Your thoughts on Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

[KeeperOfThePizza]

Just curious what everyones take on Ubuntu 10.04 is. I'm liking it. Only thing that has really bothered me about Ubuntu is I noticed my laptop fan's are on quite often compared to Windows 7 and Audio quality isn't the best.

[brentaal]

I'm not liking it. I feel like Ubuntu's been going downhill since 8.04. Never had any audio (pulse/alsa) or hardware problems, so I'm definitely not complaining about that. What bothers me is the application choice, one that keeps going in the exact opposite of what I'd use by default. Of course, I can remove/add packages which I don't like, but there are some other things such as the removal of the Services menu (in the Gnome version of Ubuntu). The Services menu is present in upstream Gnome and in all Gnome distributions. It lets you easily remove services you don't want launched at boot, however, Ubuntu doesn't let you do that.

Then there are weird meta-package dependencies, exclusion of 64-bit flash (hell, even Debian in its highly conservative repositories for testing uses the 64-bit flash plugin), and so on, and so on.

10.04 specific things - too much focus on social apps, not impressed with the artwork, and have had a lot of trouble with plymouth.

All in all, I'd rather stick with Debian and/or Archlinux.

[Growled Member]

I'm not liking it.

Me neither. I didn't like the layout or the theme. That can be easily changed, of course, but still first impressions count.

[Syanide]

I've only shortly used it on other people's computers since I didn't want to upgrade to it (can't backup my data and don't feel like risking with a beta). But from what I've seen, it's still Ubuntu, meaning their target audience is basically almost the lowest common denominator (spotlight in this release aims at people who hang on twitter and facebook all day long), but so far, I have yet to feel any of that as a distraction to what I normally do on a computer - quite contrary actually, whenever I try something else, I seem to miss some of the more comforting little features Ubuntu has (and they always manage to add a few, sneaky *******).

Basically, I think it's as good as any other Ubuntu release out there, it just depends on whether you see Ubuntu as good in the first place.

As for the looks, the theme itself is actually good, but I've learned to dislike the color scheme. Seems like they've thrown a bunch of stuff together without thinking much ahead. There are too many colour tones they have going on, aubergine, yellowish, brownish, black, red. I hate those new purple icons, I think a new blue-grayish set would have been much better than recolouring Human icons to match the wallpaper (?). Me not a fan. As for the branding, I absolutely love new fonts and logos, and that's where I think even the purple/aubergine might work, like on CD packages etc.

[MrA]

I'm liking it so far. But I'm using the netbook variant so that's probably skewing my opinion quite a bit.

[amon91]

I don't get why everyone is hating on the theme. Personally I really like it. Not perfect (aka too dark and the light version is too light. Weird situation I know), but it's much better than the previous one. Was a little buggy at first but subsequent updates have made it smoother, so if you haven't run it in a while, now might be a good time to give it a shot. Can't wait for Beta 2 and the final release later this month. I might even try it out as main, or at least dual boot.

[bjoswald]

I have mixed feelings about it as well. As for the visual appeal, I think the refresh did Ubuntu a lot of good, but like Symod said, the color choices are weird and the button layout is off-putting. I also don't think the social apps are necessary, and they should be in the Software Center rather than installed by default. Other than a few other minor annoyances, I'm still excited for Lucid overall. I just hope I can completely kick out my Windows dependency for good one day.

[Roguefoxx]

My first impression of it was horrible. I didn't like the new theme much, was way too dark and just looked "cheap". Hated the buttons on the left side of the windows. My opinion may also be tainted by the fact that when I installed it, it ran like absolute crap on my computer. I mean the system I run it on isn't a great system or anything, but it ran 9.10 great. I couldn't believe how poor it seemed to run out of the box compared to its predecessor. Was very laggy and slow to respond. Could have been some video driver issue or something, but I would think that wouldn't be an issue considering 9.10 was great out of the box. So my first experience with it was pretty poor. I removed it and am still contemplating putting 9.10 back on.

[UncleSpellbinder]

Not a fan of the new themes either. Don't like the default wallpaper at all. But, that's and easy change. I never use the default wallpaper or theme on any Linux distro I've ever used. The first thing I do is change the wallpaper, the second is change the theme.

As far as the usability of Lucid goes. It was more stable for me than Karmic when it was in Alpha 2 stage. Now at beta 2, it is remarkably stable and VERY fast.

[Kreuger]

I've only upgraded so the them is nothing to me. Really, there isnt much difference for me.

[Roger H. Veteran]

I tried out a live cd beta on my laptop and was pleasantly surprised. I actually liked it and used it for a few hrs before restarting and going back to Windows. I'm not a Linux guy, played with Red Hat back in the day and Mandrake but that's as far as my Linux knowledge goes. Ubuntu did some nice stuff there, definitely flashy and it detected everything in my laptop as far as i can tell.

(Y)

[boogerjones]

They're making nice progress, but it's still Linux, which is enough to keep me away from it. :)

[markwolfe Veteran]

They're making nice progress, but it's still Linux, which is enough to keep me away from it. :)

I feel the same way about Windows 7.

But I guess the big difference is I don't go into Windows threads to post it. :ninja:

As for the new Ubuntu? I'll likely wait until it goes final and upgrade through the package manager.

[cork1958]

I'm not liking it. I feel like Ubuntu's been going downhill since 8.04. Never had any audio (pulse/alsa) or hardware problems, so I'm definitely not complaining about that. What bothers me is the application choice, one that keeps going in the exact opposite of what I'd use by default. Of course, I can remove/add packages which I don't like, but there are some other things such as the removal of the Services menu (in the Gnome version of Ubuntu). The Services menu is present in upstream Gnome and in all Gnome distributions. It lets you easily remove services you don't want launched at boot, however, Ubuntu doesn't let you do that.

