Ubuntu 9 Is Jaunty Jackalope, Coming Next April 318
mr_3ntropy writes "Ars is reporting Mark Shuttleworth announced today that Ubuntu 9.04 will be called Jaunty Jackalope, to be released next April. It will focus on improving boot times and the convergence of desktop and web.
The 8.10 release, Intrepid Ibex, is coming next month with GNOME 2.24 and will include better support for subnotebooks."
Re:Why is this important? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://ubuntusatanic.org/news/ [ubuntusatanic.org]
Jackalope? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speed is important... (Score:5, Interesting)
But when I see Ubuntu and it boots slower than XP and... Well, feels slower than XP, I have to facepalm. Linux is supposed to be the faster one, it's supposed to be the one where you can say "Man, you use XP? It's so slow! Use Linux!", but with Ubuntu you can't really say that. Not that it's Ubuntu's fault, I put the blame on Gnome. The Gnome desktop is bulky and slow, your *panel* shouldn't be using CPU cycles constantly, or the amount of memory gnome-panel uses. There's alternatives for sure (And I'm not talking about KDE, it's almost as bad.), but you have to piece it together yourself because it isn't a single DE. I.E, Openbox WM, pypanel or bmpanel or lxpanel or lbpanel or one of those (I prefer pypanel and bmpanel), pcmanfm filenavigator (Can also set icons on the desktop and manage wallpapers), and on and on. There's tons of lightweight programs out there with the same abilities, just not packaged neatly together. But people are trying! Just have a look at crunchbang linux [crunchbang.org] and DEs like lxde [lxde.org]. Using this stuff, you can get that old 550mhz thinkpad you have in your closet up and running again, webbrowsing and e-mailing at lightning speeds. THIS, to me, is what Linux should represent. Not the slow bulky thing you have to buy a new computer for!
But about the other things with the new Ubuntu release, polishlinux has a great review of what Ubuntu alpha looks like right now, and what we can expect from it here [polishlinux.org].
Looks like nautilus is finally getting tabs, although the lighter pcmanfm has had tabs for awhile. I'm really excited about is improvements with the network manager and with xorg... Two places that really need improvement. Seems like wireless support improves with each release, and I hope it continues on that awesome path. And it seems that the kernel 2.6.27 will be out in time for this release! It's already on rc5, and most kernels don't go past rc10 before release (And they're releasing an rc once a week, or about once a week).
It's all very exciting, but again the one thing I hope for more than anything else is speed and bloat! Keep Linux the OS that you say "You don't even have to get a new computer for it. It's fast, unlike Vista/XP/OSX/Everythingever", please please please
Re:Speed is important... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up. I was getting annoyed that no-one seemed to care about anything except what they named the release! I was starting to think I was on a PHB forum!
Re:Guessing the new name is fun... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does everyone assume the Z will be Zebra? What about the Zorillas [wikipedia.org]?
Re:I agree.. but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen this argument before, and it is disgustingly ironic. Codenames that are unrelated to what they describe have the advantage that they can describe something else if needed. For example, it was originally assumed that Ubuntu Dapper Drake would become 6.04 LTS. However, they delayed the release for a couple of months for stability reasons, and Dapper Drake became 6.06. If they had referred to Dapper Drake as 6.04 from the start, the change would have been more difficult. Also, codenames are easier to remember, and more difficult to mis-type.
What you are suggesting is that they reduce functionality to make it "sound better", which is the opposite of professional.
Re:Why is this important? (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be nice if they quit making low priority, and at times frankly pointless, changes and concentrated on making it both useful to users and a happy experience. From Gutsy to Hardy the applications presented in the toolbar changed - for no good reason as far as I can see, needlessly confusing users. At the same time basic UI improvements went undone. I was going to remove Evolution for someone until I saw what synaptic said would also need to be removed... choice apparently doesn't include letting the users decide for themselves what mail, calendar etc. to use...
It isn't that I don't appreciate what the Ubuntu people are doing but they are fooling themselves if they think that installing and using Ubuntu (or any other distro I suspect) is anything like a friendly, happy experience for a new user. If it comes preconfigured on a system and the user doesn't want to change anything then maybe... but otherwise normal human beings aren't going to be happy.
Here's an example - iirc Ubuntu is going to make Samba the default file share mechanism (rather than NFS)... I tried using it to copy a directory tree for someone and it bitched about file names being too long... now they weren't too long for the source (Win2K) and they weren't too long for Hardy but apparently they were too long for Samba...the limit seemed to be 128. They were music files with artist, album, track number, track name etc. in the file name... very easy to get past 128 chars. Imagine being a naive user and getting that message... they will give up
If you're coming from a windows environment is it obvious in Ubuntu how to copy, rather than move, a file to a directory? I don't think so. Yes you can find it in the docs but users don't want to read the docs - why do things differently (just to be different?) and cause the user to have to work needlessly? Maybe just doing it the way Windows does is a patent problem thing but it was one of the first problems my friend encountered.
My suggestion to Ubuntu folk is this - pay a bunch of people to use the current system and tell you what they don't like - and then change what *they* want not what you think they should want changed. Get people who have never used a computer, get people who have used a computer but not Ubuntu or other distros, get people who have used the current version for some months... I bet you boot times and web integration aren't anywhere near the top of the resulting wish-list.
And geez, it's the 21st century and we still have fixed limits on the length of paths and filenames?