Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#41

Post by bd » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:37 PM UTC

rsheridan6 wrote: post #17

megaman821 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard out Ubuntu feels even further away from becoming mainstream. I want to like Linux on the desktop but looking at it objectively Win 7 and Snow Leopard are better.

I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs, which are the same on every platform. It really doesn't make much of a difference to me what desktop OS I use as long as it's cheap and it works with my hardware. I use Ubuntu on an HTPC because it's free and it (usually) works. I can't imagine what MS or Apple could do to improve on free + works. To me Linux is a lot closer now than it was in…

Firefox experience in Ubuntu is inferior to Firefox experience in Vista (at least on my Thinkpad).

It's noticeably slower and fonts are uglier (even after installing exactly the same TrueType fonts as on Windows).

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#42

Post by mquander » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:38 PM UTC

mikeyur wrote: post #40

bretthoerner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine. But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.

Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly. The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?

I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.)

Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configure X and fonts/local.conf.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#43

Post by mikeyur » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:40 PM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #28

megaman821 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard out Ubuntu feels even further away from becoming mainstream. I want to like Linux on the desktop but looking at it objectively Win 7 and Snow Leopard are better.

you must have a fast machine... Try installing windows 7 or snow leopard on a computer with 2gb of ram and a 2 year old processor... then the eye candy won't really add to the experience.

Windows 7 is running on my 1.6ghz Sempron w/ 1GB of ram. I turned off the major eye candy (aero) and it still looks great and runs fine.

That PC is the 'family' computer - so basically all it's used for is Surfing, streaming music through iTunes and instant messaging.

It used to run ubuntu but everyone complained about how ugly it is - and I wasn't going back to XP. At least with Win7 I'm in the clear anti-virus wise, no need for that.. yet.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#44

Post by ramidarigaz » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:43 PM UTC

trevorbramble wrote: post #38

Looking forward to upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 ...in 3 to 6 months when all the bugs are shaken out and everything is compatible with the new version. =^)

What do you use that isn't compatible?

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#45

Post by bretthoerner » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:49 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #42

mikeyur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly. The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?

I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.) Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configu…

The menus and title bars look great.

But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#46

Post by ktf » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:52 PM UTC

garply wrote: post #13

In the last version, they broke my Intel graphics driver, rendering my machine almost unusable except for the console. I spent many hours trying to fix it, and ended up switching to Arch out of frustration. I don't think I'm going back, but does anyone know if they've fixed it?

If you've already got Arch set up how you like it, there's not much reason to switch back over to Ubuntu, at least in my opinion.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#47

Post by trevorbramble » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 4:58 PM UTC

ramidarigaz wrote: post #44

trevorbramble wrote: post #38

Looking forward to upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 ...in 3 to 6 months when all the bugs are shaken out and everything is compatible with the new version. =^)

What do you use that isn't compatible?

I use a few packages from http://www.getdeb.net/ and have several PPAs https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas installed as well so there's some secondary lag there as those developers release new packages for 9.10. Which shouldn't be too long, really.

My main concern with this release is the ongoing, phantom ext4 (and sometimes 3?) corruption problem. Depending on which reports you read, it affects 64-bit installations specifically, which is what I use.

As much as the software, I want to ensure that there's plenty of community documentation and collective experience compiled before I switch. My System76 laptop here is my bread and butter; I don't want to find myself pathfinding on a new problem when I need to get things done, I want someone to have already charted a solution.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#48

Post by daleharvey » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:00 PM UTC

mikeyur wrote: post #40

bretthoerner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine. But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.

Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly. The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?

font rendering has always been a huge + on ubuntu for me

http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#49

Post by siegler » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:02 PM UTC

What are people's favorite guides for setting up Ubuntu? http://www.funnestra.org/ubuntu is really good but they don't have a 9.10 update yet.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#50

Post by Sapient » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:09 PM UTC

ghotli wrote: post #30

Some googling shows that the VMWare Tools are not yet compatible with 9.10. Does anyone know how quickly VMWare usually gets around to updating tools after an Ubuntu update?

I have given up on waiting for VMWare Tools to catch up and switched to VirtualBox from Sun. http://www.virtualbox.com

Unless there is some strange functionality you need from VMWare that isn't supported in VirtualBox, I suggest giving it a try.