9 Features We May See In Ubuntu 11.10 281
splitenz writes "Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' may still be occupying much of the Linux world's attention, but at last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, the next version of the free and open source Linux distribution began to take form. A number of decisions were reportedly made about Ubuntu 11.10, or 'Oneiric Ocelot,' at the conference, while numerous other questions are still being debated. ... Here's a roundup of what's been reported so far."
Killer App? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu has gone soft. Its recent changes pushed me back to Debian. Why does it have to be targeted at social media, online music sales, etc.? Unless it has something to give that isn't better-known on another platform, there's no incentive for users to switch.
TFA is slashdotted or I'd cross my fingers hoping for just that feature.
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I can't believe I waited longer for the ads to load than to read the so-called article.
Ad sponsored fluff piece. This was worth mentioning on Slashdot?
Switch to a DVD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Killer App? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hey, Shuttleworth - how about a little less Steve Jobs in the next distro, huh?
Re:Killer App? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I wouldn't fault Ubuntu for trying to appeal to the masses. I think their aim is linux on the desktop. I don't use Ubuntu, I also don't use Facebook or social media beyond the occasional Slashdot post (and that's hardly social). The reality is that the masses do.
I'm fine with Ubuntu turning into 'Linux for people who don't care that it's Linux'. There's plenty of choices for people who know what they're doing otherwise and it grows the market, which means that hardware vendors pay a tad (not much) more attention to the fact that linux exists and sales can be made by supporting it, etc.
Re:I have an idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well that just reaffirms my concerns then. Ubuntu's UI is in some areas far less configurable than Windows 7.
I suppose there's a reason the Ubuntu web site barely mentions the word "Linux". The traditional benefit of everything being configurable in Linux does not translate to Ubuntu's philosophy, even if there's very little reason why it should not. Maybe Canonical just doesn't have the manpower/skill?
Re:I have an idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Mark has gone on record stating how he doesn't like having too options...
Too many options is why I was drawn to Linux in the first place.
sigh
Re:Killer App? (Score:4, Insightful)
Inconsistency and hypocrisy are what kill me.
Mark Shuttleworth pushed through the left-side window control buttons change by using the excuse of "less mouse movement" (which is ridiculous since the scrollbar is on the right side, so you're often on the right side).
Then he goes and puts the menu all the way on the top of the screen. How much mouse movement does that take? And what does it do for keyboard control?
Re:Switch to a DVD (Score:3, Insightful)
Ditto to this. Ubuntu really got my attention originally by making it dead easy to set up a USB stick with a live image.
Only if you already have Ubuntu up and running. Otherwise it's a complete bitch that makes me want to throw things. Fun situation: you have an Ubuntu netbook with no optical drive, an old PPC Mac desktop, and a FreeBSD server. The netbook hard drive dies and you replace it. Pop quiz; think quick! How do you use OS X or FreeBSD to copy the downloadable USB image to a flash drive to boot the netbook? Ha-ha! Trick question! There is no downloadable USB image! You have to create one yourself using the Linux or Windows usb-creator GUI, which happens to operate directly on a flash drive (meaning that you can't SSH into your Ubuntu desktop at work and run the X program there to create an image file you can scp back to the house).
And that's how I ended up driving to work to make a bootable USB stick and cussing myself hoarse.
Seriously, Ubuntu: forget the damned cutesy usb-creator tool and just put a downloadable image up on your website. Almost no one ever wants a custom boot image with a writable partition, or at least to the point that you have to make it configurable at image creation time. Pick an easy-to-manage small size (say, 2GB), use usb-creator to make a bootable drive that size, use dd to copy the image back off the USB stick, and put the damn thing up on your website. I guarantee that everyone who owns a computer without an optical drive and who wants to install Ubuntu will thank you for it.
I'll always be greatful to Ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
The last time I played around with Ubuntu I actually found it had more quirks, bugs, and stability problems than my Arch Linux install, which is a rolling release. I think these days, if I was going to set up a Linux box for someone, that only wanted to use it and not tinker with it under the hood, I'd just put Slackware on it and configure it for them.
Re:Switch to a DVD (Score:4, Insightful)
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] doesn't work?
Re:I have an idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that just reaffirms my concerns then. Ubuntu's UI is in some areas far less configurable than Windows 7.
I suppose there's a reason the Ubuntu web site barely mentions the word "Linux". The traditional benefit of everything being configurable in Linux does not translate to Ubuntu's philosophy, even if there's very little reason why it should not. Maybe Canonical just doesn't have the manpower/skill?
If you want configurability, you will not find it in Ubuntu, old or new. Neither GNOME nor Unity are highly-configurable user experiences. Granted, GNOME is more configurable than Unity...
No, for the Linux desktop, KDE [kde.org] wins the gold for configurability and integration. If you like the rest of what Ubuntu has to offer (bleeding-edge packages, Debian-based repository, etc.), use Kubuntu [kubuntu.org], an Ubuntu distribution that defaults to the kubuntu-desktop package instead of the ubuntu-desktop one. If you want a heavyweight desktop environment, the only reason to use GNOME or Unity over KDE is a simplified streamlined experience.
Re:Will 10.04 work with Sandy Bridge kit? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sufficiently unimpressed with 11.04 (and especially Unity) that I'm tempted to reinstall with LTS and keep at least until next year.
I did, and I plan to stick with 10.04 LTS until the cows come home, then (sadly) switch to something else. Ubuntu is definitely in that "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is" loop, and people who just want a simple system that works in order to get actual work done are clearly not the target audience. There's also a creepy "Change purely to differentiate from other forms of Linux" going on here. If Shuttleworth thinks he's going to forge some sort of open-source Mac phenom, he's barking up an invisible tree.
Nuke this crap and make what works boot faster and be more stable. If I wanted dysfunctional Playskool eye-candy and a lame music store, I'd buy a Mac.
Asking during setup (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to go into grumpy old man mode (or perhaps grumpy middle-aged man, since I'm not demanding ditching the GUI), but I'm with the folks who dislike Unity. If I want an OS that tries to look like Vista/7 or OSX, I'll run one of those. In particular, the "search box to find things in the menu" feature is a step backward rather than forward relative to Gnome. The reason Windows needs that sort of thing is because of its horrible standard for arranging new items in the Start menu -- the "Start -> Company -> App" or "Start -> Company App" patterns. Because of course the most important thing about a program is who wrote it, not what it does. Only a crazy person like me would want Photoshop sharing a menu with Inkscape and SketchUp because they're drawing programs and Flex Builder grouped with Eclipse and VStudio because they're development apps, rather than together because they're both from Adobe. Combine that with Windows install programs' tendency to throw in a link to the product homepage, a link to the company homepage, and a shortcut to the uninstaller -- sometimes even if the program isn't an app per se (fx. drivers) and thus has no business adding anything to the Start menu at all -- and I can see how a "search the menu" capability would be nice to sort through the resulting morass. But Gnome never did that. When I started using Ubuntu that was one of the things I loved about it -- that it maintained the main menu more or less the way I'd always had to rearrange the Start menu to anytime I installed something new under Windows. You don't need a search capability for that sparse a structure; it only gets in the way.
As to Libre Office, if space is marginal they could keep everything except Base. It's probably less-used than Writer or Calc, and anyone intending to do database work is going to be able to figure out how to install new things anyway.
Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change! (Score:4, Insightful)
You've posted the same comment more or less in virtually every GNOME 3 thread. While it was amusing the first time, after the fifth or six time it's just sad. Please, stop.