Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Drawing Near

daria42 writes "Ubuntu developers are finalizing preparations for the release of the next version — dubbed Feisty Fawn — of the popular Linux distribution in mid-April. Overnight, Ubuntu developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Ubuntu's main software repository had been frozen — with no changes allowed to the code — as developers got ready to issue a fifth major test version ("Herd 5") of the next version of Ubuntu."

I'm using feisty since herd 1

[vivaoporto]

And I can say is that Feisty is a big improvement over Edgy, both in hardware support and software "smoothness". It is a pity that Xorg 7.2 will not be ready for Feisty launch, but this is certainly a candidate to bring an alternative to Windows on the Desktop.

Why Xorg 7.2 is so important?

[pato101]

Please would you point major features of Xorg 7.2 so it is a pity it does not get included? (not pretending to troll, I'm just ignorant).

Yes, try Kubuntu

[metamatic]

I just switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, because Ubuntu is infected with Mono.

While KDE has way, way too many UI tweaks available in its preferences, I just switched the theme to Plastik and stopped fiddling with everything else. Other than that, KDE beats Gnome in every way.

Faster, Feisty, Faster!

[reclusivemonkey]

Is it just me or does Feisty seem noticeably quicker than Edgy? OK, my Edgy was getting a little bloated which is one of the reasons I updated to Feisty, but is seems to boot a lot quicker and my Desktop seems to be up in seconds after logging in from GDM.

What is the point of GNOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I understand the point of Gnome.

Can you please explain it to me?

I've been a die-hard KDE user for about eight years. But at Christmas a friend of mine suggested that I give GNOME a try. So I've been using GNOME 2.16 since the start of January. And you know what? I've hated every minute of it. My productivity has tanked, and my system is now quite unstable. I promised to use it until the end of March, at which time I'm sure I'll be switching back to KDE.

My main complaint is the extremely poor performance of GNOME. It's nowhere near as responsive as KDE. Being written in C, I thought it'd be much quicker than the C++-based KDE. But perhaps the pseduo-OO layer of GTK+ really destroys its performance.

Maybe the performance of GNOME is hindered by its excessive use of system resources. Whenever I use Nautilus for anything greater than about 25 minutes, its memory usage balloons. I'm talking about it consuming 750 MB to 800 MB of RAM, according to top. Thankfully, I have 2 GB of RAM in my system. But with a couple of Nautius processes consuming nearly 1 GB of RAM, plus other running applications, I find my system starts to swap, resulting in terrible performance.

The stability is also terrible. I don't recall ever crashing any KDE applications, let alone the main processes of KDE itself. On the other hand, I've had some GNOME app or component crash out on nearly a daily basis. I can't use Evolution because it crashes whenever I go to check for new mail. Even some of the games crash!

So I find myself wondering why people would want to use GNOME. It's clear to me that KDE is superior in just about every way. KDE is more responsive. KDE doesn't crash every now and then. KDE uses far less memory than GNOME. With GNOME it's so easy to see all of the problems, and so difficult to find anything good about it. So I ask, why do people continue to use GNOME, when KDE and XFCE are far superior? I'd almost have to guess it's a semi-religious obsession that makes them put up with such nonsense.

Will Feisty Fawn be an LTS release?

[ELiTeUI]

Dapper Drake (6.06) was an LTS release. Edgy Eft (6.10) was not an LTS release. Does anyone know if Feisty Fawn will be LTS or not?

Feisty Fawn shpping - Debian slipping as usual

[Kjella]

I actually thought Debian was closing in on a release quite soon when they slipped their December release goal. Well, it's now March tomorrow and they still haven't even gotten RC2 out the door. Yes, I can understand the "when it's ready" but if you run into so long delays that you could have an intermediate release, then it's better than no release at all. At this rate, Ubuntu might have their next LTS version out before Debian does...

Does Upstart = Launchd?

[Kadin2048]

Is upstart based at all on Apple / MacOS X's launchd? They created that basically to speed up OS X's boot time, and it did so dramatically. I believe that it's Apache (or BSD?) licensed and Apple was hopeful that it would be included in other systems and become the standard way of doing things, although there was a lot of cynicism that the mainstream Linux/UNIX community would never give up init and rc, regardless of the technical merits of any replacements. Granted, it doesn't give you the System V-like multiple runlevels, but I'm not sure that most desktop users are ever going to care. They're either going to use the computer normally, or boot into some sort of low level recovery mode from the boot prompt if things go pear-shaped. The idea of multiple runlevels is more confusing than anything for non-technical users.

