7 ms·

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1, Released

114 points by hotice 15y ago

dave1010uk 15y ago
OMGUbuntu have a (fairly similar) review: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/ubuntu-11-10-beta-released-reviewed/ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/ubuntu-11-10-beta-release... The offical Ubuntu site has more juicy details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta1#New_features_in_Oneiric https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta...
rubinelli 15y ago
Looks like most of this release is about tweaking Unity. I was really excited about it at first, but I switched back to classic Gnome after three months. The extra screen space is nice, but it was too easy to lose my bearings.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I got used to it after a couple days. My home computer runs Unity while my desktop at work runs classic Gnome (with 10.10 - I'm waiting for 11.10) My biggest complaint is that Unity took all my super bindings from Emacs. I had to do a lot of remapping for it to work on both machines.
  - ajarmoniuk 15y ago
    Just change the hotkey for the Unity panel - in the compiz plugin configuration, the Unity plugin.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      But then I'd have to manage custom bindings for both Emacs and Unity. It was easier to avoid collisions in Emacs and let Unity use Super for whatever it wants (which is useful, BTW)
      - ajarmoniuk 15y ago
        I found that Unity doesn't like Super+R or whatever other combination you enter. It doesn't always seem to "catch" the combination.
  - pdelgallego 15y ago
    That was the deal breaker, Ubuntu is just a library that Emacs use to communicate with the hardware.
- mise 15y ago
  I use Ubuntu Unity daily (both at work and at home), and still find myself lost when trying to navigate between open windows.
- rufugee 15y ago
  I really like Unity, but neither it nor Compiz play well with Xinerama (at least on 11.04). So while I was using Twinview with two monitors, Unity was great. However, as soon as I switched to three monitors across two vid cards, I had to drop Unity/Compiz and switch back to vanilla gnome. I'm hoping this release will resolve that issue.
  - rufugee 15y ago
    Well, that and the sorta crazy window behavior. I think Unity is more intuitive than OS X regarding window management except for one "feature"...when you have multiple windows of the same application and then click the Launcher to restore one, it restores and brings to the front all of the windows. This is really bad design...I often have many terminals open and want to view a browser beside one of those terminals, but Unity makes it a real pain to do so, because every time I bring one term to the front, they all come along.
    - lobo_tuerto 15y ago
      A better sensible default would be to bring to the front only the ones that are in _that_ workspace, a second click (in case you didn't find what you are looking for with the first one) would bring to the front all the windows belonging to that app (current behaviour).
  - Florin_Andrei 15y ago
    Hm, for me it did not work well even on two monitors. I'll give this one a try, hopefully they fixed it.
- arcdrag 15y ago
  For me there was an issue with the fact that most of my work apps aren't standard and didn't cooperate with the hijacked toolbar. If I'm going to use a distro that prides itself on ease of use, I'm not going to bother with any additional configuration just to have a toolbar in Intellij and Spring Tool Suite. No clue if this has been remedied at all yet. My dance with Unity lasted only a week before I just removed it and went to Linux Mint.
hasenj 15y ago
> We had to revert from unity-window-decorator to gtk-window-decorator for performance reasons. This means that the "1 px border" for resizing window is back temporarily. I hope "temporarily" doesn't mean until 12.04
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  I hope this means my brand new laptop with a Core i5, 8GB of Ram and an SSD will now have the performance to run the standard bloody desktop. I'm currently using the classic desktop on 11.04 because my laptop starts crawling on Unity after short periods.
  - jrgifford 15y ago
    I run Unity on a netbook with 1GB of ram - and since all I run is vim, chrome and a few terminals, I don't see any problems. But, your mileage may vary
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      Yes, some people have no problems. But the performance issues with Unity on 11.04 are well known and wide spread. FWIW, all I usually have running is Thunderbird, Instantbird, Firefox and some terminals, and since switching back to classic I haven't had any performance issues.
  - hasenj 15y ago
    Did you try unity-2d?
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      Nope. I ran with plain Unity for the best part of a week and found it didn't give anything of value over the classic interface. The performance issues forced me back to the classic interface though. Not had any performance issues with classic. I'll give Unity another go when I upgrade to 11.10 in January (3 month delay gives them time to fix the worse bugs). I'm not spending my time trying to make it work nicely if I can just fall back to classic to fix things.
kajsadfksdfkl 15y ago
Does anyone know if it will do any good for the dual gfx card laptops? These new acer series laptops have two graphics cards on them. One is the intel on board and one is the nVidia G-Force. It uses a technology called nvidia optimus to select one of them according to need. But Linux seems plain confused and always uses both the cards I think. Thus on windows laptops run for 4:30hr with everything turned on and it is just under 2 hours for linux.
