Ubuntu 11.04 Impressions

[axeman]

Trying Kubuntu 11.04 here, on my laptop at the moment. This is the first version of *buntu that works on this HP G62 with Arrandale graphics at all. So far so okay, it does seem to work but I have noticed a few lockups and kernel panics so far though seemingly at random. I'm going to carry on trying it out for now, hopefully it will improve with updates, otherwise I'll take this laptop back to openSUSE.

The next machine I will run it on is my Main machine (see sig), I've heard there's some lockup problems with konsole and gnome's terminal when trying to resize them with the latest nVidia drivers (main work around is to downgrade to earlier ones it seems). I'll be giving that a go in the next few days.

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

[End User]

VMware is working on an update for Workstation. It is running under 11.04 for me but it is acting in a very strange way (it disappears).

I've found the best update for VMWare is to switch to VirtualBox. Since the vast majority of it is is OSE, no more painful waiting for VMWare to update their crap to run on the latest distro.

I won't go as far as to say that Workstation is crap but I think it is time for me to give VirtualBox a shot as it does meet my 3 platform requirement (runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

[just brew it!]

VMware is working on an update for Workstation. It is running under 11.04 for me but it is acting in a very strange way (it disappears).

I've found the best update for VMWare is to switch to VirtualBox. Since the vast majority of it is is OSE, no more painful waiting for VMWare to update their crap to run on the latest distro.

I first tried VirtualBox a few years ago, when VMware introduced their ridiculous browser-based UI (there were also some annoying gotchas on some Linux distros that required convoluted workarounds). VirtualBox also had its issues back then, but has matured tremendously now. As long as you're using one of their officially supported distros -- they are *very* good about providing current binary builds for these -- it "just works". Or you can use the OSE edition supported by your distro; but this may lag a couple of point releases behind the official VirtualBox release, and lacks certain features (USB 2.0 pass-through and Windows RDP console support).

[kc77]

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

AMEN to this ^^

[just brew it!]

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

Yes, RPM/Yum royally pissed me off. It was one of the reasons I switched from Redhat/Fedora to Ubuntu, and (like you) the switch was what made me finally decide that I could use Linux as my primary desktop OS.

I actually *prefer* to use CLI tools for manual package searching and installation though; I use apt-cache/apt-get almost exclusively when installing new packages. (However, on systems where I have the Ubuntu desktop environment installed, I do let Ubuntu's GUI-based update tool handle routine updates, since it seems to get the job done with a minimum of fuss.)

[kc77]

Gnome 3 has been completely miserable for me. I've had no luck getting it to work in more than 5 hours of trying. Unity is a disgusting excuse for an interface (they aped everything wrong with OS X and left the things that were already bad). I don't like KDE and want more than LXDE/XFCE, so I'm sticking with 10.10/Gnome2 for a while yet.

I actually moved to 11.04 when it was beta specifically because of Gnome 3. While I'm still waiting for better tools for GTK management the package sources for Gnome 3 on 11.04 is heads and shoulders above what came with 10.10 or 10.04. Since this is actually the first "non-beta" release of it I am actually quite impressed with it. It works better than Unity in my opinion. I use it paired with AWN and so far it's serving my needs.

[lonleyppl]

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

I like my zypper!
Using openSUSE 11.4 now. I much prefer KDE to Gnome (I run Gnome on my secondary machine), but haven't had a chance to try Unity. I'll probably install it in a VM at some point, but not for a bit. Getting my laptop soon and I need to get that up and running first. Honestly I haven't found Ubuntu a compelling alternative to openSUSE in the few times I tried it. I originally went with SUSE because it supported PPC (in 11.1 maybe) and Ubuntu only had community support for that. VirtualBox is really great though. Used the version from the repositories for a bit, then just downloaded it from Oracle. SUSE has a VirtualBox repository that contains the most recent version of it though.

[codedivine]

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

There have been some improvements recently, at least in OpenSuse. OpenSuse does have a GUI based tool for package search and installation. For those prefering CLI, there is also a command line tool called "cnf" that can search for matching package names given a keyword. If you do know package name, you can use zypper to install packages and dependencies much the same way as apt-get. I don't have much experience with other rpm based distros so can't speak about them.

Overall I do still prefer apt-get, its vastly more user friendly, at the least the Ubuntu version is. I haven't used any other deb based distro. Update process is especially simpler in Ubuntu compared to OpenSuse.

One thing (unrelated to package management) that I like about OpenSuse is YaST. YaST provides a GUI based control over a lot of things that Ubuntu sometimes doesn't. For example, there was a nice GUI to edit bootloader settings which Ubuntu doesn't provide AFAIK, instead resorting to editing files manually.

[lonleyppl]

There have been some improvements recently, at least in OpenSuse. OpenSuse does have a GUI based tool for package search and installation. For those prefering CLI, there is also a command line tool called "cnf" that can search for matching package names given a keyword. If you do know package name, you can use zypper to install packages and dependencies much the same way as apt-get. I don't have much experience with other rpm based distros so can't speak about them.

Overall I do still prefer apt-get, its vastly more user friendly, at the least the Ubuntu version is. I haven't used any other deb based distro. Update process is especially simpler in Ubuntu compared to OpenSuse.

