Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx was released two days ago. Yesterday I've installed it on my laptop. As I used beta before I wasn't surprised with a stable release. I'm also not disappointed. It's just great!
Look and Feel
Gnome looks slick. I officially stopped using KDE. Well, at least for some time ;) User interface in Ubuntu is consistent and clear. Everything is just in the right place.
Usability
One of the most noticeably improved things is usability. I really like the whole social media, messaging and mail integration in the top panel. Also, less experienced users will no longer struggle with setting up multimedia plugins to watch movies or listen to their mp3s. The first moment you try to use a file with restricted format, Ubuntu asks if you'd like to install support for it.
Ubuntu One Music Store
I already wrote about Ubuntu One Music Store while testing beta release. Once I installed stable release, in my music player I directly got songs bought in the store some time ago. Of course I needed to sign into the Ubuntu One in the first place. By default all music you buy is stored on your Ubuntu One disk.
Chromium on Board
I got surprised by the fact that Chromium is from now on available in the main Ubuntu repositories. You can install it with 'sudo aptitude install chromium-browser' or use Ubuntu Software Center.
Read More
If it happens that you're a PHP programmer you might be interested in reading: Setting up a PHP development environment with nginx on Ubuntu 10.04.
Comments
about 1 year ago wrote:Just want to answer you about usability: While ubuntu is probably pretty good on average compared to other distros, it's not yet at the level where you can actually talk about it being usable at all. Mouse buttons aren't recognized, if you plug in a monitor nothing happens, or at best you can reconfigure which might require a Xorg restart, which is kind of like a system reboot since it closes most of your apps (I don't care about background services). Also of course if you're lucky the config will be corrupted and Xorg will crap itself.
Then you mention the awesome "accessibility" that is that when you need MP3 decoders, it goes and downloads them for you.. what a victory for mankind. What about having them bundled since 99% of normal people will want to play a MP3 at some point? Especially when the Ubuntu One store sells MP3s.. What kind of fucked up hypocrisy is it not to ship them but building a mechanism that will go fetch them when necessary?
Anyways.. have fun. I'll try open source OSs again in a few years.
about 1 year ago wrote:@Jordi Thanks for a comment :) All I noticed is that usability improves with each Ubuntu release. I know it's not on the OSX level if we talk about regular users. My monitor is recognized, however. It's true I need to turn it on in nvidia-settings but no Xorg restart is needed ;) And if we talk about mp3... it is a restricted format and they simply cannot include it out of the box from legal reasons. It's not fair to blame Ubuntu for third-party vendor restrictions!
- about 1 year ago wrote:
Does this also apply to nvidia drivers? Or are those not bundled because of ideological reasons? Anyway, what I meant to say is that as long as users have to live with such crap, Ubuntu/Linux will be a pain to work with. Sure there are patents and yadda yadda, and it's not all their fault, but at some point you have to get real and realize that either you pay for it, or your users suffer. Anyway, I'm not using OSX and I'm not a big fan of it for other reasons, but yes to this day I think both windows and osx beat the crap out of the linux world at large as far as the desktop experience is concerned. This deeply saddens me because I love using linux on my server, I love using command line stuff, but it seems I'll still be better off with the few quirks of cygwin than the many quirks of a linux desktop environment. My main wish is that linux devs would realize that usability and user interaction design isn't just about putting cute buttons together. If they want to succeed they have to cater to the non-nerds, and for that they need to attract designers and others that have more knowledge about UI than C. Programmers aren't omnipotent.
- about 1 year ago wrote:
Well, what can I say? I have a feeling that you haven't tried Linux based system for a long time. I don't think Ubuntu/Linux is as bad as you try to present it. I don't say it's perfect either. It is, however, for me the best OS out there. Not for everyone. For me. I really cannot use Windows. On Mac I get lost. With Ubuntu I get a lot of command line and GUI tools which are harder to set up on Windows (if even possible).
about 1 year ago wrote:@Jordi
Here's a real-world example from the trenches that culminated in a great Ubuntu install on a Vista laptop just two days ago:My daughter's Vista crapped out after dogging her for several months. We didn't upgrade to 7 because of several privacy issues related to Vista/7 relaying info in the background to MS (and anybody else they happen to be affiliated with - stay away from updates).We decided to put XP-Pro (retail box) on her laptop. This turned into a two-day chore largely because Toshiba laptop drivers are only available for Vista and 7, not for XP.Anyway, we got it going and everything worked except for the proprietary ACPI stuff (which we knew we'd have to deal with).Just as an experiment, we decided to put Ubuntu on a USB flash drive and try it out (16G Sandisk) - it was cake!Not only did it manage to I.D., locate, download and install all the drivers we needed, it also got all the missing ACPI stuff, installed it and put the laptop back in 'out of the box' condition (although with Ubuntu-Linux as the OS).All with no manual prompting on our part, as a Windows/DOS user since 1983, I was impressed.Now, you may be a Mac aficionado, in which case all this may be meaningless to you, but from where I stand, I'm blown away.To pour gas on the fire, we then proceded to put Sun's VitualBox on the system and virtualize XP-Pro yet again to see if we could run Win apps directly...no problem.We also put Wine (HQ latest ver) and CXG on to benchmark the performance differences, all worked without a hitch.As far as I'm concerned, this is what an OS should be, I'm sold.You might want to give this another look if you haven't tried Ubuntu in a while, it looks pretty solid, so far.- about 1 year ago wrote:
I thought I'd also comment on the issue with 'bundling' verses downloading various ancillary apps, utils, etc.. From my standpoint, I think that downloading the appropriate drivers, codexes, etc. for a specific box or config is quite the superior way to handle an install. For one thing the question of 'specificity' of particular hardware is handled more efficiently, for another, it insures you get the latest revisions rather than having to 'settle' for what happens to be burned on the distribution at release-time. As to UI experience, I'm not overly dependent on any particular desktop layout as long as the underlying code runs as expected, but that's just me.