- fader 15y ago
  Optimus requires driver support to perform the switching, which so far nVidia has refused to even think of adding for Linux. Since their drivers are closed, there's not much more that can be done. It's possible that support might eventually make it into nouveau, the open-source NV driver, but it's not there now. (On top of that there are some bits of X that need to be rewritten to be able to fully take advantage of card switching conveniently, but last I heard people were working on it.) If power is your concern, most BIOSes will let you disable the nVidia card and force everything through the Intel hardware. But the obvious downside to this is you never get to use your fancy graphics hardware.
  - kajsadfksdfkl 15y ago
    I never use it anyway except for rare occasions like some games in which case I have to switch to windows anyway. But I don't see the option to switch the thing off.
  - starwed 15y ago
    This was actually enough for me to avoid buying an Optimus equipped netbook I had my eyes on... :(
  - protopete 15y ago
    In an nVidia Optimus configuration, there is no actual switching between the IGP and GPU. The LCD display is connected only to the IGP. The discrete GPU is connected only to the PCIe bus. Therefore to display anything from the GPU, the contents of the GPU framebuffer RAM need to be copied over the PCIe bus to the main RAM and displayed using the IGP. The Windows drivers use "Microsoft detours" in the Display Driver Interposer to seamlessly direct graphics API calls from applications to the IGP or discrete GPU. http://www.nvidia.com/object/LO_optimus_whitepapers.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/LO_optimus_whitepapers.html
ajarmoniuk 15y ago
I tried it today morning (by doing an upgrade from 11.04) and the unity panel kept restarting every two seconds. Don't try it without a backup yet.
- jetbean 15y ago
  Upgrading like that may cause some issues (I had issues upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04) so maybe doing a fresh install would make it work better.
  - ajarmoniuk 15y ago
    Well I had very similar (or worse) problems when upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04, but when they released the Narwhal, the update went smoothly. It's quite a difficult task to provide the update facility, last time I checked, Linux Mint recommended doing a full reinstall.
lurker19 15y ago
No sign of fixes for the various bugs that cause Sandy Bridge systems to crash on suspend/hibernate and at random times, and adds an extra power regression: the self-destruct button has been expanded to more systems: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/837266 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/837266
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  Isn't that a kernel bug and not a Ubuntu bug?
ddon 15y ago
I was a big fun of ubuntu, and used it on my desktops and laptops, but in last few years Skype became a major tool for me, to communicate with my team, and since there is still no good Skype for Linux, I no longer use ubuntu. On a desktop I use Mac OS, laptop is no longer my central tool, and most of the work from the road I do on my iPad. Thinking to get a book air for long trips, where iPad just can't cut it yet :) also, unity so far has been a disaster... I know about 5 friends who still use ubuntu, they couldn't use it with unity, and I helped them to get old gnome back. Hopefully unity will gets better, but this change I think was too big and wasn't optional. I think they lost a lot of users because of it. But I still use ubuntu on some servers of mine.
- andreasvc 15y ago
  What are you talking about? You can just apt-get install skype, if you enable the partner repository. Or do you mean to say the linux skype version is not as good? Agree with you on unity.
- sandGorgon 15y ago
  Use skype (w/ video) on android. I fully expect Microsoft to drop Skype support for Linux .. or atleast give a seriously stunted binary to get around anti-trust, that I am using Android as my full-on communication tool, including video conferencing. I see skype-video on the S5PV210 Samsung chipset android tablets already (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA). Atleast in Asia, you can get resistive 8 inchers with Gingerbread for sub-$200.
- gasull 15y ago
  I use Skype with video every week on Ubuntu. No problems.
mithaler 15y ago
Can someone explain to me exactly what the advantage is of hiding the menu bar contents behind mouseover?
- bretthoerner 15y ago
  Something like 28800 pixels on typical monitors these days?
  - algorias 15y ago
    Putting it that way without mentioning that it's only 1.4% of the 2073600 pixels available on those same displays is a bit misleading, don't you think?
    - ajross 15y ago
      It's a much higher fraction of the vertical space available though, which is terribly underprovisioned on modern displays. We're all trying to scroll vertical text content on a screen intended for watching movies, and it sucks. I haven't had a chance to actually try this yet, but it looks great from the shots. Gnome 3 is doing similar things with hot corners and I like that too.
- naner 15y ago
  Looks less cluttered? It is a design decision so you're not going to get a universally accepted answer.
  - starwed 15y ago
    There is a specific answer -- the designers must have thought it had specific advantages over the previous behavior. Whether these advantages exist and are worth it can be argued about, but they hopefully had something in mind! :)
- sp332 15y ago
  So programs will make their basic functionality more discoverable instead of hiding it in the menus? And when only less-used functions are relegated to the menus, there's not much point in having them visible all the time. There will be a larger contrast between common, discoverable functions and rare, hidden-away ones.
