Well it is good to see that Ubuntu is progressing at good pace.



But IMNSHO it is getting dumbed down too much. It is good for users but for developers/hackers/code artists, it is becoming painful.



I hope Canonical fixes this in Lucid Lynx. Till then I am sticking to Archlinux.



All the best to Ubuntu team.

I love the new features in 9.10 - really great, but am getting irritated by the naming system. What will they do after Zesty Zebra.

Wooo, finally managed to install Kubuntu Lucid ( 10.04 LTS ) on this -> http://www.techenclave.com/show-off/...er-154619.html



Apparently current Karmic/Lucid has issues with SSDs (libatasmart or udev package bugs if not kernel bugs) and my dmesg is full of ATA errrors -> Ubuntu Pastebin



There are a few bugs reported like https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/445852 so hopefully it gets fixed fast before it kills my SSD.



I was hoping to post about the speed, but sadly the install which looked like it would complete in an amazing 3 min flat got stuck for 7 min near the end... but 3 min is sweet.



Also put in place some of the tweaks like mentioned here: Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives | Tombuntu (mainly noatime and tmpfs)... will post some speed numbers once Lucid gets a little stable... its still at "alpha 1" stage after all.



I installed mainly to check out KDE 4.4 Beta 2... awesome release... small smooth animations here and there in the UI... although the progress bar is still jerky and not smooth as claimed on some release page... got to post on KDE forum asking about it...

Got some nifty GRUB2 quad boot theming going on , see: Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - GRUB2 theming for lucid?



Pic:



Youtube video!



[youtube]zBCR0jVzMFs[/youtube]

What's current state of Ubuntu these days? Is it still full of silly bugs, it was the only reason I switched from Ubuntu. I have friends, who wants to try Linux - he is a complete newbie so needs an easy to use distro

there are few folks facing problems with ubuntu. it (9.10 also) usually worked well for me, except when i got my SSD the problems started (all distros though - kernel bugs)



plans for lucid are to be conservative/stable since its an LTS (learn from previous mistakes), so its looking good for april 2010...



im currently running 10.04 alphas and with continuous kernel error logs, disk errors (hope i dont kill my precioussd)



edit: updated previous post with pic and vid...

Originally Posted by Gaurish

I have friends, who wants to try Linux - he is a complete newbie so needs an easy to use distro

i guess for ease its ubuntu or mandriva, although i would suggest your friend try ubuntu 9.10 first (and hope they dont face problems like hardware/video/sound issues) because of the vast info/support out there. if that causes problems they can try mandriva "one" 2010



also, please show your friend screenshots of both GNOME and latest KDE 4.3/4.4 so they can pick. i would recommend KDE now that its quite sweet and stable...



so finally, if GNOME then try ubuntu, if KDE then try mandriva...

OK! After awesome BURG (grub2 hack) boot eye-candy (posted above), now comes plymouth eye candy!



Youtube HD video captured on my Cybershot:

[youtube]N-4xTkN1_RQ[/youtube]



Problem is, bootup is so fast (10 sec) that the animation barely has time to work (has to be speeded up)...



There were small bugs in the theme script itself as noted here Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - Plymouth theming ? and I had a little bit of a struggle to figure out VESA for nvidia since Ubuntu still does not have nouveau KMS at the moment: Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - Plymouth theming ?



All in all, an enjoyable way to spend a Sunday for sure

Awesome. Both Grub2 and Plymouth skin looks great.

heh, took me all of sunday to figure out how to get a 10 second boot theme working

Maybe they should introduce something like Delta RPMs which are available by default on Fedora 12. They reduce the size of the updates that are being downloaded drastically, sometimes even by 95%.. it would really be great because Ubuntu has a much wider user base than the RPM based distros....

"delta debs" has been discussed by the ubuntu devs for many many years. recently an indian ubuntu member (onkar shinde) posted in indian mailing list he has setup an experimental repository (32 bit only) for deltadeb support but the ubuntu-in.info site has limited space/resources.



i doubt they will go for this for the "LTS" (long term supported) release 10.04 but i will also (as a regular user) make noise/requests for the next version 10.10 to start playing around with this support.



i tried it briefly in Fedora 11 (when it was a bit experimental) and also in 12 (where yes, you are right, its installed by default, called the "Presto" plugin for "yum") and it appears to work quite well most of the time (at least it displays savings like 80-90 % download saved) so if its important to anyone then they should switch to Fedora clearly for that killer practical feature.



i think other distros also have it, mainly openSUSE is leading the way with this kind of feature...

Another thing that would be really appreciated by a lot of users would be the inclusion of Mozilla Thunderbird in the default installation.. I know that Evolution is there, but Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 is a lot more easier to use and configure than ultra-powerful Evolution...



Also, you guys might have noticed that once Evolution is configured, then it keeps on running some background tasks such as Alarm, calendar alert.. Although they're quite good and handy, but still they eat resources....



And how about including a Webkit based browser such as Epiphany or Midori in the default installation with Mozilla Firefox..

There is actually a survey somewhere asking Ubuntu users to vote for default apps, search around, I dont know where it is... (or was)

Originally Posted by hellknight_mnd

Another thing that would be really appreciated by a lot of users would be the inclusion of Mozilla Thunderbird in the default installation.. I know that Evolution is there, but Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 is a lot more easier to use and configure than ultra-powerful Evolution...



Also, you guys might have noticed that once Evolution is configured, then it keeps on running some background tasks such as Alarm, calendar alert.. Although they're quite good and handy, but still they eat resources....



And how about including a Webkit based browser such as Epiphany or Midori in the default installation with Mozilla Firefox..

Avoid bureaucracy, Ubuntu will take their own sweet time. install it yourself

LOL!



BTW, @gaurish check out: http://www.techenclave.com/open-sour...ml#post1391317



wooohoooo

Downloaded 10.4 kubuntu alpha2 with KDE 4.4 rc i guess.



the distro boots with splash for ubuntu...the same that i see with ubuntu 9.10 ..even the name is 'ubuntu' rather than kubuntu.



at login screen.. it says 'welcome to ubuntu' and it asks for username and password for a live distro!!..

after a series of trial and error.. the info that worked was

username: ubuntu (again)

pass: (left blank)



overall very buggy is what my initial impression is... the widgets would show corruption in image at the bottom of every widget.

no filesystem on other drives would mount.



that apart, KDE 4.4 rc did feel a little better in terms of eye candy. i did not get to spend much time on it, will bot it up again tomorrow and will see if it is worth installing it.

@madnav Did you read the Release notes for Alpha 2

Known Issues



* Due to the recent changeover to Plymouth, the boot splash shows the Ubuntu logo instead of Kubuntu's. (For now)

* You have to log in twice 495100

* Autologin doesn't work 495057

* The wallpaper is missing and the panel geometry is funky to work around 494731 (Will be fixed shortly after the alpha release)

BTW, if you downloaded original alpha2 yes IT IS ALPHA and an early one at that



Since then the updates have made it quite stable even though its still "ALPHA"...



I have high hopes for Alpha3 where they will also test nouveau and NVIDIA proprietary support to make it smooth



All in all, its looking really good this time, especially yes, with KDE 4.4 also.



@madnav: i hope you have read the other threads in this section (grub2/plymouth eyecandy etc) - lots of cool stuff in development