Ubuntu 10.10

[linuxviolin]

Plymouth is a pain right now but when it's working it gets rid of the geeky look Linux has.

Plymouth does the things "look nice" but frankly I don't care! It is justly one of the things I don't like totally about the current distros. I *love* this "geeky look", why Linux wants to do like Windows and prevent the users from seeing below the surface?

OK, I'm sorry, just a digress... lol

[exploder]

Hey that's cool. You are entitled to your opinion. Plymouth can be turned off of course and most distros use esc to kill it if you need to see whats happening during boot. The thing is that Linux is gaining some elegance across the board.

[simpleblue]

Hey that's cool. You are entitled to your opinion. Plymouth can be turned off of course and most distros use esc to kill it if you need to see whats happening during boot. The thing is that Linux is gaining some elegance across the board.

I agree. I'm into this new 'pretty' and smooth streamlined look and I think the majority of users are too. If lets say someone likes the geeky look, they'd likely know how to activate it quite easily, or they'd at least enjoy the process involved.

[linuxviolin]

Frankly, for all users, I think quality, no bugs, regressions etc are much more important things than a nice, "pretty and smooth streamlined" look, elegance...

It's an OS and a computer, not a game console or like... It's a tool which must be efficient, usable etc not necessarily "beautiful", but I'm probably not fashionable and probably from the "old school", is not it? In fact, I am "grumpy, depressed and older than I would like to be."

I don't say it's absolutely a bad thing but focus us on that is perhaps a bit excessive, right? Again, nice or not I do not care a bit, if it works perfectly and as I like then I'm happy... Plus, anyway, I hate all these things like 3D desktop, widgets, effects...

Yes, I know, I am an "old" grumpy

[Robin]

I'm completely soured on Ubuntu since 10.04 (Lucid). Their insistence on the inclusion of invasive, buggy software like Plymouth and PulseAudio renders it unusable on my 5-year-old machine. 9.10 (Karmic) is the last usable version for me. When Xubuntu 9.10 and Mint 8 reach EOL, I'll try Mint Debian (hopefully an Xfce vaiant will be available then) or switch to a different Debian-based and truly user-friendly distro.

I don't care if it isn't pretty. I can make it pretty. I don't care if boots up in a fraction of a second. I never needed it to boot up that fast, I needed it to boot up reliably into a responsive, easy desktop. Ubuntu and it's spin-offs may be great on newer machines, and that's good. But I think alot of people look for an alternate OS because Windows is too slow on their aging machines and they can't afford to replace the hardware. So they look for "beginner-friendly" alternatives... imagine their disappointment when the most popular "beginner friendly" alternate is as resource-hungry as Windows 7!

-R

[tdockery97]

It's an OS and a computer, not a game console

Well, for most people that may be true. I'm retired and more of a hobbyist, so to me LMDE on a laptop IS a game console...the game being making it work to my liking, and then usually breaking it tinkering around and trying other people's wild ideas. If it wasn't so much fun I guess I'd be fishing instead.

[exploder]

linuxviolin, compiz is not all that important to me. The thing with elegance and Linux is it attracts people that might otherwise brush it off. Ubuntu has it's 100 paper cuts, sort of it's version of continuous improvement. With Maverick I am actually noticing all of the little changes that make the interface flow better. It is rumored that Maverick should be very stable because of the freeze on the Debian repos in preparation for Debian's upcoming release. Maverick is much more stable and less buggy than the last two releases have been and it's still in beta with 29 more days of development time remaining.

I have been through my share of Ubuntu development cycles and reported my fair share of bugs. Maverick does not have all that many bugs and the bugs it does have seem fixable. Here is the current bug list for Maverick.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs

Back when I first started using Linux I thought that most all distros were built by people with really bad taste. Back then Linux looked ancient and the artwork, themes, icons, everything was hideous, a lot has changed! I never thought I would see the day when Linux could compete with the Mac OS in elegance, I was wrong! I changed the theme in Maverick to Radiance and changed the wallpaper and in my opinion Maverick looks better than Leopard. Who would have ever imagined Ubuntu looking good?

Edit: Has anyone thought of the significance of why Mark Shuttleworth insisted the release date for Maverick be 10/10/10? The release date is a play on the use of the number 10 by Apple! Think about it!

[exploder]

Although I'm not the biggest fan of the Ubuntu
system (due to the last couple of releases)

Same here. Something is different about 10.10 though.

[craig10x]

exploder...i was always a gnome person but finally got hooked on KDE when i tried Mint 9 KDE...in the past when i looked at Kubuntu, it was nice, but didn't seem complete and well polished (as Mint 9 KDE is)....I recently decided to check out the beta of Kubuntu 10.10 and was really amazed...not only did it run flawlessly but had a very complete, very attractive and polished feel to it...so i suspect it (like the gnome side) is going to be an excellent release...in fact, i am pretty tempted to install Kubuntu 10.10 when it arrives next month in it's final release...

could be they are finally starting to get things right

[linuxviolin]

@ exploder, and others.

All of this sounds good but Ubuntu has sometimes/often (?) an unfortunate tendency to produce interesting development versions and even pretty good, so you have some hopes, but then final versions where they break something or introduce regressions, bugs or other things like that, and finally the hopes are disappointed. This would be not the first time this would happen, so I wait and see... If this doesn't happen in this release, well, that's good.

[exploder]

linuxviolin, yeah, they have fooled me before. Time will tell.