gcb 15y ago
unity is cancer. I loved it when it was just maximus for better screen state on netbooks and a few dashboards... but now, that's a travesty. it's so wrong that they are adding feature and features to try to 'fix' it. tabs in the bottom, filters on the right... it will became a full window manager on the dashboard soon. just kill it. i'm happy back to good old debian.
- keithpeter 15y ago
  Oddly enough that is what I have done as well. Squeeze is nice and stable with backports for Firefox/Iceweasel and LibreOffice and Gnome. Then I started fiddling with dwm as a window manager and dmenu as application menu and have not looked back...
  - gcb 15y ago
    i went back to ion3. i missed it and didn't know :) i'm impressed how much debian and ubuntu are the same after you install the non-free firmware package. now i'm wondering if ubuntu is giving a lot back to debian or just doing minimal changes. but i promised myself to stay out of distro politics a long time ago
alinajaf 15y ago
Unity stamped over a bunch of my keyboard shortcuts, so I took the opportunity to learn xmonad (with gnome classic) and haven't looked back.
- chrishenn 15y ago
  XMonad is great. For anyone who finds it a bit daunting I recommend Bluetile[1]. It's a great introduction to the best window management system I've used (I really miss XMonad on OS X.) [1] http://www.bluetile.org/ http://www.bluetile.org/
  - mcpherrinm 15y ago
    I have a Linux, OS X, and Windows machines on my desk (for doing cross-platform development of Firefox). XMonad is definitely my preferred WM for getting things done. OS X and Windows both have attempts at nice features, but they feel so frustrating to use in comparison. Lion actually improved that a lot: Fullscreen apps integrated with Spaces gives a large part of what I use X<onad for. If they'd combined that with Windows 7's snapping of windows to half-screen, that would cover 75% of my XMonad usage. It's really a shame that XMonad is Linux-only. (Or that Firefox users expect Windows&OSX ports, depending on your perspective).
    - angrycoder 15y ago
      I use Sizeup under osx to get window snapping via keyboard shortcuts. It also gives you a set of shortcuts to throw the current window to different desktops.
  - Adaptive 15y ago
    I run xmonad and was under the impression bluetile had been merged back into xmonad proper... no?
RocknRolla 15y ago
Seems to be lots of love for Unity here. Where are my haters at? I'd rather punch myself in the eye than use Unity. First thing I did was switch back to classic Gnome. I think Linux Mint is heading in the right direction with Gnome. Also been thinking about switching to Xfce since I've been using the CL a lot more.
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  I'm using an embarassingly old Ubuntu release on my main machine and Unity on a test machine. I've really tried to like Unity but I simply hate it. The machine I'm using doesn't show that many bugs. I'm patient with bugs - they'll fix them, they fixed them in the older release. It's not that. The bar side is OK-to-mediocre but the lack of a main-menu/start-menu completely crocks the thing. WTF. I can't find my apps, the apps I have installed. I've looked quite a bit. WTF were they thinking? Their particular search thingy sucks but that's not the point - even if it was great, I'd also need to know the stuff that is "just there". Sure, maybe I am an idiot for not knowing the names of the obscure graphics program I just installed and want to use but I don't think I'm the only idiot with this problem and other interfaces are forgiving for us idiots. It seems like there are two kinds of users that wouldn't be bothered by Unity. Those who only use the browser or about two-three GUIs and those who only use the command line. For all I know, these might a majority but as a former Windows power user, I suspect that there's an important minority of Ubuntu users and potential Ubuntu who'd like to use a wide variety the existing Linux GUI. Ubuntu has essentially excluded us. And its not just that Windows/GUI "power users" are a fair share of Ubuntu users but that I think we'd be the best ambassadors/evangelists if Ubuntu is to get off the ground - those who use the OS as only a launchpad to start a browser won't have a strong opinion and the average person isn't going emulate those ten terminals to get their work done. I can see the "everything slightly confusing must be destroyed" ethos leading to an "OS" consisting of a brightly color candy-machine interface with two buttons, "browser" and "off". No one will be confused but it will still suck.
  - RocknRolla 15y ago
    I agree with everything you said. The whole point behind technology should be accessibility for everyone. Geeks (guilty myself) tend to get into a bubble where we forget about the rest of the world. And there's just something about the Hacker mindset (which most people on HN have) where there more complicated it is, the cooler it seems. Instead of having the mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", Geeks/Hackers tend to think "If it ain't broke, lets break it!!!" Linux Mint is based upon Ubuntu/Debian. Give it a try. If you're a Windows power user you'll probably really like it. And all the commands you learned in Boontoo will work in Mint.
viraptor 15y ago
It's interesting how much they want to include Openstack at the moment. On one hand side it is trivial to add the Openstack PPAs and install the new version yourself. On the other current upstream versions are quite far from being usable in a real environment and major redesigns are planned... Why are they pushing for inclusion out of the box so hard?

