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Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

releases.ubuntu.com

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#81

Post by count »

acabal wrote: post #23
sandGorgon wrote: post #14

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…

They seem to be doing pretty well focusing on what they've been focusing on - end user experience.

They didn't go from nothing to #1 for no reason, you know.

Calling it a cargo-cult dictatorship is a bit unfair as well - he's footing the bill for a huge chunk of the work, why shouldn't he get a say? Nothing's stopping you from ponying up and starting your own distro dev team; you can even fork from Ubuntu and just fix the thing's you think they're lacking.

We'll see who gets more user mindshare...

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#82

Post by rufugee »

u48998 wrote: post #69

I hate Ubuntu, there is no support for it. Tried it twice already. They need to go back to the drawing board.

Um....ok. At my day job pay roughly $150 a year to Canonical for support. I don't really need it, mind you, as most of the time the system operates as expected. However, it was a way to give a little back to a company who has done a lot for Linux over the years.

I have used it on occasion, and aside from the rather crappy salesforce interface they're using to track cases, it works very well. The responses are quick and the engineers are very knowledgeable.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#83

Post by dkarl »

nailer wrote: post #61
dkarl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a graphic designer :-) I thought, "What does attractive have to do with professional?" and then realized you meant designed by professionals, not designed for professionals. Professionals' tools tend to look beautiful to them and ugly to everyone else. Maybe this is a step toward changing that, at least for Linux. (Except I'll still have emacs taking up at least half my screen space, with its functional b…

Nope, I'm a programmer. I just don't like brightly colored notification icons all over my GNOME taskbar. They're distracting - looks (and discoverability, and other UI aspects) directly affect usability, I'm surprised you say you don't get that. As a counterpoint to your argument, I'd say OS X has more professional UI designers than Windows or the Linux OSs and is generally regarded as being more usable too.

I'm surprised you say you don't get that.

Thanks for reading my comment so charitably ;-)

What I'm saying is that beauty to the professional user and beauty to an innocent bystander are different things. A professional actually cares more about usability and certainly cares about aesthetics as they apply to usability. The way a professional perceives a desktop will be very different from the way a casual user does. But some people are self-conscious about that; they don't want their professional exposure to change the way they perceive things, or at least they don't want anybody else to notice. So they want a plastic consumer case for their Hole Hawg[1].

Not that OS X doesn't have a lot going for it on the desktop, but a major part of the appeal for developers is that they can have a great desktop they love without non-geeks thinking they must be a little weird to love it.

[1] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#85

Post by sliverstorm »

sandGorgon wrote: post #14

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…

About 6 months to a year ago, the (geek) headlines were FULL of articles lambasting Ubuntu's fonts. I agree, it seems kind of trivial to me, but apparently it REALLY, REALLY matters to some people, more than anything else.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#86

Post by dkarl »

bad_user wrote: post #68
lg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw, all these laptop issues (especially this suspend/resume bug after I upgraded to Hardy) were what convinced me to get a mac. The only people I know with problem-free linux systems are desktop users.

That's not true. I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu. Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra configuration required. Not only that, but I also…

Apparently some people have laptops that worked great with earlier Ubuntu releases but don't work after an upgrade. That's scary to me -- I could do careful research and buy a laptop now, only to have an upgrade make my laptop unusable. Then at the very best I'd have to downgrade and be stuck on an earlier version of Ubuntu while they classify it as a medium-priority bug and leave it broken in subsequent releases.

P.S. To make this more specific, I've been thinking about buying a refurbished Thinkpad, and one of the commenters on the bug says suspend/resume stopped working on his T61p in Lucid and remains broken in Maverick.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#87

Post by illumen »

mgunes wrote: post #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://l…

It has now :)

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#88

Post by ugh »

old-gregg wrote: post #47
jbarham wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is FreeType intrinsically better than the Windows font renderer? Microsoft has the advantage of subpixel font rendering (aka ClearType) although admittedly that because it's patented ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering#Patents ).

Because FreeType does it too, in fact FreeType employs every single trick there is: bytecode interpreter, hinting, subpixel rendering, etc. But it has an advantage of being configurable i.e. it doesn't follow "all size fits all" path. Slight hinting + subpixel smoothing with enabled bytecode interpretation yields incredible output on high-DPI screens. However, IIRC there's a Microsoft-made utility that allows you to…

I think the tool comes with Windows, at least Windows 7. I recently installed Windows 7 and could tinker with how Cleartype looks right away. It's a quite nice interface, you get six different example texts and repeatedly click on which looks best to you.

I don't know how Ubuntu does that but if it doesn't do it like that it already lost by default. In the unlikely case that normal users stumble upon the adjustment tool they might even click on what they like best. They will never diddle with knobs or checkboxes.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#89

Post by mgunes »

bruceD wrote: post #6
someone_here wrote: post #3

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

The font is available on the CD, but it has not been set as default (and it might not be default in the final release either).

It will most likely be default for everything other than monospace and document fonts.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-artwork/+bu...

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#90

Post by FooBarWidget »

moxiemk1 wrote: post #15
sandGorgon wrote: post #14

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…

It seems highly improbably that the people working on fonts and design would otherwise be working on suspend/resume. Medium severity sounds right for a bug that only affects users with certain hardware. High severity should be reserved for things with a wider impact, or else it loses its meaning.

Suspend/resume has been broken in various ways on various hardware for years. This makes me wonder whether they're bugs in Linux or bugs in hardware for which each one requires a different workaround. In case of the latter I can imagine why things stay broken for such a long time.
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