Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X

An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece from ZDNet Australia. "Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04, which formally hit the streets yesterday: its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface since the last release in October. Just like Microsoft has taken the blowtorch to Vista to produce the lightning-quick Windows 7, which so far runs well even on older hardware, Ubuntu has picked up its own game."

Way faster than 8.10

[cbuosi]

Installed Ubuntu 9.04 over my 9.04RC and all i can say that its a lot faster than 8.10 (RC was faster too). And i mean it cause i have a quite old config.

Re:screenshots?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I realize reading TFA is frowned upon, but:

You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists. What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.

Re:screenshots?

[pzs]

FTFA: "You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists."

Re:Polish & slickness are buzzwords

[Nerdposeur]

Well, the author did specify a meaning:

You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists. What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.

OT: Debian Squeeze

[mpapet]

I just upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze and it's in decent shape already.

At the moment there are no show-stopper bugs for your plain-vanilla desktop use. You can pull kde4.2 from sid too.

I'm having no performance issues with KDE4.2 eye candy on a Thinkpad T42. Way to go!!

Note, last week's build of the Squeeze net installer didn't work. Do a basic Lenny install then upgrade into Squeeze.

Very Impressed with the update

[Patman]

I just installed 9.04 on my work machine. The upgrade had one minor hiccup, which was quickly fixed(the PCM setting in the volume control was muted). Compared to the 8.10 upgrade, which was an unmitigated disaster, this was refreshing.

I haven't really seen a noticeable improvement like the article's author has yet; maybe that will change. I can say that this is the first upgrade yet that hasn't required fiddling with Envy or the Restricted Drivers Manager to get my Nvidia card humming nicely.

Consider me impressed.

[JoeytheSquid]

I have to admit this is the first smooth Ubuntu install I've ever had. It actually detected my wireless adapter right out of the box. No fiddling, no CLI hackery, no sacrifices to the pagan gods of open source (which is good because my lease forbids livestock and the downstairs neighbors frown upon blood dripping through the ceiling.)

Not bad, not bad at all.

Except if you try and use the ATI binary driver

[gzunk]

Not with the 4850X2 or 4870X2 (like me).
The X Server segfaults on startup: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/364180/ [launchpad.net]

It's not nearly as nice looking when using VESA or RadeonHD.

They also don't tell you about nVidia drivers

[plasmidmap]

An upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 hosed my polished UI yesterday because there were no nvidia glx drivers available for download. That was a bit of a shock and annoyance, but it's my own fault for not checking its availability before hitting upgrade.

Seems like there is one now in the repos but I think there's a lot of traffic because I can't seem to update.

Patiently waiting... still love Ubuntu.

Its okay ... still unaddressed issues

[Christianfreak]

I like the speed and the new interface. Both are very nice. I was really excited when I read there were improvements to handling multiple monitors and the evolution-mapi plugin that would finally let me use the office's exchange server. Sadly both have missed the mark.

I use the Nvidia driver which means the fancy new monitor settings are not available to me (it pops an alert that tells me I have to open the Nvidia utility). The good thing is I don't have to hunt for the utility, it opens it for me, the bad is the utility is mostly useless. X sees my two screens as one huge screen, which is fine when I have two screens but sucks when I undock the laptop. No way to switch to one screen without hand-editing xorg.conf

I've always had high-hopes for evolution and I don't know why because its always been buggy and slow. This time is no different: "We have REAL exchange support this time! I promise". Sadly while I was able to install the mapi plugin and it shows in my settings, evolution helpfully crashes when I try to login. There are bugs filed against it ...maybe it will get fixed ... someday

And no, I have no love for exchange but I'm forced to use it. I have used the evolution-exchange package that connects through OWA ... its slow and buggy. Often refusing to download my mail, losing the connection to "the backend process" requiring me to delete a certain file. All in all, not worth the hassle.

For now I'm stuck using Outlook in an XP virtual

Re:They also don't tell you about nVidia drivers

[plasmidmap]

Now the driver has downloaded and it looks fantastic! I spoke too soon.

