8 ms·

New Ubuntu in 9 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes and 29 seconds

100 points by doh 15y ago

stephank 15y ago
Here are the beta 2 release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta2 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta... I probably missed it; what's so radical about this release? It's not even an LTS.
- xelnyq 15y ago
  the date 11/11/11 is an opportunity for easy marketing
  - jalada 15y ago
    Except it's 11/10/11 or 10/11/11 depending on where you live.
    - xelnyq 15y ago
      damn i mixed up the date :]
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- wisty 15y ago
  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?). The more things change ...
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > and is probably just a wrapper on apt-get Not at all. 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.
k_bx 15y ago
offtopic: and for dr. who fans http://aubronwood.com/ticktock/ http://aubronwood.com/ticktock/
sundar22in 15y ago
Let me call it this time... This is the year of Desktop linux :D
jrockway 15y ago
New Debian in ... always.
fhars 15y ago
Oh my god is that embarrassing. 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?
- Auguste 15y ago
  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.
  - fhars 15y ago
    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...
    - Raphael 15y ago
      10.10 was the last before Unity. 10.04 is LTS (long term support) until April 2013.
    - andyking 15y ago
      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.
gurkendoktor 15y ago
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?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sathishmanohar 15y ago
Where is the link to Ubuntu website?
s8qnze982y 15y ago
I'm really looking forward to new Ubuntu releases... NOT. As a matter of fact, Ubuntu's getting so much buggier and buggier with each release, that I'm just downgrading from Natty to Maverick. What a huge disappointment.
- sciurus 15y ago
  You might want to consider Debian.
Lucadg 15y ago
I was going to say that there's a flyer. But it's empty too :)
kiwidrew 15y ago
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.
- pnathan 15y ago
  You can, of course, install Gnome 2, yes?
  - technomancy 15y ago
    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.
- pasbesoin 15y ago
  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.
pnathan 15y ago
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.
pinwale 15y ago
The site doesn't even say anything about 11.10 & try counting the days on the timer. :) It looks like it's a countdown for something else.
snowwindwaves 15y ago
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!
- viraptor 15y ago
  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)
  - piccadilly 15y ago
    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
lhnn 15y ago
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.
Or1on 15y ago
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/ 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.
bbg 15y ago
For those of us using NoScript, it's 00 days, 00 hours, 00 minutes, and 00 seconds. We get it first. Win!
davidandgoliath 15y ago
Debian, debian, debian: http://debian.org http://debian.org Do it -- you won't regret it :) Ubuntu is turning into such a mess.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
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] [1] Caradpio+docky http://i.minus.com/iA94EsbEeR2fz.png http://i.minus.com/iA94EsbEeR2fz.png [2] Note how the menus are different here in each application. http://i.imgur.com/ER4pR.png http://i.imgur.com/ER4pR.png (Firefox, native gnome-terminal, qt VLC)
tedjdziuba 15y ago
As long as xmonad is still in the repo, do whatever you guys want.
earthviaradio 15y ago
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.
jrgifford 15y ago
Let it be known that this is a community project, not a Canonical project.

100 points by doh 15y ago

Here are the beta 2 release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta2 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta... I probably missed it; what's so radical about this release? It's not even an LTS.

xelnyq 15y ago
the date 11/11/11 is an opportunity for easy marketing
- jalada 15y ago
  Except it's 11/10/11 or 10/11/11 depending on where you live.
  - xelnyq 15y ago
    damn i mixed up the date :]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
wisty 15y ago
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?). The more things change ...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > and is probably just a wrapper on apt-get Not at all. 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.

k_bx 15y ago

offtopic: and for dr. who fans http://aubronwood.com/ticktock/ http://aubronwood.com/ticktock/

sundar22in 15y ago

Let me call it this time... This is the year of Desktop linux :D

jrockway 15y ago

New Debian in ... always.

fhars 15y ago

Oh my god is that embarrassing. 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?

Auguste 15y ago
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.
- fhars 15y ago
  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...
  - Raphael 15y ago
    10.10 was the last before Unity. 10.04 is LTS (long term support) until April 2013.
  - andyking 15y ago
    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.

gurkendoktor 15y ago

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?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

sathishmanohar 15y ago

Where is the link to Ubuntu website?

s8qnze982y 15y ago

I'm really looking forward to new Ubuntu releases... NOT. As a matter of fact, Ubuntu's getting so much buggier and buggier with each release, that I'm just downgrading from Natty to Maverick. What a huge disappointment.

sciurus 15y ago
You might want to consider Debian.

Lucadg 15y ago

I was going to say that there's a flyer. But it's empty too :)

kiwidrew 15y ago

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.

pnathan 15y ago
You can, of course, install Gnome 2, yes?
- technomancy 15y ago
  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.
pasbesoin 15y ago
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.

pnathan 15y ago

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.

pinwale 15y ago

The site doesn't even say anything about 11.10 & try counting the days on the timer. :) It looks like it's a countdown for something else.

snowwindwaves 15y ago

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!

viraptor 15y ago
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)
- piccadilly 15y ago
  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

lhnn 15y ago

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.

Or1on 15y ago

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/ 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.

bbg 15y ago

For those of us using NoScript, it's 00 days, 00 hours, 00 minutes, and 00 seconds. We get it first. Win!

davidandgoliath 15y ago

Debian, debian, debian: http://debian.org http://debian.org Do it -- you won't regret it :) Ubuntu is turning into such a mess.

drivebyacct2 15y ago

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] [1] Caradpio+docky http://i.minus.com/iA94EsbEeR2fz.png http://i.minus.com/iA94EsbEeR2fz.png [2] Note how the menus are different here in each application. http://i.imgur.com/ER4pR.png http://i.imgur.com/ER4pR.png (Firefox, native gnome-terminal, qt VLC)

tedjdziuba 15y ago

As long as xmonad is still in the repo, do whatever you guys want.

earthviaradio 15y ago

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.

jrgifford 15y ago

Let it be known that this is a community project, not a Canonical project.