Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

releases.ubuntu.com

91–100 of 126 posts

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#91
post #71
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of users affected is unknown, but the list of laptops mentioned in that thread is pretty varied, and it makes Ubuntu unusable for those folks. I know OSS needs to be more attentive to aesthetics, but let's not forget that "Ew, I just can't STAND these fonts" is a different kind of unusable from "I tried six obscure workarounds listed in a bug report, but none worked, so I installed a different OS." Using a…

Poor sleep/wake stability was the single biggest reason I gave up on Linux. I was running Ubuntu on my HP nc8430 and had to rush out the door so I closed the lid and didn't wait to make sure it went to sleep properly. I tossed my backpack into my car and when I came back a few hours later I found out the machine never went to sleep. It got so hot that the enclosure actually melted and warped. Probably lucky it didn't…

Not to take anything away from the problem but if your machine got so hot it melted because it was on that sounds more like a hardware problem.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#92
post #83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

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.

Most developers (and sysadmins) I know positively delight in their reputation of being a little weird. I know that given two options I like as well otherwise, I'll usually pick the less common one. I still use OS X, though, having switched from Gentoo in 2003, and having tried Ubuntu and Arch for 6-7 months within the last year.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, suspend/resume breaks because of device drivers failing to put their components to sleep properly. The biggest culprit is wireless drivers.

It may be that as they improve wireless support by including more drivers and making it easier to use proprietary ones, they're making the suspend/resume problem harder and harder.

I've fixed several problems like this on a per-machine basis, but the fixes are specific to each piece of hardware (read: "this obviously would break something for someone else if included in the distro").

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#94
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian (stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer problems. That was all well and good until I needed to enable backports to upgrade Firefox to >=3.5 for work. Now the package manager's broken due to some weird dependency issues.

I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling (laptop) hardware and maintaining a GNU/Linux distro that's guaranteed to work on it. Surely there's a buck or two to made?

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#95
post #94
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian (stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer problems. That was all well and good until I needed to enable backports to upgrade Firefox to >=3.5 for work. Now the package manager's broken due to some weird dependency issues. I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling (laptop) hardware…

There are a couple such companies, I think. One is called Emperor Linux (if it's still in business) and offered reasonably late-model Vaio laptops among others.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#97

Can I dual boot ubuntu on my mac? I am looking to get a mac to replace my netbook.

I am, but it hasn't been particularly great. There are some hardware issues, mostly surrounding audio and multiple monitors, that I haven't experienced when running Ubuntu on other machines.

Strange, Lucid works great without any problems on my Macbook Pro 6,2.

What model are you running?

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#98
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what is worth, suspend/resume works on my laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 (a Dell Inspiron 1525) and it was completely broken in Debian testing.

For what is worth, suspend/resume works on my laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 (Sony Vaio F-series) and it is completely broken in Ubuntu 10.10. Touché.

For what it's worth, the battery lasts half as long in Ubuntu than Windows (Dell Studio XPS 16). Also the fan is always on moderately loud even if I am only browsing the web or the lid is closed, and it heats up under the trackpad more than Windows to a degree that is annoying.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#99
post #91
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor sleep/wake stability was the single biggest reason I gave up on Linux. I was running Ubuntu on my HP nc8430 and had to rush out the door so I closed the lid and didn't wait to make sure it went to sleep properly. I tossed my backpack into my car and when I came back a few hours later I found out the machine never went to sleep. It got so hot that the enclosure actually melted and warped. Probably lucky it didn't…

Not to take anything away from the problem but if your machine got so hot it melted because it was on that sounds more like a hardware problem.

Not to take away from either of you, but I had a very similar problem with Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 9300. I would open my insulated laptop backpack, at least once every few months, to find a computer too hot to touch and the smell of baking foamcore. I have not had that problem with Ubuntu, and it has been running on that machine since 7.04.

Re: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

#100
post #31

Ok, my previous comment ("Who cares?") seemed to be thoughtless or even offensive (~15 downvotes in 5 minutes), and I have to acknowledge that it lacked quite some arguments. So let me ask: why does this news deserve so much attention to stand in front of HN? What interesting innovation, except the GUI, has brought this new OS release? Is an OS all about GUI and look & feel? Generally speaking, I am just fed up with…

One thing I like about the bi-annual Ubuntu announcements is that it has provided a sort of mental metronome for the pace of development, and a moment to reflect on when, exactly, I did I last update those servers?
Post reply on HN