Hands on with Ubuntu 14.04 | Hacker News Reader

Hands on with Ubuntu 14.04

zdnet.com

72 pointstanglesome88 comments

I'm very impressed with ubuntu lately. Despite all the drama in the blog space about their technical decisions, from a user's perspective it's a very stable and mature OS. Every upgrade fixes a few little things, makes things a little bit better, and most importantly doesn't break anything. There's very little to get excited about and very little to get annoyed about. It really does just work. On windows or even mac I would wait until a day when I don't have a lot of work that needs to get done to install a new version of the OS, on ubuntu i feel confident clicking okay on the upgrade notification, even if i'm in the middle of something important.

That's really the jist of what they bring to the table anyways. I share the same sentiment.

excluding the printing fiasco, you described Debian.

ubuntu is just fast in moving debian unstable packages to their own stable branch, and screwing usability just so they make the experience more apple-like.

Choices are better, no?

No one is preventing anyone from giving Debian a spin.

As somebody who used a laptop with touch screen and extensively uses the Unity Dash, I am getting increasingly perplexed by all this complaining about Unity (and also gnome, and windows 8) usability.

I've been using Xubuntu 14.04 for a couple of days.

With the exception of a different theme (out the box, which lasted about 10 seconds anyway) it feels exactly like Mint XFCE 16 (which is great).

Install was a breeze (I'd have been surprised if it wasn't these days), everything worked out the box, the ati open source driver with arandr works really well (on the 7750 at work and the 6950 at home) though there was some tearing when dragging windows on the 6950 (tried the usual suspects) so I installed the binary driver which took care of that.

All the software I use day to day installed with zero issues (vagrant, phpstorm, pycharm, oracle-java7, chromium, firefox etc).

I also upgraded by vagrant configs to Ubuntu server LTS 14.04 (it's nice not to have to monkey patch in newer versions of PHP and Postgres with a bootstrap.sh) also with no drama.

For me at least the days of "oh now, new release it's going to take 2 days to put everything back" are long gone, I'm back up and running in < 2 hours.

You can enable vsync at the foss driver level by doing the inverse of this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Turn_vsync_off

if your dri default had it off.

Sorry when I said "(tried the usual suspects)" I should have pointed out that meant exactly what you posted.

Thanks anyway though :).

>Install was a breeze (I'd have been surprised if it wasn't these days), everything worked out the box

It depends, I guess.

I installed xubuntu 14.04 the day it came out, and I was surprised that I encountered 3-4 bugs within the first hour that affected my work and about a dozen smaller bugs that, while noticeable, aren't that serious.

After few years without running (x/k)ubuntu, I was surprised that stuff like language selection is broken upon release, that network manager about 20% of the time just doesn't work after booting etc etc.

I always had this experience with ubuntu, and its derivatives - it looks great, and 90% of time it works great, but nothing seems to be really polished/stable. But YMMW.

Is it just me or have the open source graphics drivers improved by miles. A couple of games running through Wine are getting similar frame rates with Gallium3D and Catalyst.

Not just you, every new release has been a major improvement over previous ones for me running a 7750 at work and 6950 at home.

I suspect the steambox been debian based has helped drive this :).

It isn't you. The AMD opensource team has been doing a terrific work lately, especially considering the small size (IIRC 4 people). DPM is the big thing, as it means that the gpu can raise the clock under load as it does on Windows, but they've done lots of work everywhere else as well.

Say thanks to Intel as well for driving the work on Mesa (It's thanks to Intel that Mesa got OpenGL 3.3 compatibility so fast).

Also Wine got some speedups as well (and an huge one should be coming soon with the stream patches).

Overall, I'd say that the Linux graphic stack has never been in a better state. We got official opensource drivers for Intel, official opensource drivers from AMD that are 50-80% as good as the closed one depending on your card, and unofficial opensource drivers for Nvidia that are usually good enough for non-gaming.

For some older Radeon cards (such as my 6630HD Mobile) I would recommend the open-source driver instead of Catalyst, as the performance is noticeably greater.

Yeah it has. Over the last few years, the OSS radeon driver has significantly improved. Most of the feature matrix [1] is now green. Whenever Hyper-Z is finished and enabled by default, it should lead to another major performance improvement for geometry-heavy applications. Mesa and the Intel drivers have improved significantly too. As far as I am aware, Nvidia drivers are still closed-source.

