
Ubuntu 10.04 - Perfect - macco
http://lunduke.com/?p=1095
======
devonrt
Calling 10.04 perfect is a real, long stretch. Even the authors own
description of 10.04 hardly amounts to "perfect."

Its cosmetic changes are, in my opinion, dubious at best. Window controls are
on the left hand side of the Window for no good reason. The color scheme is
way too dark, it made me long for the old human theme. UI elements are glitchy
in places. The "Me Menu" is useless to me. And why the heck did they ever
remove the startup/shutdown options from the system menu? Why are they off on
their own?

I like the idea of the Ubuntu Software Center but its execution leaves a lot
to be desired. Last time I checked it was just another front end to apt. Many
of the packages available are totally useless to the vast majority of people.

Ubuntu One and the Ubuntu Music store, well, we'll see how those go.
Personally, I've never, ever used them and I have to wonder if they're the
type of things that will actually draw people to Ubuntu

And, well, I hate to come off as a curmudgeon because I really do like Ubuntu,
but to say that 10.04 blows OSX and Windows 7 out of the water is just wrong.
It doesn't. For instance, why does Ubuntu still have the same old application
menu? Both OSX and Windows 7 (and even KDE4) have moved away from this model.
The categorized, hierarchical menus that have been around forever are really
unhelpful. Why can't I search this menu like in Windows 7 and KDE4? For that
matter, why can't I easily search _everything_ like I can in Windows 7 and OSX
(spotlight). If they really want to compete with Windows or OSX they need to
give me better ways to find, sort and organize _everything_ on my computer.

~~~
pak
>The categorized, hierarchical menus that have been around forever are really
unhelpful.

Call me old-fashioned but I liked this way better. Search-based interfaces
don't help when you know _what_ you want to do but don't know what
_applications_ are available to do it. On Ubuntu for people coming from other
OS's, this is probably a very common experience (e.g., "I want to listen to
music, what media programs are on this OS?"). I like being able to get on an
Ubuntu box and riffle through the hierarchical application menu to see what's
installed and what I might need to add for my own use. The fact that the
hierarchy is well-integrated with the package manager makes it all the more
worthwhile.

By moving away from this format in e.g. Mac OS X, I have a hard time keeping
track of what applications I have installed without riffling through my entire
Applications folder from time to time. Unless you put your Applications folder
as a stack on your dock (which is not the default), I have no idea how typical
users on Mac OS X remember and launch apps that aren't pinned to their docks.

~~~
devonrt
I didn't necessarily suggest that the menu not be organized at all, just that
the strict categorical hierarchical menus are lame. Why do some text editors
go under the Utilities menu and others under the Programming menu (like
Emacs). It's hard for a new user to know which menu a program is going to be
under immediately after installing it, so they have to scrub all of them until
they find it.

Why not have a more semantic approach? Why can't I tag my applications and
have the application menu be more like a tag cloud and let applications be
under multiple menus. At least then I could put Emacs under Editors and
Programming.

~~~
drinian
It's a nice-to-have, for when you don't know exactly what you're looking for;
I just wish that there were a way to make more people aware of things like
Gnome Do as a complementary solution. <http://do.davebsd.com/>

------
vilya
Perfect? I wonder if the author tried installing it on a MacBook Pro.

WiFi won't work without the proprietary BroadComm drivers. But jockey (the
program which detects which drivers you need and installs them for you) won't
work without an internet connection. So if you don't have a usable ethernet
connection handy, you're a bit stuck.

It's possible to install the drivers manually, but it's a pretty convoluted
process (which still involves downloading things - go figure). I've not yet
had any luck with it.

The irony is that it clearly has the drivers somewhere in the .iso, because
when you run it in LiveCD mode it's able to install them, no internet
connection required.

Overall it felt like a trip back to the bad old days of linux, where you had
to spend a week editing config files before you got a usable system

Not what I'd call perfect.

~~~
Zak
I'd like to have working suspend/resume on my Thinkpad while using Compiz and
the FireGL. I'm going to blame this one on ATI, rather than anything under
Ubuntu's control, but it's still short of perfect.

~~~
Estragon
I have a Lenovo T61. There is no suspend option in the power management menu,
but from the command line, pm-suspend-hibernate seems to do the right thing.

~~~
Zak
What video card does it have? The problem I'm having is specific to ATI's
proprietary driver when used together with Compiz.

------
frou_dh
Not saying I could do any better, but all things visual just can't seem to
shake a decidedly amateur quality level.

Perhaps an empty desktop looks good, apart from the Firefox icon scraping the
top pixel of the screen, but open a few applications...

<http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/9595/fffb.png>

------
lwhi
I had huge problems with my proprietary nvidia driver and the new nouveau
drivers (which replaced nv).

Because of this, the experience of upgrading was very painful. It's fine now -
but, on the surface, there really isn't much difference to karmic.

------
ApolloRising
The release is quite nice but not perfect - still can't rotate the monitors 90
degrees for vertical alignment unless you go in and manually edit the files
instead of the gui

------
jackowayed
It's perfect just like every Ubuntu release in the last 2 years has been.

~~~
hackermom
Meaning it's not perfect?

~~~
jackowayed
Yes. Every time a new Ubuntu release comes out, it's finally the one that has
fixed everything wrong with Linux! It's only a matter of time before Linux has
a 50% market share of desktops thanks to this release!

And then market share basically stays flat. But don't worry, there'll be
another _perfect_ release in 6 months :)

~~~
grandalf
the bar is continually being raised by other OSs all the time, so the
definition of perfect changes. Try using windows 2000 or MacOS 8.55 and see if
you don't prefer Ubuntu tremendously. Then ask yourself what has changed about
Windows and MacOS in the last ten years.

------
sailormoon
_As of this very moment, MacOS X 10.6 and Windows 7. Neither of them ship with
a video editor of any kind out of the box. That’s right. Of the three
operating systems, Ubuntu is the only one that ships with any video editor at
all._

Huh? My iMac shipped with iMovie, and Windows ships with Windows Movie Maker.

update: whaddyaknow, windows 7 doesn't actually ship with the movie software,
you have to download it (free) from <http://download.live.com/moviemaker>.
Still.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Technically your iMac came with that iLife software preloaded, it didn't come
with the OS. If you had an older iMac and bought an upgrade for the OS then
you'd have to buy the upgrades for iLife separately. (You almost always got a
game too, again that wouldn't be there if you bought the OS itself).

~~~
sailormoon
What you say is true, but it's splitting hairs really. The fact is that unless
actively deleted, every mac has video editing software installed from the day
it was delivered. Still, I have to concede that although it is present, it was
not actually shipped with the OS.

It's a pretty lame boast that has to be laden with so many caveats, though.