- about 1 year ago wrote:
@Anton thank you for your real world example! I'm not using Windows since XP was released so I didn't have a chance to suffer from it lately. All I can tell is that Ubuntu is improving with every release (which you just confirmed). Thanks!
- about 1 year ago wrote:
Sooo.. you're really comparing an OS so old (XP RTM Aug. 2001) that your hardware manufacturer (and anyone with some common sense) dropped support for to the latest Ubuntu release? Ok.. I will just skip over that and tell you about my Ubuntu 10.4 experience, because yes I have tried it before ranting.
As you mentioned, the installation process is quite smooth, and it offered to download the evil proprietary drivers for my graphic card which was nice. First impression was really good, I started playing with the CLI - and being a happy debian user when it comes to dedicated servers, I was enchanted.
But then I started to try and really use it as a desktop environment, to do my day to day stuff, like using a browser. It probably took me 30seconds before I realized the "back" and "forward" buttons on my mouse weren't working. I started googling around to find a solution, found a topic in the ubuntu forums about my mouse model, but it had like 5 guys each saying that the above solution didn't work for them, but that theirs was ok. The solutions were obviously not some easy thing like, enabling support for mouse buttons (which would still be retarded imo, if they're there, I want to use them) somewhere, no you gotta edit the xorg configuration. So, basically, you have to put some values in, you restart xorg - which in my book is equal to rebooting your computer, but keep laughing about windows reboots - and hope everything will go fine. First time buttons were working in Firefox but not in Nautilus or Opera, since I use Opera mostly, this didn't work, so I went on to try another of the offered solutions.. Except this time xorg couldn't start anymore due to some error in the configuration. Great. So now I'm stuck in console mode just because I tried to use the buttons on my mouse? Screw that. - about 1 year ago wrote:
Part 2, since your form says it was too long : Next up, consider that I installed it on a laptop, which moves every day, and when I'm in the office I plug in the extra 24" monitor I got, so I need this to be painless. Again this goes through Xorg. I plugged in the screen and nothing happened.. Usually on windows it's detected and the desktop is extended automatically, but that's a detail. The Nvidia drivers detected it once I polled manually, fine, but then I had to choose between two buggy modes.. Extended desktop, my preferred mode, is like one big rectangle where the two monitor are placed, which means you've a dead zone that actually can not render on screen, but your mouse cursor and windows can get lost in it. If your two screens aren't the same size, it's really annoying. On windows this is handled nicely since the desktop area is just the two rectangles of each monitor put together, no dead zone. I hope you get what I mean.. it's kinda hard to explain without a picture. The other mode was to have two desktops, but that makes you a task bar on every screen and I hate that. I realize this might be nvidia's fault, but I don't really care whose fault it is, it didn't work as I wanted.Unplugging the monitor meant I had to have a gigantic dead zone on the right, or I had to go in the nvidia drivers to reset the settings manually, and possibly restart Xorg if it failed, unacceptable if you gotta do it twice a day and it shuts down all your apps in the process.
- about 1 year ago wrote:
And part3, the finale: Finally, I thought I'd play some music.. I got Foobar2000 to run in Wine pretty easily, that is my player of choice on windows and I really didn't want to let it go, but the hotkeys didn't pass through wine which is a huge inconvenience to me, so I decided to give amarok a shot.. Added some music in it and hit the play button, but it just went over the entire playlist skipping all songs, maybe due to missing codecs, I don't know, no error, nothing, I gave up and reinstalled windows7. First boot in windows, all my hardware works, windows update offers me the latest nvidia drivers along with updates to a couple other drivers, I didn't have to go look for anything. My mouse worked just fine, and when I plug in a monitor I can just hit Win+P to switch between "extend, duplicate, computer only, external only", the screen flickers for a second and I'm up and running. How's that for a real world example?
- about 1 year ago wrote:
Addendum: I am not hating linux for the sake of it, I was genuinely disappointed because I wanted to use it, but it required too many compromises for me to find it an acceptable choice. All I hope is that someone out there is listening, and that one day they manage to get it right, both from a nerdy CLI point of view, and from a human point of view. -- As for your paranoia about Windows Vista/7 sending private data, if you have any decent sources please let me know, but as far as I know, all they send is usage data, like "joe x has 30 programs running on average", and things like that that help them have real metrics on how people use their software, instead of letting programmers make assumptions as to how normal people use a computer, and I'm very happy to contribute to that with my data. Most programmers are poor interface designers and most of them are too selfishly close-minded to realize that their usage doesn't match that of the end users. I'm sure I failed at that myself, I'm not saying I'm perfect, just that you have to be smart enough to recognize the problem and ask for help to competent people, making software isn't all about programming shit.
about 1 year ago wrote:Jordi, it would be fair to conclude you want Ubuntu to behave as Windows 7. You set Windows 7 as the standard, and Ubuntu should be like it. It is not, and it probably never will be.If you don't want to change, you'll never like anything else than Windows anyway.As for "not being usable at all", I have Linux since 1992, as my desktop system since 1999 (Ubuntu since version 6.06) and I'm not complaining. It's growing, and getting there, and that without a lot of funding.I agree with the author that 10.04 is the best release until now.I agree with you that someone should put some "rules" out there, so programmers can write and design more uniform apps.Apple did that, and I think that's still their strongest GUI selling point. Microsoft also did it, but as usual only for 70% and they can't keep up with their own "standards".As for your mentioned problems, all desktop operating systems have their quirks. Windows 7 also. Anyway, in your case, you seem better off with Windows 7.And yes, I also run Windows 7. For gaming.
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