Then there are weird meta-package dependencies, exclusion of 64-bit flash (hell, even Debian in its highly conservative repositories for testing uses the 64-bit flash plugin), and so on, and so on.

10.04 specific things - too much focus on social apps, not impressed with the artwork, and have had a lot of trouble with plymouth.

All in all, I'd rather stick with Debian and/or Archlinux.

"I'm not liking it. I feel like Ubuntu's been going downhill since 8.04"

Actually, since about version 6.04, but that's just me. Ubuntu is total bloatware, IMO.

I'll stick with Blag and Zenwalk.

[Kreuger]

As for the new Ubuntu? I'll likely wait until it goes final and upgrade through the package manager.

It's stable enough now you can use it

[brentaal]

Yeah, it did become a lot more stable since the Beta 2 release. (Y)

[UncleSpellbinder]

It's stable enough now you can use it

Indeed. Hell, it was stable fro me as Alpha 2. As it is now, it far outshines Karmic in my opinion.

[markwolfe Veteran]

It's stable enough now you can use it

I think I can wait. ;)

[KeeperOfThePizza]

I think Ubuntu looks great as far as GUI. I'm bothered with the heat production. Even with CPU scaling it still runs rather hot on my laptop... Might be the Kernel I dont know...

Few things that do bother me,

1. Yahoo search? lolwut?

2. No Pidgin? sorry Empathy just sucks.

3. Gwibber Service causes CPU to spike, had to remove it.

4. Notifications? Annoying with Empathy and Pidgin.

5. The "Large Sans Font" is Ugly

Thats all for now. :D

Ps, not bashing Ubuntu. Love it.

[Rob2687]

Well for one thing they reverted the default search engine back to Google.

[KeeperOfThePizza]

Well for one thing they reverted the default search engine back to Google.

haha Thank god... What ever made them switch over to Yahoo?

[Growled Member]

Well for one thing they reverted the default search engine back to Google.

+1 on the thank god.

[Panacik]

I love the look, but i found it a little buggy. Kept giving me errors when running some applications and randomly apps would crash. I went back to version 9 for now, but looking forward to the solid release of this version, as it feels like a big leap :D

[Syanide]

Installed beta2 yesterday.

Upon installation, without any updating being done, I did receive some bugs. The most obvious of all was gtk-jockey (Hardware Drivers detector) crashing upon start. First update fixed the crash and it would run, but than I had an issue of all three driver versions for my nVidia card being marked as installed and active, even though they weren't. Disabling the drivers from there, and installing the correct driver from synaptic, and then re-enabling it with gtk-jockey did the job.

I also got that crash icon in the panel reporting that the system has suffered a serious kernel error, though nothing happened and it was pretty stable. First and subsequent updates seemed to have fixed this, and I didn't see it today at all.

Changing the repository server reported an apt issue and some files got locked, disabling me from updating the system. It required removing a file, than it worked fine.

After the first batch of updates, I've noticed the system runs much, MUCH better, haven't had a crash today at all, and I've started adding more applications etc.

So my suggestion to markjensen would actually be to wait until the bigger bugs gets squashed, even though I'm impressed with the stability.

When it comes to the system generally, I find myself liking it more and more. The are some subtle changes, some bigger ones, and updates seem to really add/fix majority of things as well.

I like the indicator applet thing they did in the system tray, meaning that select applications no longer live inside the system tray, but have an indicator of their own, with more options etc.

I've noticed that with bluetooth on, when I reached Download folder, it kindly asked me if I wanted to receive files from bluetooth devices directly in Download folder, and it also offers to enable the Public folder to serve as a share folder for bluetooth devices.

The latest updates with the theme finally fixed the issues when there is only one button on a windows, the background of the button now looks good:

Which also means that if you use the classic layout, the menu icon will look good as well:

One bigger change I've noticed and not a lot of people have commented on is that now, besides being able to move/drag windows with titlebar, you can do the same with the empty space on the menu bar (similar behavior to Chrom/ium when using native window borders). Seems to work with native GTK apps only (I've noticed it doesn't work with Firefox, don't have any Qt apps installed atm to see what happens there).

Then there's a mass amount of small things that look better, probably gnome related (panels sliding down on startup, some borders being removed when unnecessary, messaging applet. Ubuntu Software Center also looks much better now, I like the featured applications list, though I usually end up installing things with apt/synaptic. One thing I like with USC is, that if you're updating with apt/update manager, you can add more apps to queue with it. The look in general is great, I love the new branding, color scheme of the new theme not so much. I even got comfortable using the button on the left (to some degree).

One thing I really dislike about it (though it's not their fault at all) is how Plymouth looks with nVidia cards with proprietary drivers. It looks like utter s***. Boot screen looked great with the open source nouveau driver, but when I changed it to the proprietary one, it was forced to scale down to 640x480 4bit image. There are manual ways of changing this, but it can mess your system up, so for now, I left it be, at least until I upgrade to final release.

This actually brings me to the last thing, the reason I can let go of boot screen looking ugly is that I basically have to look at it for a few seconds only. The boot speed is really great in my case, kudos to the developers.

Anyway, so far so good, if they keep the work on bug fixing up until the final version, I don't think I will be going away from Ubuntu anytime soon.

[x-scratch]

works wonders on my netbook even tho i had to use windows xp drivers

while it does not like my desktop it refuses to resume from suspened