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."
Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change! (Score:5, Interesting)
I know one of the features is "me not using it anymore." 10.10 is probably the last version I'll ever use, and I've been looking at Mint or just going straight Debian.
I love apt, otherwise I'd consider an RPM based distro.
Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am using the "classic desktop" in Ubuntu 11.04. It's similar as the Gnome 2 desktop on Ubuntu 10.10.
I might consider Gnome3 later this year, but not the 3.0 version. The Ubuntu desktop is moving in the wrong direction. Do they have the resources to run their own projects alone over time? The other distros share resources and costs by making software together.
Have non-expert users run Testing, not Sid (Score:4, Interesting)
Please don't recommend Debian Sid for those that aren't ready for it. There is a reason it's called "unstable"; packages uploaded to Sid are "bleeding edge" and there is occasionally breakage, and the person running the box needs to be ready to handle that and know what to do and how to fix it. This isn't for everybody. Running Testing (currently named Wheezy) is a relatively safe bet.
Sid is not even a complete distribution -- Stable and Testing are, but Sid and Experimental aren't. I didn't realize this about Sid/Unstable either until I attended DebConf10 and was told so by a developer from Australia.
And if you continue to recommend running Sid, at least also tell people about installing 'apt-listbugs' so that they at least if someone else has reported grave or critical bugs on packages that they're about to install that they get warned about that. I.e. this is your "Debian Unstable condom".
The only downside to running Testing is that there are some source packages in Sid that you might need that aren't in Testing. For those situations I think it's fine to install JUST those packages from Sid onto your Testing box. That generally works fine.
Re:Let's hope for another radical GUI change! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different
Unity is sound in theory, it's just the implementation which is crap. They took a shell primarily designed for tiny netbook screens and didn't put in the functionality that would make it useful on large screens. It's not configurable enough, the defaults are extremely annoying and the intent behind some functionality such as the bizarro Ubuntu expanding panel is just unfathomable. Click on the Ubuntu icon and you get a large panel with some huge icons. Click on the expand icon within this panel and it fills the full screen by making the icons supermassive. What the fuck is it for? The apps launching panel is also horrible, where before you had a nice hierarchical list of apps, now you must filter them to see what you want.
I hope for the next release they focus on a preference dialog that allows the position and hide behaviour of the dock to be configured in realtime, for the global menu to be disabled. As I said I think the concept is fine - GNOME 2 is looking long in the tooth and is wholly inappropriate for the transition to 3D and surface based windowing, but the implementation is just not there yet.
IMO GNOME 3.0 looks incredibly attractive by comparison. It's clear a lot of thought has gone into it. However it screws things up just as badly in its own way. Why is the dock on a separate screen that I have to do some Expose like stuff to access? Why can't I just drag and drop icons around like I could in the good old days and enjoy spatial and contextual functionality? Why did they see fit to remove (not just hide) the minimize / maximize buttons and force me to complete a drag operation on the window to the top where I used to just have to do a single click? Where are the configuration options?
I think GNOME 3.0 is more radical than Unity. I think both are on the right tracks to being useful desktops but its obvious they both need a lot of work. It would be nice if the projects would actually cooperate on things like infrastructure. People shouldn't be forced to take sides to have a useful desktop.
Re:I gave up on them... (Score:4, Interesting)
the next one will be Pugilistic Puffin. You can install it, if you think you're hard enough to have a go.