jamesturk.net

James Turk — 2008/03/29 — ubuntu

As I have done with every release since Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) I installed the latest Ubuntu Beta almost immediately upon release.

To be entirely honest, so far, I almost wish I hadn't.

Now I know, that it's rare to read an Ubuntu review that's anything but glowing, but keep in mind this is a Beta, and there was just no reason for me to upgrade.

The major features advertised on the Beta release page include: Xorg 7.3, Kernel 2.6.24, Gnome 2.22, PolicyKit, PulseAudio, Firefox 3 Beta 4, Transmission Bittorrent Client, Vinagre VNC viewer, Brasero CD/DVD burning, World Clock Applet, Inkscape 0.46, and Wubi.

Xorg 7.3 promises to bring better multi-monitor support. The thing is that for my laptop's nvidia card nothing beats nvidia-settings. I know it's proprietary, but it just works with my setup and still has a much nicer interface than the "two white rectangles" that the new XRandR GUI offers.

It's hard for me to judge what benefit I'm getting from the Kernel, I will say that as always with a Kernel upgrade a few drivers break, which is a hassle, but my own fault for upgrading to a Beta before everyone has the chance to catch up.

Gnome 2.22's big thing is GVFS, which I'm sure in time will pay off. So far I haven't seen much benefit, but I understand that getting rid of the old underlying filesystem will allow some cool things in the future. Related to this is PolicyKit, which again, isn't integrated with the system enough to bring real benefit so far, but is a nice idea to avoid having to gksudo everything. The other feature of Gnome 2.22 is the World Clock Applet which is cool. Of course, the practical use for most users is close to nil.

PulseAudio integration is another thing that lays some cool groundwork, but without integrated volume controls much of the benefit is lost. I have to say that controlling volume on an application-by-application basis sounds awesome.

I was already running Beta 3 of Firefox 3, no real changes in Beta 4. (I did notice that for some reason I was having X lockup issues with Twitterfox. I unfortunately had to uninstall it they were so serious and consistent. Unfortunately a coworker of mine couldn't reproduce them on his Hardy Heron system so I have no idea what was actually to blame, so I haven't been able to file a bug report yet.)

Transmission Bittorrent client looks nice, I only usually fire up bittorrent when downloading Ubuntu ISOs however, so I haven't really taken it on a test drive. Vinagre VNC viewer is another "looks nice but I'm not a VNC user". Same with the new CD burning application, typically the only CDs I burn are ISOs so this isn't a huge deal for me. Inkscape having PDF support built in by default is awesome. I played around with it a bit and it seems pretty good. I love Inkscape despite my lack of artistic ability, and being able to generate PDFs is quite nice.

Which of these application upgrades matters to you is a highly personal thing that depends on your usage, all four are nice polished applications that I feel are great choices for inclusion in a default install.

The memory protection and new firewall aren't things that are very visible to an end user, although it certainly is nice to see the continued focus on security. (Ubuntu being the last laptop standing in this "hack a laptop to win it" contest shows that it's already somewhat ahead of Vista/OSX.)

The last thing, and one of the biggest features being plugged with the new Ubuntu release is Wubi. Wubi allows you to install Ubuntu within Windows without repartitioning. This is cool for people who have to be on Windows, but I'm a bit worried it'll slow conversion rates.

I never meant to switch to Ubuntu. About a month after I installed 5.04 (3 years ago, happy anniversary!) I realized I hadn't rebooted my computer (a rare feat in windows). It was another 3 months until I went into windows again, and that was only to make sure that a hardware problem wasn't to blame on Ubuntu (it wasn't). When I got my new laptop I hesitated before giving the whole drive to Ubuntu, but I realized that I hadn't booted into Windows in something like a year, and when I did (to test windows applications that refused to run under wine) a VM would have been must less of an interruption to my workflow.

It remains to be seen if users running Ubuntu within Windows will have this same realization that they don't need windows anymore. Of course, lowering the barrier to entry so drastically is a huge positive. I rather preferred the idea of switching users away from Windows only apps (getting them to use OpenOffice, Firefox, and Pidgin) and then pointing out that they hardly needed Windows (this is what inadvertantly also switched a (non-computer geek for the record) girl I was dating a few years ago to Linux-only, she hasn't rebooted her desktop since upgrading to 7.10).

As I said at the beginning of this review, I somewhat wish I had waited to upgrade. I got virtually no benefit from upgrading as I had virtually no problems on 7.10 for the last 6 months. This is not a negative review of 8.04 so much as it is a glowing review of 7.10 (which wasn't even a LTS release). That said, with the exception of the aforementioned TwitterFox issue and an issue with a new wireless driver I had early on, there is no reason not to upgrade to 8.04 at your leisure.