114 points by hotice 15y ago

OMGUbuntu have a (fairly similar) review: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/ubuntu-11-10-beta-released-reviewed/ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/ubuntu-11-10-beta-release... The offical Ubuntu site has more juicy details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta1#New_features_in_Oneiric https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta...

rubinelli 15y ago

Looks like most of this release is about tweaking Unity. I was really excited about it at first, but I switched back to classic Gnome after three months. The extra screen space is nice, but it was too easy to lose my bearings.

rbanffy 15y ago
I got used to it after a couple days. My home computer runs Unity while my desktop at work runs classic Gnome (with 10.10 - I'm waiting for 11.10) My biggest complaint is that Unity took all my super bindings from Emacs. I had to do a lot of remapping for it to work on both machines.
- ajarmoniuk 15y ago
  Just change the hotkey for the Unity panel - in the compiz plugin configuration, the Unity plugin.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    But then I'd have to manage custom bindings for both Emacs and Unity. It was easier to avoid collisions in Emacs and let Unity use Super for whatever it wants (which is useful, BTW)
    - ajarmoniuk 15y ago
      I found that Unity doesn't like Super+R or whatever other combination you enter. It doesn't always seem to "catch" the combination.
- pdelgallego 15y ago
  That was the deal breaker, Ubuntu is just a library that Emacs use to communicate with the hardware.
mise 15y ago
I use Ubuntu Unity daily (both at work and at home), and still find myself lost when trying to navigate between open windows.
rufugee 15y ago
I really like Unity, but neither it nor Compiz play well with Xinerama (at least on 11.04). So while I was using Twinview with two monitors, Unity was great. However, as soon as I switched to three monitors across two vid cards, I had to drop Unity/Compiz and switch back to vanilla gnome. I'm hoping this release will resolve that issue.
- rufugee 15y ago
  Well, that and the sorta crazy window behavior. I think Unity is more intuitive than OS X regarding window management except for one "feature"...when you have multiple windows of the same application and then click the Launcher to restore one, it restores and brings to the front all of the windows. This is really bad design...I often have many terminals open and want to view a browser beside one of those terminals, but Unity makes it a real pain to do so, because every time I bring one term to the front, they all come along.
  - lobo_tuerto 15y ago
    A better sensible default would be to bring to the front only the ones that are in _that_ workspace, a second click (in case you didn't find what you are looking for with the first one) would bring to the front all the windows belonging to that app (current behaviour).
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago
  Hm, for me it did not work well even on two monitors. I'll give this one a try, hopefully they fixed it.
arcdrag 15y ago
For me there was an issue with the fact that most of my work apps aren't standard and didn't cooperate with the hijacked toolbar. If I'm going to use a distro that prides itself on ease of use, I'm not going to bother with any additional configuration just to have a toolbar in Intellij and Spring Tool Suite. No clue if this has been remedied at all yet. My dance with Unity lasted only a week before I just removed it and went to Linux Mint.

