131–140 of 170 posts
Smoothest dist upgrade yet ... didn't break any laptop functionality (ThinkPad T500) AFAICT. Use a mirror! ;)
But don't trust the upgrade if you use advanced features (as I found out the hard way) like Software Raid, LVM, and cryptfs. IT WILL BREAK YOUR SYSTEM.
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Yeah, but it's coming out today, and it's going to get like a gazillion upvotes... so somebody wanted to earn the points by being the first to post. I've been using the beta for a while now, it is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. It's competing with OSX now (having surpassed Windows long long ago)
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.
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I replied to someone else with the same issue, font rendering has always been by far the best with ubuntu for me than anything else http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg all default installs, ill reply in 10 minutes or something confirming which is which
1) OS X. A tad fuzzy, but everything is rendered _accurately_. Consistent thickness and character tracking (spacing). 2) Windows. Everything is slammed into pixel boundaries, making it look clean. Verdana is optimized for this style of rendering, so it doesn't look terrible.. but it's definitely not accurate. 3) Ubuntu. Worst of both worlds. Fuzzy and inaccurate.
I use Ubuntu configured to use Windows style hinting without sub-pixel smoothing, and I have absolutely every font forced to Verdana. I'm glad that there is accidentally a little bit of logic behind my choice.
It supports ARM; and a bunch of ARM-based netbooks are due out soon. They are cheaper and much more power efficient than intel's Atom etc. And Windows doesn't run on them (yet). I'm not a big linux vs. windows or ARM vs. intel fanatic, but I'm excited at what seems to be a disruptive inflection point coming up in the next year or so...
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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…
hmm... I guess some people don't like brown. I would be happy if ubuntu came with a non-brown theme that had the same overall quality as the default theme.
However, it's been a while since I've used it (I have 10.4 and XP machines for the most part), and I get the feeling that Gnome has benefited from Ubuntu far more than KDE has from Kubuntu, being sort of a bastard stepchild at best.
KDE's Konqueror has features that I still find myself wishing for on my Mac on a daily basis. (E.g., the visual view-by-size thing and built-in sshfs are my top two.)
I've not seen any compelling reason to upgrade my Macs from 10.4, so when they finally hit EOL I may seriously reevaluate Kubuntu as my main desktop, see if it's kept up reasonably well versus the mainline Gnome version.
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Out of curiosity ... why do you use the 64bit version? Do you have more than 4GB of ram?
I have 4GB system and 512GB video memory installed. However, I only upgraded from 2GB after installation because the already-heavy Java apps I use (Eclipse, SQL developer) now required twice the memory. As the other commenter mentioned, there are the CPU optimizations to consider, but what decided my final transition (I've tried it out a few times over the past few years) was when System76 moved to shipping their sys…
Of course the 32-bit JVM also has a 2.5 gig or so address space limit that makes no goddamn sense whatsoever, so if you want to process more than 2 gigs of data for any reason you have to either do it offline or you have to buy twice as much memory and do it on a 64 bit VM.
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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.
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Is editing the registry or hunting down drivers for a new version of Windows better? Or how about waking up to Snow Leopard having deleted your $HOME folder? Operating systems have their issues - it's inevitable...
> Is editing the registry or hunting down drivers for a new version of Windows better? When was the last time that installing a new Windows involved registry hacks. I'll admit that I haven't used Windows 7 or Vista, but I don't remember hacking the registry on Win95/98/ME/2k/XP installs. Maybe you shouldn't get so bent out of shape so quickly. It's not like he was bashing Linux and promoting Windows/OSX. If someone g…
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Being Windows-proof is, definitely, a feature for me ;-)
Me too. So many netbooks are coming out now that don't even work with Linux properly now like the Samsung ones and Ubuntu 9.04 even was broken with WPA Wireless on the EeePC 901. Also Dell only offer Linux on the very lowest model in their netbook range.
Its all well and good for Ubuntu to push further ahead but they would do a real big favor to the push of Linux on the Desktop if they could solve 1 major issue , remove the ugliness in the default rendering of the Fonts. Yes, i know it can be done via a bazillion font config options and yes its very powerful and flexible, but lets get it right by default.
Basically, here's what's going on: 1) There aren't many free typefaces for daily use that are beautiful, so you have to buy (or commission) several and "open source" them. 2) Techniques for AA font rendering that maximize aesthetics and readability are protected by numerous software patents. Years ago there was a short-lived patch in Xorg that had a modern font-AA algorithm that held its own against the competition,…
Basically, my take is that you need the fancy expensive typefaces and the patented hinting if you want type to look really good at small sizes and without anti-aliasing i.e. Windows before cleartype or Macs before OS X.
The vast majority of people don't want that, they want OS X style rendering, particularly if their monitor is 95dpi or up. Admittedly there are a vocal minority of geeks that grew up with the former type of font rendering, but even they seem to limit this preference to coding fonts and even they seem to be leaving this behind as dpis go up.
If you want OS X rendering on Linux you can have it today, without patented code, or the need for meticusously hinted fonts (which makes them much easier to produce as open source).
It basically involves going into the advanced Gnome font controls turning off all hinting. Voila! "Blurry" Mac OS X style font rendering. You can add sub-pixel rendering to taste.
You can also make it look like XP, which I personally think is a bit retrograde and ironically this does require well-hinted fonts (like Microsoft's) and patented code.
There's a how-to here: http://www.sharpfonts.com/