DescentBB

I got an early release (torrent) this morning, from a Scandinavian.
The Karmic Koala fixed a bug on my roommate's computer from Jaunty Jackalope. She will be happy to see that when she gets home.

It's suppose to be faster, according to some benchmarks. I did reformat ALL of my partitions by accident. 3d artwork that was saved nowhere else was lost. However (on the other hand) I can fully claim that installing Ubuntu using a USB drive is very fast.

Downloading from the Japanese mirror now. Gonna install it into VirtualBox and play around with it.

Are you liking it? Any problems?

I'm just a casual tinkerer in Linux, but I do enjoy it. It is getting more polished with each release. Running in VirtualBox on Win7.

virtual box.

right, I can use that...

I agree. They did smooth out the UI a bit in some places. I really like the sound controls.

I installed it on an old Eee 900 I \"inherited\", but before that I was running the test versions in vBox. It's a nice improvement over 9.04 in some areas, but it's still suffering from the \"feature bleed\" (where certain features are deprecated and/or removed entirely without satisfactory replacements being made easily available) that's plagued Ubuntu since about 7.10. Another couple of annoying issues I have with it are the use of \"GNOME defaults\" for various applications and the switch to using base 10 capacity units in at least the installation partitioner. It works well enough for the netbook, but it's not going to woo me away from OS X or Windows 7 any time soon.

I upgraded from 9.04.

It works decently enough, I guess. I'm having some sound issues.

I don't like the sound UI, because it has less functionality than the pulse audio volume control app. The fortunate thing is that the old volume control app still works. (I have multiple sound cards, and want control over what programs route their sound to what cards.) I also have to force Alsa to reload each time I boot.

Summary: I guess it's a decent upgrade. I had some issues, one that's still unresolved.

I've decided to skip 9.10 on my boxes, simply because I haven't had any problems with 9.04 and I've heard some mixed reviews of 9.10.

Compiz no longer crashes Nexuiz in 9.10
That's a big plus for me since it was a big pain in 9.04 having to turn off Compiz every time I wanted to play a game.

Jeff250 wrote:I've decided to skip 9.10 on my boxes, simply because I haven't had any problems with 9.04 and I've heard some mixed reviews of 9.10.

That's a good idea. My brother is doing the same. It took him forever to get his wifi drivers to work and doesn't want to go through that again.

However I would recommend trying it off a live cd and seeing how it fares. 9.10 Does benchmark better than 9.04. And if there's no hardware/driver issues then it would have been worth the time testing it.

If 9.04 works for you then skipping 9.10 might not be that bad an idea. The next release, 10.04 (or Lucid Lynx), will not only be an LTS, but they're promising to be more conservative and put a stronger focus on testing and bugfixing. If they pull it off then not only will they have the best, most polished release yet (and quite possibly the first actually worthy of carrying the LTS moniker), but it'll signal that they've actually learned something from the whole 8.04 mess.

The problem here though is that anything they put into an LTS release they have to support for at least 3 years. This is where 8.04 screwed up: they introduced a handful of new technologies (Firefox 3 and PulseAudio for example, though to be fair the latter was mainly to deal with a problem that should never have existed in the first place and only exists because, like a lot of open source developers, ALSA have no concept of design and forward planning.) that just weren't ready for prime time to "get in on the ground floor" only to have it bite them on the ass in a massive way. Compared with what's coming though, a new sound server and a beta web browser might end up looking like a picnic.

The projected April release date of 10.04 roughly coincides with the first release of GNOME 3, itself planning some fairly ambitious changes. Ubuntu may have to choose between sticking with what they have now, which they'll have to support for a minimum of 3 years, or adopting what will almost certainly be only slightly better than beta quality code. Given their track record to date, forgive me for not being entirely convinced that they'll make the right choice.

snoopy wrote:I don't like the sound UI, because it has less functionality than the pulse audio volume control app. The fortunate thing is that the old volume control app still works. (I have multiple sound cards, and want control over what programs route their sound to what cards.) I also have to force Alsa to reload each time I boot.

The sound control panel is my pet "feature bleed" peeve in this release. I never used the more advanced PulseAudio controls so I didn't miss them, but I can see how it would be annoying to people who did. My specific problem is fairly minor in comparison: They've replaced individual control over alert sounds with all encompassing sound "themes" without providing any obvious way of creating/editing them. A regression is a regression (this isn't Ubuntus fault though, teh ball is firmly in GNOMEs court on this one as far as I can tell) whether you use/appreciate the feature or not.

I'm running a mixture of versions of Ubuntu, just installed 9.10 on a machine, haven't really had too many impressions on it other than visual differences.

Looking forward to 10.04

Any particular reason that they're going with X.04, X.10, X+1.04, X+1.10, etc. Version model?

Year.month
09.10
10.04


Also the names (recently) are in alphabetical order.

Aha!

Anyone using a manager other than Gnome?

I'm wondering about messing around with Xfce or Enlightenment a bit, though I may not out of pure laziness.

I've used XFCE a lot, I like it a lot... but I liked KDE's features. Gnome wound up being a pretty good balance, so I stuck with it.

I don't see how people can use Enlightenment, they swear it's awesome, but I can't figure it out for crap.

Blackbox/Fluxbox wasn't bad, but it's very minimalistic.

I'm tempted....

Maybe I just need another project.

My little brother got me this.

here's the latch...