Re:I love Ubuntu...

[pnutjam]

Try mint [linuxmint.com]. They should have their 9.04 based version out soon, but 6 works pretty nice. Hulu and youtube out of the box, not to mention, DVD playback and everything else. Plus you get to use Ubuntu repositories for other packages.
Best desktop distribution IMHO.

Re:The shell still bugs me a bit

[David Gerard]

I believe they're favouring this one [today.com].

One Ubuntu Caveat

[Barterer]

Agreed.. the Ubuntu interface and speed are great, even running off a live CD. But if you plan to install to a flash drive, do not trust it to leave your hard drive alone. When it gets to the GRUB installation, it reverts back to a hard drive install and messes with your MBR. I tried it on a Windows XP machine, and it made both XP and the flash drive unbootable.. should have yanked the hard drive first.

Re:They also don't tell you about nVidia drivers

[Christianfreak]

That's weird. My Nvidia drivers upgraded with no problem.

Re:The problem remains... groupware

[mhall119]

The new Evolution, included in Ubuntu 9.04, uses MAPI to interact with Exchange, it no longer needs OWA.

Re:I love Ubuntu...

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

You know, this is a common retort: "Windows is hard to install, you have to install drivers after installing the OS; Linux is so easy to install because the OS comes with all drivers"

What Linux advocates forget to mention is that it's really easy to install drivers after installing windows. If you have the disks your hardware came with, it's as simple as "next, I accept, next, next, done".

Another minor detail advocates forget to mention is that, if a given Linux distribution doesn't have your drivers, you're SOL. Nor do advocates mention that each version of Linux has a different driver API/ABI (this is a deliberate decision done by kernel devs [kroah.com]) so you can't, for example, use your Ubuntu drivers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Linux advocates also forget to mention that the time needed to edit configuration files with arcane formats to get just one thing to work in Linux (such as, say, file and printer sharing in Samba) is far greater than the time needed to install all of the drivers to get a given Windows install to work.

Quite frankly, I would rather deal with the bother of downloading and installing whatever drivers an older version of Windows needs to work (I'm sticking with Windows XP for the foreseeable future) than being forced to install a new unstable version of Linux just so I can have drivers for my new computer.

Re:font rendering

[bjourne]

I had the same issue. Compiz + 8.04 + nVidia proprietary drivers + not antialiased fonts and the fonts would look terrible. Especially italicized glyphs. But switching to Metacity solved those problems (and some others too, related to Compiz or nVidia driver instability).

Giving this one a 3 / 10 for install reliability

[Brad_McBad]

I've now done the upgrade from Intrepid on three machines and here are the results:

1. Work Machine - Uses an Intel 965 Graphics cards, support of which is broken until kernel 2.6.29 / 30 according to the forums, and won't be properly supported until karmic. Fucking annoying, since by 'broken' I mean "utterly non performant".

2. Home Laptop. Ran just fine, but apt decided that I didn't want the restricted packages installing on the upgrade, so my atheros wifi card was out of action until I could get the .deb from somewhere else. Annoyingly, the madwifi drivers seem to kill whatever ubuntu do to NetworkManager so I'm stuck using the propietary, even though they've been in the kernel since 2.6.25.

3. Home Desktop. This has killed X. Killed it good. At the moment I've no idea how it was managed, but it was...

I love ubuntu, but this upgrade has gone horribly wrong for me on two out of three installs, and 'smoothly' on none of them.

Re:Dual Monitors - No Sweat

[TurboNed]

All it needs now is a "Launch World of Warcraft from my Windows partition" menu entry, and it'll take the world by storm.

You do realize that you can do this with Wine, right? It's how I play. I never ran the installer in Linux, I just told Wine to launch Wow.exe on the NTFS partition and it worked.

Re:screenshots?

[PitaBred]

I thought that was MNG [libpng.org]?

Re:screenshots?

[PitaBred]

A touchscreen is significantly different than a Wacom tablet. The Wacom tablets should pretty much work out of the box with Ubuntu. You don't have the orientation and calibration issues nearly as bad with the Wacom tablets as you do with the tablet touchscreens.

