I have not experienced any bugs outside of experimental software I installed. To be honest, I have never experienced a snappier desktop than gnome 3.
In case you wanted more proof of this I think both of these are wrong and it should be by window not application. Thankfully MATE does this and is coincidentally available now in Ubuntu 14.04.
That's also the default on Xfce.
Why would you need an empty workspace (except at the end,
which gnome provides)? Seems to make since to me.
It doesn't really "re-arrange apps" it just moves
the work spaces to fill in the empty gap.
In practice, that's not likely to happen to me often, since I leave all of my workspaces open and populated nearly all the time, but it's still an option that I would turn off if I could.
I love the fact that I can choose between many great options.
To me, this is the problem. I don't want to rely on extensions that will potentially break when Gnome updates or be abandoned when their developers move on to other things. I also don't want to be forced to spend hours fiddling with settings in order to get something that isn't completely broken. I just want my stuff to work.
I also find the graphical nonsense in Gnome 3 and KDE 4 nauseating. They make for some sexy Youtube videos (like Compiz when it first came out) but for day-to-day use I find them awful (and shockingly buggy, but that's another debate).
I'm actually impressed at how they built a javascript API to be able to mess with core UX !
2. static workspace - this is actually fixed in 3.10 (part of 14.04) now. Enabled by the Gnome Tweak tool
3. slow animation - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/
Gnome 3.10 is really good and incredibly good slick alternative to Mac - without being a clone. 3.12 is likely to be better.
Example: http://i.imgur.com/bKGyEo3.png
See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME#Reduce_title_bar_...
But the tweak tool lets you change the font size which was enough for me. I also installed htitle to firefox to hide the title bar when full screen.
FTFY
That is the only weird issue I've had, apart from that 14.04 is a very solid release.
An aversion to orphaned software is clearly good for things at a security boundary (web browsers, sshd, etc), but is it really an issue for a launcher? In 3-5 years it may not be good enough, but shrug, if that's the case I'll have another look around then. It's not like launchers have lock-in.
If synapse ever stops doing what I want I'll probably take a stab at writing one.
I am grateful for this choice.
This thing cold boots on my non-UEFI laptop in 4-5 seconds. That's at the same level as Windows 8.1, which also impressed me greatly.
Now if they can only get systemd and the "online in 50ms" updates implemented, this thing will be super-sweet.
What's the point to shut down your machine, and either lose your session or wait considerable time while it restores?
If it spends 30 seconds before you get to the login screen on good hardware, there's no telling how much things are going on and how it will affect your battery life.
A fast boot process is also telling about good engineering in general, as it implies more things are decoupled and can be loaded independently, instead of being queued in a one-by-one sequence.
So in itself, a fast boot is not that important, but when they manage to cut it in two compared to what I'm used to, that gives me confidence they are doing the right things in general.
KDE has to many buttons for me :)
I think it's more of a desktop for people who are use to using a lot of advanced features on Windows, because they're used to and enjoy the idea of having a button for this and a window and sub-menu for that. GNOME is more for people who either don't use advanced features, or use the terminal for advanced features.
Personally I'm over the traditional desktop.
As for configurability KDE has quite a few more years under it's belt, so it's not a surprise, but GNOME 3 is all JS and CSS so I would say it's pretty configurable and the number of extensions is only going to increase. I think extensions will become much more stable around GNOME 4.0, when they come out with a full OS [1]
[1]http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0ODg
I previously thought it was growing pains and they would eventually land on a great style that was still "theirs", but at this point it feels like a lost cause. Personally I've stopped recommending Ubuntu on the desktop because I already know what the initial reaction to a fresh install is going to be.
And the lack of a flat UI does not count as an argument - that's just a fashion trend.
Also, my own anecdotal experience does not match yours. I often get surprised (as in "wow, that looks nice!") questions of "That's not Windows/OSX? What is that?" from people when I show something on my laptop.
But be that as it may, I doubt this is what causes the downvoting. I'm pretty sure a statement like "colors and icons are ugly" would have provoked a similar reaction.