1. http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

I commented a few weeks ago I got a huge boost in performance in regular desktop use with a laptop running an Intel HD4000.

"I've been testing it in a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM)"

Then how much was he really using it? Surely one of the first things Ubuntu did was make sure the OS runs in a VM. But how well does it run on real hardware? Does it detect the hardware properly? Does the video work? Does the suspend and resume work? Anything wonky about the ACPI? How about bootup--does it work on your Windows 8-certified hardware that has Secure Boot and UEFI? Did it install a bootloader properly? Does said bootloader properly handle other OSes on the system or does it hide them away, which is just as good as nuking them as far as inexperienced users are concerned?

Since it's in a VM, I doubt you have many files in there. How does it handle desktop search and indexing? What about connecting to your printer? Do the control panel-like gizmos work properly?

These "I installed it in a VM" style drive-by "reviews" are worthless. Everything he says is pure pablum. Wake me up when someone posts a real review that actually puts this system through its paces.

Fully agree. It should not be named "hands-on" if it's in the VM.

Fortunately, for me, it runs really great in real install. I even managed to make a dual-boot Win7 + Ubuntu 1404 and then inside Ubuntu tweaked a Win7 machine, that allows me to run my "physical" Win7 by booting and in a VirtualBox VM from Linux. Now I will boot Win7 very rarely.

Even though I haven't worked with this update much yet, I'm so inordinately happy about them bringing back local menus, I honestly hated the global menus and the update is worth it for local menus alone.

I fully agree, this is for me the "best" feature of 14.04 LTS (coming from a 12.04 LTS).

> At the same time, it's kept one controversial feature: Built-in search scopes for such commercial sites as Amazon and eBay

Wow, they really did it.

I searched for "web browser" and am presented with two web browsers "Firefox Web Browser" and "Browser" (?), followed by nine pictures of mens' shoes. A search for "Terminal" suggested Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a gun, and a goth metal singer dressed in a Nazi uniform sticking his tongue out at me.

What a ghastly misfeature. Is a cryptic terminal command really the only way to disable this noise? The linked article couldn't even get it right (it's gsettings, not settings).

They used to have a disable option for the search stuff in the privacy settings, did they take it out?

You can disable the "search stuff" in System Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Search (tab).

This is what I immediately did. So, this is a shame that the article only mentions a command line method to switch it off.

I did the upgrade but I noticed no difference whatsoever to the 13.x that I had been using before.

I actually wasn't hoping for any changes other than being able to run 'skype' again (I broke the 32 bit libraries that skype 'needs').

Had it not been for skype working again and a small change in how the folders are rendered in the 'save file' dialog box, I don't think I would have guessed that my OS had been upgraded.

Maybe that is the future of upgrades - no perceptible difference whatsoever.

LTS releases rarely introduce huge changes, they just focus on increasing stability and polishing features from the preceeding non-LTS releases.

The changes were small, but there were definitely improvements to the UI. More smooth transitions including the lock screen which now uses lightdm instead of GTK. The windows are now without borders so it looks much cleaner.

I think you mean instead of GDM, not GTK.

there's a few user-visible changes, but for the most part they are hidden behind a setting so you won't see them unless you enable them. personally, this one is my favourite: http://imgur.com/lTncRkz

From 13.10 to 14.04 there are also an incredible amount of polish and small touches around Unity. If you aren't a consistent non-LTS user, you might miss them, but there are a lot of them and they really add to the experience.

anyone tried it native on a macbook pro retina yet?

and/or : best laptop for running it? I'm guessing a thinkpad or maybe one of the dell xps13 developer edition?

avoid dell. even if that ONE model was any good, which it is not, their entire line sucks for linux support.

get an asus. it was the first company to try shipping linux for real (not dev beta scams) and still pick the most linux friendly components (last time i checked)

Counterpoint: I've run Ubuntu 11.04, 12.04, and now 13.04 as my everyday OS very well and very consistently on two consecutive Dell laptops (the older XPS 13 and a Vostro v131) and both have worked incredibly well.

