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Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

extremetech.com

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Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#31

Post by freehunter »

BruceIV wrote: post #24
zzleeper wrote: post #10

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).

Yes, unfortunately with all the things Linux gets right, there's always those tiny but annoying bugs. Windows and OSX have fewer because they have huge budgets and strong management to make sure things are polished.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#32

Post by acabal »

I don't think they should develop in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't release until things are polished.

Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release!

There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#33

Post by viraptor »

BruceIV wrote: post #24
zzleeper wrote: post #10

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).

Not sure if joking or not... I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#34

Post by Karunamon »

jfoutz wrote: post #26
Karunamon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration…

Oh, right the guy who said: "Unity 3D behaves spectacularly on all tested hardware, including old and new graphics cards. The performance is quite good, the responsiveness is great, and you even get reduced power consumption."

Yet it somehow causes 10fps+ drops in virtualization, and is nigh unusable on older hardware (yes yes anecdotal and meaningless i'm sure).

Again, I wouldn't care if they would have just left 2d alone.

I for one am getting very tired of being told how I should be using my computer.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#36

Post by cooldeal »

viraptor wrote: post #33
BruceIV wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).

Not sure if joking or not... I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.

> I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.

Examples of said big bugs?

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#37

Post by mistercow »

Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because that sounds whiny.

Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#38

Post by zupreme »

columbo wrote: post #18
zzleeper wrote: post #10

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang ( http://crunchbang.org/ ) (video demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat... ) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.

CrunchBang looks very interesting. I'm surprised that I've never heard of it. I'm downloading a copy now.

Thanks for mentioning this.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#39

Post by munchhausen »

abc_lisper wrote: post #7

Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!

Are you nuts?

Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.)

To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#40

Post by a-priori »

abc_lisper wrote: post #7

Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!

Nothing's stopping you, or anyone else, from forking it and making their own distro their own way.
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