hasenj 15y ago

> We had to revert from unity-window-decorator to gtk-window-decorator for performance reasons. This means that the "1 px border" for resizing window is back temporarily. I hope "temporarily" doesn't mean until 12.04

mike-cardwell 15y ago
I hope this means my brand new laptop with a Core i5, 8GB of Ram and an SSD will now have the performance to run the standard bloody desktop. I'm currently using the classic desktop on 11.04 because my laptop starts crawling on Unity after short periods.
- jrgifford 15y ago
  I run Unity on a netbook with 1GB of ram - and since all I run is vim, chrome and a few terminals, I don't see any problems. But, your mileage may vary
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    Yes, some people have no problems. But the performance issues with Unity on 11.04 are well known and wide spread. FWIW, all I usually have running is Thunderbird, Instantbird, Firefox and some terminals, and since switching back to classic I haven't had any performance issues.
- hasenj 15y ago
  Did you try unity-2d?
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    Nope. I ran with plain Unity for the best part of a week and found it didn't give anything of value over the classic interface. The performance issues forced me back to the classic interface though. Not had any performance issues with classic. I'll give Unity another go when I upgrade to 11.10 in January (3 month delay gives them time to fix the worse bugs). I'm not spending my time trying to make it work nicely if I can just fall back to classic to fix things.

kajsadfksdfkl 15y ago

Does anyone know if it will do any good for the dual gfx card laptops? These new acer series laptops have two graphics cards on them. One is the intel on board and one is the nVidia G-Force. It uses a technology called nvidia optimus to select one of them according to need. But Linux seems plain confused and always uses both the cards I think. Thus on windows laptops run for 4:30hr with everything turned on and it is just under 2 hours for linux.

fader 15y ago
Optimus requires driver support to perform the switching, which so far nVidia has refused to even think of adding for Linux. Since their drivers are closed, there's not much more that can be done. It's possible that support might eventually make it into nouveau, the open-source NV driver, but it's not there now. (On top of that there are some bits of X that need to be rewritten to be able to fully take advantage of card switching conveniently, but last I heard people were working on it.) If power is your concern, most BIOSes will let you disable the nVidia card and force everything through the Intel hardware. But the obvious downside to this is you never get to use your fancy graphics hardware.
- kajsadfksdfkl 15y ago
  I never use it anyway except for rare occasions like some games in which case I have to switch to windows anyway. But I don't see the option to switch the thing off.
- starwed 15y ago
  This was actually enough for me to avoid buying an Optimus equipped netbook I had my eyes on... :(
- protopete 15y ago
  In an nVidia Optimus configuration, there is no actual switching between the IGP and GPU. The LCD display is connected only to the IGP. The discrete GPU is connected only to the PCIe bus. Therefore to display anything from the GPU, the contents of the GPU framebuffer RAM need to be copied over the PCIe bus to the main RAM and displayed using the IGP. The Windows drivers use "Microsoft detours" in the Display Driver Interposer to seamlessly direct graphics API calls from applications to the IGP or discrete GPU. http://www.nvidia.com/object/LO_optimus_whitepapers.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/LO_optimus_whitepapers.html

ajarmoniuk 15y ago

I tried it today morning (by doing an upgrade from 11.04) and the unity panel kept restarting every two seconds. Don't try it without a backup yet.