I bought a Dell e7240 couple of weeks ago and put Linux Mint 16 on it (since Mint is based on Ubuntu, I wouldn't expect the experience to be vastly different for straight-up Ubuntu). Everything except the hardware Wifi on/off switch works out of the box (the Wifi can be comfortably turned on/off via the Cinnamon network applet). Considering that this is new hardware (Haswell i7, 8GB DDR3 RAM and dual 256 GB SSD), I absolutely wouldn't have any issues recommending Dell for Linux to anyone.

Finally, the above system can also be ordered with 12.04 LTS which means Dell is officially supporting Linux. I don't think it can get much better than that.

Asus is also the company that ran an advertisement campaign titled "It's better with Windows".

No, thanks.

after they offered eeepc with linux snce 2006 and nobody bought :)

Dell has some support for the corporate E models but not that solid (eg touchpad support took ages to arrive).

Runs great on a Lenovo ThinkPad T430s and X220T.

However I had to send back a T440s, and I guess it is the same with all the new Thinkpad models :( The "virtual" trackpoint buttons work so bad (while clicking the cursor slides) and when you disable the trackpad alltogether then you have no mouse-buttons at all! But I guess this is not Ubuntu's fault - it's Lenovo who screwed it up.

Ugh. My 440s arrives today :/

I'm running it on the latest XPS dev edition, and it works great. I even use the touch screen occasionally.

The fonts were kinda small on 13.10, but in 14.04 there's a new setting to "scale for menu and title bars" which I bumped up a little, and it looks great now.

Yes, xubuntu 14.04 is the best xubuntu I've ever used. :)

Been using linux distros and ubuntu 12.04 for about 2 years now. Linux is the shit but ubuntu sucks IMO. Very poor customization possibilites. Heavily reliant on python 2.7. Very bad support for other window managers than unity, dont ever try to mess with multiple window managers on ubuntu, it will ruin your week. With WAY FASTER alternative systems such as arch, funtoo, gentoo, knoppix and even debian. I have a hard time understanding how ubuntu could have gained the traction it has among developers.

Developer here. I simply prefer satisfying defaults over crazy customization possibilities. Also dash and being able to call any file menu item through it is super fast and mostly mouse-less.

It's such a shame they insisted on their timing schedule for this release. It means the biggest Linux distro is committed to running X applications natively for the 6 years to come.

Imagine how good it would have been for the Linux community as a whole if they would have been able to exclude X from this release. We came so close to finally shaking up the Linux user interface stack.

I wonder if they've had a discussion about moving the LTS down half a year or perhaps a year, just for Mir.

edit: To help a bit with the imagination part, if we'd have Mir in this release, then a whole bunch of big UI products could say in ~3 years that about 80% of their users are running Mir enabled desktops. That could aid them to consider moving to a native Mir stack, the increase of work on this layer would not only benefit Mir but also Wayland as a side effect. An even more beneficial side effect would the assistance of big companies like NVidia and AMD and perhaps Valve be to this process, if things go according to plan their drivers on Linux could benefit a lot from more well defined/thought out interfaces, something which again could benefit Wayland also.

I don't agree. An LTS release is not the place to introduce such an huge change. An LTS is a stable release, and should include only stable, well-tested software.

I, for one, hope they'll introduce Mir in the "right" way (to be honest, I hope they'll just drop it and switch to Wayland, but that's another story), which mean a release with only X and alongside a Developer Preview with Mir, then a release with both X and Mir installed, but with X the default and an easy way to switch for the user, and then a release with Mir by default (but X still available). After that, we can talk about an LTS with Mir.

And, even assuming Mir is ready for the desktop (it isn't), the support everywhere is missing. No toolkit has official Mir support, there are only some downstream patch by Canonical for Qt (and maybe Gtk3? I'm not sure). There is pretty much no driver support for Mir (I think only the Intel driver has what they consider stable support, and even there is all downstream).

What's the point of shipping with Mir if it mean using XMir for every single application (and XMir is not ready for the desktop as well), a subpar experience for users since it's not well tested, and it would have to failback to X for most configurations anyway.

LTS is supported for 6 years, but they release a new LTS every two years. pushing LTS back a year to wait for Mir doesn't really make sense when the next LTS is due only a year after that. And from what i've seen of Mir/Wayland, i suspect that one year is a pretty optimistic timeframe for actually moving away from X in a stable, production quality OS.