Not on Intel graphics hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://www.ubuntugeek.com/intel-graphics-performance-guide-for-ubuntu-904-jaunty-users.html

Some users are experiencing performance issues with Intel integrated graphics chips in Jaunty, for several reasons:

        * The current driver in our repository has some performance issues with the EXA acceleration method. Users will notice 2D performance is poor due to the default âoemigration heuristicâ employed by EXA (to âoealwaysâ migrate pixmaps), but this causes performance issues for many users. Setting the heuristic to âoegreedyâ alleviates this problem somewhat. See âoeman exaâ.

        * The new and faster acceleration method (UXA) is not enabled by default, due to issues reported by many users. This code is being actively developed, and many stability and performance issues have been resolved in the latest drivers (specifically within the intel driver, libdrm and the latest kernel 2.6.30-rc2). Unfortunately, Jaunty will not include the latest versions necessary to improve performance.

        * 3D performance has regressed compared to the Intrepid release, possibly due to major code changes that have resulted from the introduction to the new acceleration and memory management code (UXA, GEM, DRI2). Due to these changes, there seems to be some regressions in the âoelegacyâ DRI acceleration.

        * Either Xorg or the âoeintelâ driver seems to be suffering from a bug, in which the memory region allocated for the graphics card is not set up with the proper type of caching. This results in jerky video playback of almost any content (from 720p media, all the way down to simple 320Ã--240 mpeg content), and a potential loss of performance for other 2D and 3D operations.

Re:screenshots?

[djrosen]

Did you miss the part where he said they are GOOD for handheld devices? Is an iPhone held with something other than your hand?

Re:Screenshots

[drinkypoo]

I suggest you try theming the GNOME desktop before you decide that it is ugly. I am using Compiz with the truglass engine and a custom white-frosted-glass theme I made, with the Cillop-Go GTK+2 theme. It all blends very well and looks kind of like the mac without the candy coated buttons. Compiz also provides Expo and lots of other mac-like eye candy, although I admit the visual effects are faster on mac.

Re:Isn't it strange

[drinkypoo]

Two things slow Windows XP down to a crawl. One of them is registry fragmentation, which can be solved with pagedefrag. The other is Service Pack 3, which can be solved with Linux.

Re:screenshots?

[ciderVisor]

Two words: Linux Mint (yeah, I know it's not free-as-in-FSF, but who cares ?).

Re:screenshots?

[dsparil]

MNG is the "official" animated version. APNG was rejected as an official extension. However, APNG is backwards compatible with PNG, a static image is displayed instead of an animated one in browsers that don't support it, and it also supported by more browsers. Firefox 3+ and Opera 9.5+ support APNG, but only Konqueror currently supports MNG out of the box.

Re:screenshots?

[bwhaley]

Youtube demos this pretty well, IMHO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h905pHzkXPw [youtube.com]

Re:The shell still bugs me a bit

[ultrabot]

You should try Gnome-Do [davebsd.com]. It gives you a dock, if you want one, and also a QuickSilver-like interface for launching apps, which is far, far better than a dock.

It also gives you mono [wikipedia.org]

Re:The problem remains... groupware

[DoofusOfDeath]

No, I won't virtualize WIN/Outlook. No, I won't run 2 desktops. No, the Exchange server is not going to be replaced with insight or kroupware or any other open source replacement.

Have you tried 9.04's experimental support for Exchange's MAPI protocol [arstechnica.com] in the Evolution email client? It's not perfect yet [launchpad.net], but if it works for you, you might be able to ditch Windows.

Re:Isn't it strange

[stephanruby]

Or you could have just installed linux mint [linuxmint.com] which is just a repackaged version of Ubuntu and which does the sound perfectly.

Re:screenshots?

[multisync]

You can never tell on Slashdot since the dates on stories and comments always truncate the year

Go to Help and Preferenes -> Index -> General. In the Date/Time Format drop-down, choose one that displays the information you want to see.

Re:Isn't it strange

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash? it's always flash. I bet the other page is running flash. Flash on linux sucks.