jetbean 15y ago
Upgrading like that may cause some issues (I had issues upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04) so maybe doing a fresh install would make it work better.
- ajarmoniuk 15y ago
  Well I had very similar (or worse) problems when upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04, but when they released the Narwhal, the update went smoothly. It's quite a difficult task to provide the update facility, last time I checked, Linux Mint recommended doing a full reinstall.

lurker19 15y ago

No sign of fixes for the various bugs that cause Sandy Bridge systems to crash on suspend/hibernate and at random times, and adds an extra power regression: the self-destruct button has been expanded to more systems: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/837266 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/837266

bostonvaulter2 15y ago
Isn't that a kernel bug and not a Ubuntu bug?

ddon 15y ago

I was a big fun of ubuntu, and used it on my desktops and laptops, but in last few years Skype became a major tool for me, to communicate with my team, and since there is still no good Skype for Linux, I no longer use ubuntu. On a desktop I use Mac OS, laptop is no longer my central tool, and most of the work from the road I do on my iPad. Thinking to get a book air for long trips, where iPad just can't cut it yet :) also, unity so far has been a disaster... I know about 5 friends who still use ubuntu, they couldn't use it with unity, and I helped them to get old gnome back. Hopefully unity will gets better, but this change I think was too big and wasn't optional. I think they lost a lot of users because of it. But I still use ubuntu on some servers of mine.

andreasvc 15y ago
What are you talking about? You can just apt-get install skype, if you enable the partner repository. Or do you mean to say the linux skype version is not as good? Agree with you on unity.
sandGorgon 15y ago
Use skype (w/ video) on android. I fully expect Microsoft to drop Skype support for Linux .. or atleast give a seriously stunted binary to get around anti-trust, that I am using Android as my full-on communication tool, including video conferencing. I see skype-video on the S5PV210 Samsung chipset android tablets already (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA). Atleast in Asia, you can get resistive 8 inchers with Gingerbread for sub-$200.
gasull 15y ago
I use Skype with video every week on Ubuntu. No problems.

mithaler 15y ago

Can someone explain to me exactly what the advantage is of hiding the menu bar contents behind mouseover?

bretthoerner 15y ago
Something like 28800 pixels on typical monitors these days?
- algorias 15y ago
  Putting it that way without mentioning that it's only 1.4% of the 2073600 pixels available on those same displays is a bit misleading, don't you think?
  - ajross 15y ago
    It's a much higher fraction of the vertical space available though, which is terribly underprovisioned on modern displays. We're all trying to scroll vertical text content on a screen intended for watching movies, and it sucks. I haven't had a chance to actually try this yet, but it looks great from the shots. Gnome 3 is doing similar things with hot corners and I like that too.
naner 15y ago
Looks less cluttered? It is a design decision so you're not going to get a universally accepted answer.
- starwed 15y ago
  There is a specific answer -- the designers must have thought it had specific advantages over the previous behavior. Whether these advantages exist and are worth it can be argued about, but they hopefully had something in mind! :)
sp332 15y ago
So programs will make their basic functionality more discoverable instead of hiding it in the menus? And when only less-used functions are relegated to the menus, there's not much point in having them visible all the time. There will be a larger contrast between common, discoverable functions and rare, hidden-away ones.

gcb 15y ago

unity is cancer. I loved it when it was just maximus for better screen state on netbooks and a few dashboards... but now, that's a travesty. it's so wrong that they are adding feature and features to try to 'fix' it. tabs in the bottom, filters on the right... it will became a full window manager on the dashboard soon. just kill it. i'm happy back to good old debian.

keithpeter 15y ago
Oddly enough that is what I have done as well. Squeeze is nice and stable with backports for Firefox/Iceweasel and LibreOffice and Gnome. Then I started fiddling with dwm as a window manager and dmenu as application menu and have not looked back...
- gcb 15y ago
  i went back to ion3. i missed it and didn't know :) i'm impressed how much debian and ubuntu are the same after you install the non-free firmware package. now i'm wondering if ubuntu is giving a lot back to debian or just doing minimal changes. but i promised myself to stay out of distro politics a long time ago

alinajaf 15y ago

Unity stamped over a bunch of my keyboard shortcuts, so I took the opportunity to learn xmonad (with gnome classic) and haven't looked back.

