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Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#21

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed. Bug 568711 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is c…

> I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right

FWIW I tried to install Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and the main thing that made her go back to Windows was the look of the fonts. So I think Canonical is right to focus on polishing up things that can attract non-technical users.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#22

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed. Bug 568711 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is c…

Fixed link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#23

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed. Bug 568711 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is c…

Agreed. Shuttleworth & co seem more interested in tweaking visual desktop stuff (window buttons, windicators, indicator applet, etc.) than actually making sure their software is as bug-free as possible. Every time I upgrade to the newest release (literally every single upgrade since Hardy, when I started using Ubuntu) a bunch of stuff that used to work breaks. Lucid hasn't been as bad as others (Jaunty and Karmic I'm looking at you) but it's not without its problems. And I'm running a 5-year old laptop here.

I know it's hard to control quality on a desktop sourced from thousands of individual/independent contributors, but Canonical would do well to put money into their QA department to ensure release-to-release stability instead of into their design department--which for the most part seems to be a Shuttleworth cargo-cult dictatorship anyway.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#24
I'm glad that the Maverick Meerkat EC2 images(1) are working great. In the latest Lucid Lynx image (24.9.) as well as in the updates for the previous ones they introduced a nasty bug(2) causing a phantom load of 100% on one CPU. No fix in sight yet; this was really annoying. In my experiments so far, Maverick Meerkat works just great!

[1] http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/574910

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#25
The RC has not actually been released. Various news sites are reporting it prematurely to get extra traffic as usual, and the Ubuntu Release Team would like people to wait [1] for the official release announcement, which will be posted to the release blog [2] , and the ubuntu-announce mailing list [3].

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-release-cand...

[2] http://release-blog.ubuntu.com

[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#26

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed. Bug 568711 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is c…

On a related note, why do fonts look so terrible? Surely it's not just a lack of decent, free, typefaces? FreeType is unencumbered by bytecode hinting patents as of May 2010. The only other patent (according to http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html) is a Microsoft algorithm for color filtering for subpixel rendering (which, according to the page, is circumvented by using a different color filter).

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#27
post #21

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed. Bug 568711 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is c…

> I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right FWIW I tried to install Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and the main thing that made her go back to Windows was the look of the fonts . So I think Canonical is right to focus on polishing up things that can attract non-technical users.

you're absolutely right - but ugly fonts were fixable even previously. I used Droid or even Calibri from my Windows 7 install.

I dont think there have been any changes in font rendering itself (which is the main cause of Linux fonts looking bad compared to Win7 or OSX) - rather, just a new font.

But suspend/resume ? I just cant fix it - it is so bad that I have started believing in Linux suspend/resume being sentient (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613621)

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#29

This release uses a new interface font, which is the first major OS (that I know of, anyways) to not use a Helvetica-like font for their GUI. Mark Shuttleworth talks about the decision and impact on his blog: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537

I'm not sure what you mean by "Helvetica-like". OS X Uses Lucida Grande as a system font, which is quite different to Helvetica (Lucida Grande == Humanist, Helvetica == Neo Grotesque)

I can't vouch for Windows, but if memory serves it's system font is also a humanist style.

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