

Ubuntu 9.10 is named Karmic Koala, promises to bring boot time under 25sec - old-gregg
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/ubuntu-910-is-named-karmic-koala-will-eat-tasty-eucalyptus.ars

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mdasen
According to the article, 25 seconds is the target for Jaunty (the 9.04
release) which is pretty nice right there.

Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer).
Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu
(ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth,
"The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really
welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of
the system.

~~~
old-gregg
I've been using Ubuntu for 2 years as my primary environment and _I miss it a
lot_ despite terrible performance of Firefox and flash. Everything else pretty
much rocked.

I don't have room for a desk with a workstation PC to run it and all PC
laptops are so lame these days that I'm stuck with Macbook Pro but keep toying
with a double boot idea.

~~~
scorxn
Some, not all ;) <http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:Ubuntu>

~~~
old-gregg
My last 3 laptops were all Thinkpads. I switched to MBP because I couldn't
stand the LCD panels they started to use: dark, dim and low contrast TN-film
without 24-bit color support. [I owned their FlexView at some point, I was
crushed when I got T61]

Even resolution is wrong: 15" panel shouldn't be higher than 1440x900: many
web sites aren't readable at resolutions higher than that, yet Lenovo offers
only 1280 and 1650 horizontal pixels (too few and too many).

~~~
tsuraan
Why shouldn't resolutions be as high as the technology allows? Every OS that I
know of offers scalable fonts, and a higher resolution allows for nice smooth
fonts without hacks like anti-aliasing and cleartype. My 13.1" laptop has a
resolution of 1600x900, my 4" Nokia 770 has a resolution of 800x480, and my
cell phone's 3" display is 480x320. I don't think anybody's complaining about
not being able to see their phones or tablets, and I certainly have no trouble
using my laptop.

In what way does a higher resolution hurt anything?

~~~
old-gregg
Because most web site designers _assume_ 96DPI and set font sizes in pixels?

Guys with 15" 1680x1050 laptops, can you tell me if you're comfortable reading
dpreview.com with default font settings?

 _Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts_

There are more to it than just scalable fonts. Windows is essentially
hardwired to 96dpi, _only fonts_ scale, everything else does not: there are
virtually no vector graphics involved in traditional Win32 UI API, even icons
are fixed bitmaps: 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 or 64x64 pixels. They have some logical
units of measurement of dialog boxes, but everything else is measured in
pixels, see GDI/GDI+. Switching to 120dpi on windows is downright painful: a
lot of applications either start to look ugly and disproportional or sometimes
even break down: UI layouts fall apart.

~~~
nailer
Every web browser can zoom in on documents. I set default zoom to 150%.
dpreview.com looks fine.

PS. Windows 7 has a proper scalable interface. I don't or use like Windows,
but I tried it and it works well. You don't even need to restart the entire OS
to change the setting anymore either.

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pmjordan
Boot-up times are rapidly approaching the stage where the OS isn't the
bottleneck - it's the BIOS. I often wonder what the hell it's doing for those
10-30 seconds. (depending on the motherboard) EFI in Macs is definitely
snappier, at least until you start booting into Linux or Windows and the BIOS
emulation kicks in and waits around for a couple seconds.

Interestingly, you used to be able to get a decent speedup with hibernating
(suspend to disk) but nowadays, with the bootup improvements and larger
amounts of RAM (my workstation has 8GB; 4GB is pretty normal these days) it
only helps if you've got lots of stuff open in your session. OSX's resume is a
lot faster than Linux' though, so there's plenty scope for improvement. I
suspect the problem is once again initialising the hardware - controlling the
platform sure helps.

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suhlash
I spent the last three days converting my xps dell laptop from vista to ubuntu
8.10. I had to spend over 25 hours to get it to work properly. Things like
trying to figure out how to make my dual monitor system work with only one of
them rotated 90 degrees. It took so much searching and reading to make sure
that what I was doing was not going to mess up everything else up to the
point. I am no novice computer user. The task of getting ubuntu to run right
is not trivial.

~~~
whatusername
I spent 4 hours troubleshooting my neighbours computer (it's full of spyware).
We basically got no-where with it in that time.

The task of getting Windows to run right is not trivial.

~~~
jacoblyles
Linux advocates should pay attention to the difficulties of installing and
maintaining a Linux system in a modern computing environment instead of
patting themselves on the back because Windows does some things worse. I gave
up the first few times I tried to install Ubuntu. When I finally got it
running I was unemployed and had the time to wrestle with it.

Flash and wireless still suck.

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kenver
I'm really looking forward to this release. Ive been using Ubuntu for a couple
of years now, and really enjoy devloping on it. I don't have to restart my
machine that often - usually only when I have to do some Windows stuff, but
the faster boot time will be a welcome improvement.

When you consider just how many features are available in Ubuntu, and the
general feel, it's amazing that you can get it for free.

I even like the current brown/skin theme - I must be a fan boy. The one big
improvement I would like to see though is a fast Firefox port.

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jskopek
The most prominent change, in my opinion, seems to be the idea of bringing
suspend/resume to servers. I'd imagine this would only be implemented in
multi-server clusters, with extra hosts powering down but never totally
interrupting service. Is there a reason this hasn't been implemented in other
distros?

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nailer
...and, according to the article, finally get rid of the skin toned theme.