chrishenn 15y ago
XMonad is great. For anyone who finds it a bit daunting I recommend Bluetile[1]. It's a great introduction to the best window management system I've used (I really miss XMonad on OS X.) [1] http://www.bluetile.org/ http://www.bluetile.org/
- mcpherrinm 15y ago
  I have a Linux, OS X, and Windows machines on my desk (for doing cross-platform development of Firefox). XMonad is definitely my preferred WM for getting things done. OS X and Windows both have attempts at nice features, but they feel so frustrating to use in comparison. Lion actually improved that a lot: Fullscreen apps integrated with Spaces gives a large part of what I use X<onad for. If they'd combined that with Windows 7's snapping of windows to half-screen, that would cover 75% of my XMonad usage. It's really a shame that XMonad is Linux-only. (Or that Firefox users expect Windows&OSX ports, depending on your perspective).
  - angrycoder 15y ago
    I use Sizeup under osx to get window snapping via keyboard shortcuts. It also gives you a set of shortcuts to throw the current window to different desktops.
- Adaptive 15y ago
  I run xmonad and was under the impression bluetile had been merged back into xmonad proper... no?

RocknRolla 15y ago

Seems to be lots of love for Unity here. Where are my haters at? I'd rather punch myself in the eye than use Unity. First thing I did was switch back to classic Gnome. I think Linux Mint is heading in the right direction with Gnome. Also been thinking about switching to Xfce since I've been using the CL a lot more.

joe_the_user 15y ago
I'm using an embarassingly old Ubuntu release on my main machine and Unity on a test machine. I've really tried to like Unity but I simply hate it. The machine I'm using doesn't show that many bugs. I'm patient with bugs - they'll fix them, they fixed them in the older release. It's not that. The bar side is OK-to-mediocre but the lack of a main-menu/start-menu completely crocks the thing. WTF. I can't find my apps, the apps I have installed. I've looked quite a bit. WTF were they thinking? Their particular search thingy sucks but that's not the point - even if it was great, I'd also need to know the stuff that is "just there". Sure, maybe I am an idiot for not knowing the names of the obscure graphics program I just installed and want to use but I don't think I'm the only idiot with this problem and other interfaces are forgiving for us idiots. It seems like there are two kinds of users that wouldn't be bothered by Unity. Those who only use the browser or about two-three GUIs and those who only use the command line. For all I know, these might a majority but as a former Windows power user, I suspect that there's an important minority of Ubuntu users and potential Ubuntu who'd like to use a wide variety the existing Linux GUI. Ubuntu has essentially excluded us. And its not just that Windows/GUI "power users" are a fair share of Ubuntu users but that I think we'd be the best ambassadors/evangelists if Ubuntu is to get off the ground - those who use the OS as only a launchpad to start a browser won't have a strong opinion and the average person isn't going emulate those ten terminals to get their work done. I can see the "everything slightly confusing must be destroyed" ethos leading to an "OS" consisting of a brightly color candy-machine interface with two buttons, "browser" and "off". No one will be confused but it will still suck.
- RocknRolla 15y ago
  I agree with everything you said. The whole point behind technology should be accessibility for everyone. Geeks (guilty myself) tend to get into a bubble where we forget about the rest of the world. And there's just something about the Hacker mindset (which most people on HN have) where there more complicated it is, the cooler it seems. Instead of having the mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", Geeks/Hackers tend to think "If it ain't broke, lets break it!!!" Linux Mint is based upon Ubuntu/Debian. Give it a try. If you're a Windows power user you'll probably really like it. And all the commands you learned in Boontoo will work in Mint.

viraptor 15y ago

It's interesting how much they want to include Openstack at the moment. On one hand side it is trivial to add the Openstack PPAs and install the new version yourself. On the other current upstream versions are quite far from being usable in a real environment and major redesigns are planned... Why are they pushing for inclusion out of the box so hard?