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?
Slackware and Arch Linux are great options if you're interested in exploring something a little more advanced. You'll have to put more work into setting up your system, particularly at first, but you will learn a lot more about how Linux works. They kind of throw you in the deep end, but they both have plenty of good documentation.
On the other hand, if you're looking for something not too far from Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora might be better options.
Well, I started with slackware (well, actually SuSE when it was still a rebranded slackware, around linux 1.0.8ish), and I don't really want to dive into deep ends for my work machines anymore, I just want them to work and be moderately up to date. Ubuntu looked so promising at 7.04...
I use 10.04 LTS on work machines (by which I mean, machines at my workplace) simply because things stay the same on it and I'm not going to get calls saying "this huge colourful bar has appeared on the left of my screen, what on earth is it, and furthermore where on earth is my Thunderbird menu bar?". We have a lot of older users who are not especially computer-literate, so an interface that doesn't change is valuable to us.
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.
Isn't CentOS more designed for servers? I'm not sure. I've considered Debian Squeeze, but it's one of those things I've never got round to looking at in enough depth.
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.
CentOS claims to be a clone of RHEL. There is a desktop install package that puts Gnome with the usual (firefox, openoffice, evolution). There would be some post installation fiddling with different repositories to get any sound software you need working. Scientific Linux is another distribution based on RHEL but which changes the binary packages more. Again, repositories and some twiddling.
What sound software do you use? Does it involve Jack?
Archlinux.. Everytime I re-install it and see "make command not found" is a priceless moment for me. You really build your own OS over time.. installing only what you need. Everything is kept simple (simple as in there's not 10 levels of abstraction to change a keybinding or whatever). Maybe the most important thing about arch is the package manager (pacman); it's simply great.
As long as you've read up on the subject beforehand, their forums are also really helpful. A few times, I've asked a question on the Ubuntu forums and been met with dead air, but while the people on the Arch site can be a little short with people who ask questions before searching and reading, if you obviously have, they're more than helpful.
Asking without searching first is disrespectful against users of that forum who spend time to answer questions. It's a little bit like saying "Instead of wasting 30secs of my life to search and try on my own, I'll waste 30secs of yours." Personally, when someone asks something.. and I can paste their exact question and get a well done tutorial on the subject, I don't feel like answering. For a total beginner, obviously, that's different.
imo gentoo was even more like that for me. there's not even an installer (at least there wasn't when I was doing it). you're literally just running commands and moving files around
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.
While it's taken flack for Gnome Shell, I switched to Fedora when Unity was coming down the pike and have been very happy (and actually like Gnome Shell).
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.
You wouldn't necessarily know this until you had done the described change, but Ubuntu's packaging of Gnome Shell is in various small but annoying ways not as polished and together as Fedora's.
That might partly be because Ubuntu has thrown its effort into its default Unity, while Fedora has put effort into its default Gnome Shell.
"ubuntu" tells me the location of the countdown and not much more. It doesn't tell me what is going to happen in this new release, why they're making a fuss, why I should care.
I am not sure how Dylan16807 did his/her search, but when I do, I get a nice grouped response with 7 items from the ubuntu.com site. Searching for "ubuntu" doesn't take me to a specific oneiric feature-list, but, I imagine, it's not that hard to get it. Apart from that, every 6 months Ubuntu launches a new release and hasn't failed even once to provide newer versions of more or less the same packages present in its last incarnation.
It's cute of you to link that as if it gives a reason for the hype. Just the same list of incremental package updates. Oh, also multiarch is architected better, a nonvisible change to the backend.
Or are you actually answering 'no' and I'm too dense to pick it up?
I've just updated to the 11.10 beta2, and my experience so far has not been promising. My main gripe (as expected) is that the Unity desktop is the only option now; while it is possible to install GNOME 3 and use that, it lacks the polish of 11.04's GNOME desktop and is clearly in an unfinished state.
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.
> 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.
I often run into that exact problem with OSX. That is partially why I'm considering trying out Xmonad.
As a developer and 6 year ubuntu user I appreciate the innovation attempt in unity, gnome3 and kde4...I hope they mature soon.. Still prefer, gnome 2, and long for more bug free, performing, fast updates...
> 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.
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.
> As a developer, Unity's handling of multiple terminal windows is extraordinarily ham-fisted. Say you have a web browser and three terminal windows
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 tried out Beta 2 (64 bit) yesterday. I think I lasted 30 minutes with it. Unity and Compiz crashed constantly. The machine just seemed generally unresponsive. I feel like these things should've been a lot more stable by now.
Yes, the new alt-tab window switcher is horrid for the reasons you describe. I gave up on it after a day or so and switched back to the older window switcher via the CompizConfig Settings Manager.
Not anymore. The top options IMO are Gnome 3 (which is similar to Unity in that it's a fairly audacious step away from classic desktops; and still more polished than Unity in my experience) and XFCE, which does a great job of providing a more classic feel without giving up the customizability of Gnome 2.
I have a hard time understanding some of these recent UI changes. This one strikes me as being akin to not having MRU tab order in Chrome. Do none of the people making these decisions do actual work in the tools they're affecting?
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 think the biggest clue Ubuntu should take from Apple is to show the product and how to use it. I am seriously interested in Ubuntu's progress, so after shaking my head looking at the countdown, I went to ubuntu.com and clicked on the big picture, only to be forwarded to a download page for Windows stuff. (I am using Safari on OS X.)
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?
LTS releases are actually pretty boring, for obvious reasons.
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?).
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.
This thread reminds me of an old slashdot post about the original ipod... Ubuntu is investing in a better Linux desktop experience and they've been doing that successfully for quite a while now.
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.
Here are a couple of applications that can improve the Unity experience.
Superswitcher which is an awesome alt+tab alternative, Unity 2D for performance (no compiz) and gnome-do because It has features unavailable on unity app launcher.
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 am looking forward to the new Ubuntu. I plan to customize it quite heartily of course. There are more window managers than just Unity. Gnome is pretty 'fat' these days.
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.
I'm still on 8.04. Ubuntu moves too fast for me, and seems to always break something that used to work. The next time I visit any of the machines for which I am responsible for care & feeding I am installing red hat or centos. 7 year support cycle!
Why not debian? You get both the stable release supported for years to come and lots of packages. In my experience most of the needed apps are in the repository and don't need hunting down on third-party sites like with centos/rhel. On top of that you don't get silly things like ancient kernel with hundreds of patches which makes it incompatible with almost anything you need to compile as a module (depends on your hardware of course)
Seconded: if you're still on 8.04 and don't like how fast Ubuntu moves, then it sounds like you were born for Debian Stable, which is in many respects a very similar system
I installed 11.10 B2 on my desktop. It definitely looks more polished (especially the login screen), but that's where the improvements end for basic usage. Unity drives me up the wall, for the most part. I could tolerate all the BS of Unity if ONLY I had a taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I want to see my windows down there, not constantly alt-tab to see what's open.
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.
DAE not have any issues with non-Unity Ubuntu? Hell even in 11.10 they seem to have fixed the critical Unity/compiz invis-window bug. Minus window behaviors that people aren't used to and the knee jerk reaction to the unity-launcher (learn the shortcuts, it's fast to use!) I have nothing but pleasant experiences. I've found actually gnome-shell to be pleasantly minimal and usable too.
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]
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?