FWIW, I was initially skeptical of launchd and launchctl after upgrading my Mac to 10.4, but I've since learned to really appreciate the design of both of them. Some serious thought went into both, and I think they both represent a rethinking of some processes that have just been carried over in other UNIX-based OSes from the days of minis and mainframes to desktops, and aren't necessarily the best way of doing things.

I think it's natural that in the future we're going to see more differentiation between desktop Linux distros and server ones, besides the amount of software that's installed. Fast-boot systems like launchd would be one welcome addition to desktop distros (although their utility might be more questionable on servers that are rarely restarted and where the dynamic launching of services on an as-needed basis might be a misfeature).

Actually, I'm not too excited.

[DoofusOfDeath]

I find myself at a funny point now. Ubuntu is certainly my distro of choice, and its the only OS I really use. But now that it works well enough for me to focus on my work rather than having to wrestle with the OS, I don't really care that much about one upgrade to the next.

I've did install Feisty Herd 4 (+ update) on my HP laptop to see if they fixed the ACPI issues that have always plagued me. (Won't suspend or hibernate when I close the lid.) No real improvement there (although if I manually make it suspend, it does act a little more normal after waking up than it does with Edgy.) But without that improvement, I just find myself kind of, I dunno... content with Edgy. It's a nice but slightly disappointing place to be.

Re:AWW damn!!

[Short Circuit]

The bundling is done by OEMs rather than Microsoft themselves. Even then, you either get Microsoft Works (an incompatible piece of crap) or a teaser version of MS Office that you have to feed a credit card to in order to unlock.

What's really ironic, though, is that, since the days of Windows 3.1, Write (or, "WordPad" since Win95) has more than enough features for average home use. Granted, that doesn't give you spreadsheet abilities. WordPad is even capable of reading most Microsoft Word documents.

Re:Smoother update process?

[radarsat1]

If you want to upgrade to it on release day, I'd recommend using bittorrent to get the ISO (faster this way) and then doing an apt-get dist-upgrade with that CD-ROM as a new apt repository.

Actually I really wish they'd incorporate bittorrent into Apt. That would be pretty cool. (Have it fail to an http server of course if bittorrent doesn't work or is too slow)

I looked this up before and found there is at least one [fsf.org] project trying to do it [launchpad.net].

I think bittorrent could be improved if it allowed a simple http server to be considered a seed, that way you could just use the bittorrent protocol and it would download from the http server if there were no seeders.

Feisty desktop / liveCD feedback ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The trashcan applet is still broken on the desktop/liveCD. It's been broken for about a year now.
The desktop/liveCD now set's it's time and date over the network, that's a welcome improvement.
The gnome control center is a new addition, this cleans up the menus, I'm not quite sure if I like it yet or not.
The update-notifier daemon was running again on the desktop/liveCD, this is a regression.
General clumsiness during bootup of desktop/liveCD, awkward pauses, blank screens, graphic glitches.
Not possible to lock screen in a liveCD session if one creates a new user or if one creates a password.
Memory usage was up on the liveCD, perhaps this will come down as we get closer to release.
Persistence feature needs to be improved to auto-detect the proper media.
We need a USB-key version of the desktop/liveCD.

Re:AWW damn!!

[FrostDust]

Yeah, that's what I used to say, but care to venture a guess as to why Wordpad can't read .DOC's in Vista?

Colour me crazy...

[B5_geek]

I have been running *Ubuntu since the Warty days (as my only workstation OS), and I do love it.

I use KDE on the backend with fluxbox as my WM.

Will Feisty allow me to install Beryl/Compiz via apt and give my eye-candy for flux?

(A) I LOVE with speed and configurability of Flux.
(B) I am envious of all the neeto window-manager effects that compiz allows
(C) I am not willing to run Gnome or KDE as my WM in-order to get the eyecandy.

Am I crazy-insane or insane-crazy?

All I need now from Ubuntu is..

[cheros]

(1) the splash to stay 'Ubuntu' even though I use Kubuntu' - why can't I choose?
(2) a decent server. I tried Fedora but found the interface inconsistent (maybe I should have read more docs), OpenSuSE does the job with Yast but to get cups to server printing to a couple of Windows boxes is a pain but it's so far the quickest to setup re. serving Samba, Apache, MySQL for people like me that have not so much time to plough through man pages and docs (though I'm not exactly a stranger to CLI - I've been using Linux since it came on floppies and X was an option :-). I really like what the Ubuntu guys are doing so as soon as they come up with a usable server I'll be using it.

Now, if someone has a web way to set up Postfix + IMAP with a couple of domains and aliases I'd be interested, but that's a new question which I haven't researched yet myself :-). I guess it's time to find webmin again..

Ubuntu: intelligent freedom..