One thing (unrelated to package management) that I like about OpenSuse is YaST. YaST provides a GUI based control over a lot of things that Ubuntu sometimes doesn't. For example, there was a nice GUI to edit bootloader settings which Ubuntu doesn't provide AFAIK, instead resorting to editing files manually.

I find YaST fantastic, though I mainly stick to the command line. And I just pulled up a terminal to try cnf. It's my understanding that's only for finding commands on your system. I use

Code: Select all

zypper se

to search for packages. It will find packages that match a string, though I can't remember if it will search the description or not.

[codedivine]

And I just pulled up a terminal to try cnf. It's my understanding that's only for finding commands on your system. I use

Code: Select all

zypper se

to search for packages. It will find packages that match a string, though I can't remember if it will search the description or not.

Aah, yes. You are correct on both counts. Sorry I mixed them up!

[srg86]

Not to derail this thread, but Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me, never found it too pleasant of experience otherwise. I did use Slackware and others quite a lot for server-oriented stuff. I tried the latest Fedora a while back, and it seemed to be fairly decent, but raised the question for me (unless this has been addressed): How on earth can anyone stand using an RPM based distro anymore? There seemed to be no good gui tool for searching for packages - can only install stuff if you know what it's called? Maybe that's just noob-itis, but the other issue was, GOOD GRAVY THIS THING TAKES FOREVER TO UPDATE! I've heard there is some (very good features) that RPM has versus DEB, but I can't bloody stand it. That said, I haven't used Suse in ages, so I don't know how much they have in common other than RPM package management.

I totally agree with you on this, I've found Debian/Ubuntu is what made desktop linux a reality for me too. I did try Mandrake/Mandriva, Red Hat, Slackware etc but never was happy. I did buy boxed versions of SuSE a couple of times but always just went back to Windows. Ubuntu from 2007 onwards made me switch.

The only reason I was using openSUSE on this laptop was that X-Windows on Ubuntu 10.10 simply wouldn't run (some file not found and I had no idea how to fix it). SUSE just worked though as a substitute, although I have to get the wireless drivers from Realtek's website but they work once installed.

Yast is great but what made me want to go back Ubuntu is the great depth of the repositories with Debian, much better than RPM based distros, so there was software I used on Ubuntu that I couldn't get on SUSE. Also the open source AVR tool chain and utilities are much easier to compile (with fewer tweaks) than on openSUSE.

BTW I switched to Kubuntu originally because I don't like Gnome 3, then I found out Ubuntu was switching to Unity which simply made me glad of my descision. I'm finding KDE 4.6 to be the best desktop enviroment I've ever tried! No looking back!!

[pedro]

I'm rolling along nicely with 10.10. I've given a 11.04 Live CD a go and it was very good. (The Live CD boots into 'classic' mode so I can't comment on Unity.)

However... I've determined that these days my Linux use boils down to media transcoding/NAS/web browsing + IM + torrenting/fiddling around in terminals. So I'm actually making the change to Debian Squeeze this weekend. I know it's out of date and all the rest, but I honestly don't care. It's 'good enough'. For a long time I've admired Debian's focus on stability. But I've felt as though I'm missing out on that bleeding edge goodness. The real kicker is: Google provides a Chrome .deb that's just as current as it is on any other platform.

I'm not for a moment bashing Ubuntu here it should be noted. Ubuntu is a rather awesome distro. I've even had my mum using it for a couple of years now. I just feel Ubuntu fiddles with everything a little too much for my taste. That's cool. It's their choice and they make a quality product. But boring is where I'm at these day.

[ssidbroadcast]

I just watched this video on Unity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAcdFd0MmH0

And hmmmm where I have seen this GUI before? Looks awfully familiar...

[codedivine]

I'm finding KDE 4.6 to be the best desktop enviroment I've ever tried! No looking back!!

+1
KDE 4.6 is awesome.

[sheytan]

I thought unity was awesome until I tried to actually work with it.
That "one menu for all apps" sucks when multitasking.
Will not use Unity until they change the "one menu" or make it customizable.

What about adding your core apps to the dock?

[End User]

I thought unity was awesome until I tried to actually work with it.
That "one menu for all apps" sucks when multitasking.
Will not use Unity until they change the "one menu" or make it customizable.

After reading this again I get what you mean. I welcome the "one menu for all apps". It frees up valuable screen space and draws the user to the same menu area regardless of the app. It's a bold move.

"In the design of Unity we chose to be both humble and bold. Humble, because we have borrowed consciously from the work of other successful platforms, like Windows and Mac OS. We borrowed what worked best, but then we took advantage of the fact that we are unconstrained by legacy and can innovate faster than they can, and took some bold leaps forward. In category indicators, the dash, overlay scrollbars and other innovations we are pioneering desktop experiences that I am sure will be emulated elsewhere, in both the free and proprietary platforms. This is the public “1.0″, there are rough points which will affect some users more than others, but we will iterate and polish them up one by one. Our goal should be to continue to set the pace and push free software to the forefront of usability and experience, growing the awesome Ubuntu and Unity community that shares those values and is excited by those ideas." Mark Shuttleworth http://goo.gl/n4Oiz