LTS is supported for 5 years

It was probably the other way around - I'd guess they pushed Mir forward because they didn't want to release an early version of Mir in a LTS release.

X will be with the Linux community for the foreseeable future anyhow since there are plenty of distros that insist on using outdated^Wstable versions of applications.

Ubuntu recently decided to phase out its homegrown upstart init system in favor of systemd, which is backed by all other major Linux distros.

Right now Ubuntu is trying to go against the grain again, this time with Mir. I think the most likely scenario is that Ubuntu will eventually drop it too and switch to Wayland. Ubuntu is big, but not big enough to break compatibility with everyone else in such a major way.

Thus it is good that they did not put Mir in a LTS release. It is a dead-end technology if you ask me.

They also decided on a 3.13 franken-kernel instead of a 3.14 kernel which is kind of a bummer.

I still feel that distributions should start thinking about moving to update their kernels and security packages much more frequently. Specifically, I would like to use a LTS release with up to date kernels, openssl and openssh.

For LTS releases, Ubuntu provides optional updates of the kernel and the graphics stack: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

They were never going to "exclude X" at this stage, it was just about switching the default on supported hardware. Fortunately.

I really want to use Ubuntu for personal use, but still really miss it not having MS Office natively available.

I know this comment may seem lame here on HN but I just don't have the time to master OpenOffice or figure out the best way to manage compatibility when sending documents around the place.

Have you tried Office 365 online? I was surprised at how well it worked.

They should make the dock act exactly like Windows 7, put it in the bottom, remove the top panel.

I always customize my Win installs by moving dock to the left, same as Ubuntu. It makes sense on laptop with limited vertical space

I do the same on Windows 7 ;) I am wondering if it would be possible to get rid of the top panel altogether and put the information in the vertically aligned left panel, just like I have it on Win7. For maximized windows it would not gain anything, but for 2 side-by-side terminals it makes a (small) change.

Wonder how easy it is to install on a MacBook Air? My current one runs 12.04 perfectly - but I'm not sure I want to risk an update.

More importantly - does it still have wobbly-windows? :-)

13.10 is fine here, but I haven't tried 14.04 yet.

You can install compiz on any distribution.

Used to be on Ubuntu, but ever since I've started using Elementary OS I have had no use for anything else.

Even a review on Linux can't help but mention some cryptic terminal command.

"apt-get install" is hardly cryptic.

The scopes disabling command was beyond cryptic in the other hand

If you are customizing the UI then you are already in "power user" territory. The only alternative would be to go the KDE route and use hundreds of checkboxes and select boxes for changing every little thing in the UI.

It was. He should have mentioned you can go to settings > security & privacy > search and disable the dash internet search results. Very easy through the GUI.

I hope you can sleep this night not worrying about the "Terminal" monster below your bed.

When I started programming, the computer didn't have a GUI, so I'm fairly comfortable with Terminal.

I also hear, year after year, how Linux is going to finally reach out of nerddom, and it always fails to do that, and it always will if the community keeps this mindset "you don't need to be scared of a little terminal, you will LEARN more about your computer".

Well, only us geeks want to learn more about our computers, others just want to do stuff, and they are right, that's why iPads are everywhere.

The old saying is still going strong: "Linux is only free is your time is worth nothing"

I disagree. I recently installed Linux Mint 16 (with Cinnamon as the DE) on my laptop and the experience was basically hiccup free:

- Install was smooth (since I was installing on a separate drive, no fiddling with manual partitioning etc.)

- Everything that a typical user wants worked post install without any extra steps - Music/Videos/Wifi connectivity/Internet/Hibernate/Suspend etc. all worked

I didn't have to launch the terminal for any of the above.

I wish people would think of the shell as just another form of UI that happens to run on text rather than graphical widgets.

and I wish linux wasn't a horribly buggy hard to use desktop OS.

Fortunately my macbook combines a good desktop environment with what I need for work. I just my windows PC for my games and such. Linux can sit on my server where it belongs.

Just because it's hard for you, doesn't mean it's hard for everyone. Lots of people seem to be using it just fine.

Yeah, OS X is great.