Stating something like "X is inconsistent with Y making the whole thing restless and messy, and if they did the font alignment like this the whole thing would have a more orderly clean look" wouldn't have.
Saying "X is ugly" is not much use and is mean, thus more likely to attract downvotes.
Saying "I think X is ugly. Here's why {list of subjective reasoning}" may be useful and is not as mean.
(Note that I'm not saying Nathan Osullivan is necessarily wrong in his judgement - I might disagree with it but he can still have valid reasons for disliking it. It's just that it's pretty a useless remark if he gives no arguments why he has that opinion)
Negative energy is quite unproductive.
Then there are the multi-colored icon boxes (why do the icons need boxes around them at all?) that all clash with each other and clash with the (ugly) purplish theme, and clashes against the gradient black top toolbar (which has virtually no padding by the way).
It doesn't take a great designer to notice these things, god knows I'm not one. But I've worked with designers at every company I've worked for, small or big, and all of them would have done a (much) better job than Unity. Which tells me either no designers were involved or they were outvoted at every decision.
The default Ubuntu font is just not consistent and readable enough for a UI. They need to find something like Segoe UI, that gets out of the way and is easy to read.
I really do agree with the gp and your opinions regarding the design. It is important, and I do think Ubuntu should get some outside opinions for the next LTS and revamp their design based on some of the fundamental practices.
I do enjoy tweaking the fonts until it pleases my eyes most. I've been using Source Code Pro as the monospace font for quite a while now. Currently trying out Alegreya Sans and its variants for the regular system font - kind of controversial among my designer friends: some of them consider it too "serify".
I could sit and tweak a Linux install for hours, kind of like an old car. But of course I never get any work done that way.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/unity-7-to-get-new-window-dec...
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html
[2] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2337185/ubuntu-to-d...
Your comment is only comparing LXDE with other desktop managers, instead of comparing different versions of Lubuntu.
EDIT: It occurs to me you may have mistaken "LTS" for the desktop manager name (LXDE) when you replied. LTS means "Long Term Support".
I want to keep all my apps, aliases, .bashrc edits, etc. Thankfully, I don't do this often enough that I remember the process at 7 am?s
And they also gave it some thought to make sure it looks good out of the box.
All Unity-refuge-seeking, but otherwise Ubuntu (Debian++) lovers should have a look at it. :)
* most sane defaults ever found on a distro * installs load of extra privacy/ convenience plugins in Firefox by default * got all codecs build in from installation
This distro just feels a lot more solid then Kubu ever did to me.
Anyone know if 14.10 works better with nvidia cards?
Will it save me time and headache, it involves in getting things fixed on cutting-edge Linux and getting them to work, if I switch to Kubuntu?
Best decision I ever made. OS X hasn't disappointed me yet. I don't have to worry about driver/sound problems or incompatible libraries every other week.
You haven't seen any of those problems, good for you. But the fact is that a lot of people do see them, which is the reason people give out for Linux being hard to use. I mean, Ubuntu is supposed to represent Linux for the average user, and look at the state of Unity, Gnome2/3 divide, Pulseaudio or Alsa? So on and so fourth...
I used to be one of those guys who made faces at OS X being all expensive and why would I use that when I can get the same thing to work with Linux. But the fact of the matter is, it does make a difference. A LOT of difference. I can still drop into Linux. I don't regret moving away from it one bit.
For the problems, it sounds like I've been ok by avoiding nVidia for these years. I did the upgrade over the weekend and it went smoothly. I'm even finding a few things to like about it. (For the most part, I wouldn't even notice I have upgraded.)
Contrast that with my trying to use the work issued Macbook. I pretty much hate it. Has a nice screen, though. I could probably get to like the touchpad.
My wife's Windows computer is similar in my not liking it. Even she has complained about some of the UI choices, lately. Though, she can get what she wants done and doesn't necessarily see a reason to change.
But I'm actually not sure which is better? I'm guessing dailies are the same as releases, but with updates already applied? If so, dailies are probably better.
And then there's and AMI locator: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/
I am able to ping it but every port look like closed. Anyone have had a similar experience so far?