What, fonts looks like shit when you attach your non-retina external monitor to your shiny retina MacBook Pro? No biggie, just open Terminal or iTerm and type:

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

You're upset because in Mavericks sleep and display off times are lumped together? The solution is just a few keystrokes away:

    sudo pmset -b sleep 10  # sleep after 10 minutes on battery; use System Preferences to set display off times

Want to see Library folder in Finder?

    chflags nohidden /Users/[username]/Library/

Don't see the point of Dashboard? Terminal-fu to the rescue:

    defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES 
    killall Dock

... etc, etc. Don't get me wrong, my home server runs on Debian, and boy it was an adventure sometimes to install non-blessed packages (read: something less than two years old), but unless you're using an appliance (read: iOS device), every OS have it's share of weird incarnations if you want to do anything, well, advanced.

> and I wish linux wasn't a horribly buggy hard to use desktop OS.

Compared to the state of "Linux on the desktop" when I first used it, it is absolutely amazing -- no more manually configuring my NICs using jumpers, no more writing a PPP config file (and chat script!) by hand (from scratch), no more running out to buy a different video card because mine isn't supported.

It's not perfect by any means but it is certainly usable by a majority of the population.

Not sure what we'd be comparing this to. I guess the way you'd do the same thing in Windows, if you had to, would be to use regedit, which I think is super cryptic. The terminal is only cryptic to those unfamiliar with it. The more you use it the more you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Except for that re-implementation of the registry in Gnome where ´rm .config/sthg´ doesn't work anymore but you have to:

    gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.rhythmbox
    gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.rhythmbox.display-page-tree
    gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.rhythmbox.library
    (...)

http://askubuntu.com/questions/7979/how-can-i-reset-all-rhyt...

(had to do that today to unbork an ipod which rhythmbox wouln't play along anymore)

Try dconf-editor, each of these settings have detailed descriptions unlike disasteredit.

In a famous article, Joel Spolsky wrote about Linux and Windows in terms of cultures around, spefically, a culture of programmers vs. end users.

Withing the context of Linux so, it's perfectly adequate to sprinkle some technicisms.

The thing is, Linux has advanced a lot in the last decade, and it's even perfectly usable by the hmm "less receptive" users, so to see "cryptic terminal commands" is a good thing, because it shows that Linux has managed to be (so to speak) the best of both worlds, that is, the world of the casual users and the world of the advanced ones.

Because Windows doesn't have cryptic regedit paths.

I can't ever remember reading a review of a new Windows version that included registry paths.

The world has changed. Every time someone wants automatic updates on Windows without forced 15 min restarts, they're told to open `gedit.msc`. It's funny. We all expected that the world would go the other way with less CLI work in Linux, but never considered that a common thing that nearly everyone complains about would require more CLI work in Windows.

Funny.

What is the best course of action for people that have been using 12.04? Upgrade straight way? Or wait (how long?) for this LTS to smooth out any potential edges? Other than the outdated packages (which seems to be a Debian thing, but that I've been able to work around by finding ppa's and building from source), I am decently happy with 12.04.

Is 12.04 the previous LTS release? I think I'm using the same one. To be honest, I'm sticking with it. I still have a few more years of support so I might as well just wait until kinks (if any) are ironed out.

Yes it is.

Well, two good reasons (at least to me) are the newer kernel and an up-to-date version of openssh.

I've upgraded 2 VMs so far from 12.04. One broke (not a big deal) and the other worked just fine.

Mind you, you will have to do some fiddling to get ed25519 host and user keys working. But it's not too hard to get working.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo do-release-upgrade

You might have to pass the -d flag to do-release-upgrade but it was fairly straightforward.

The official advice is to wait till 14.04.1 which is scheduled for a July release.

"the best ever".

This kind of expression is getting on my nerves, as it is used as a catchphrase for an obvious expectation about the product: "great news, no regression about it". Apple uses it too ("the best iPhone we've ever built") and it is losing all the little meaning it had thanks to the usual marketing hammering ; people probably still use it because it features the product name + best.

These titles annoy me too, it's kind of expected that the new release is better than than the previous one.

It's pure marketing and I just ignore it nowadays.

It reminds me of a phrase that I always hated: "new and improved". That's impossible.

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