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Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

releases.ubuntu.com

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Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#41

Post by frank_boyd »

Demiurge wrote: post #26
frank_boyd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually yes, probably. Most people don't understand the importance of transparency for a real and working democracy. "Transparency" as in "open source code", for example.

I agree that they don't understand, and further more, they don't even understand what 'code' is. How computers work, or what the technical innards of the computers have to do with democracy. Frankly, I don't understand the later either :(

> what the technical innards of the computers have to do with democracy. Frankly, I don't understand the later either :(

We're about to connect every tiny little aspect of our lives to technology. Everything becomes data that can be stored, measured, interpreted, used for good and nefarious purposes. Code is what manages all these processes. If we let black-box code (closed-source code) control our data, it means we trust those companies and governments who produce this code 100% and beyond the slightest doubt. Given Snowden's revelations about the NSA's abuse of power, it's become pretty obvious that we couldn't make a bigger mistake than trusting nontransparent governments or systems or operating systems or code. Even hardware needs to become open-source sooner or later.

Simple question: Can we ever trust voting machines that are not 100% open-source? Of course not.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#42

Post by rlpb »

baldfat wrote: post #7

Ubuntu is not going the direction I want for "my Linux. 1. Mir is a huge mistake (My opinion) 2. Unity (Well I am tiled window manager (i3) guy now so all DEs) I really don't like the flow of OS X and it is starting to really look more like OS X. DEFAULT an easily be changed. 3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream. 4. Software Center. They…

All of your complaints seem to be about the defaults. That's fine, but I don't see that it makes sense to switch distribution because you don't like the defaults, given that all the other options are available inside Debian and/or Ubuntu as well. There's Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu etc. all of which have different desktop environment defaults, enthusiastic developers who look after it. Some intend to switch to Mir, and some do not. Switching distribution because you don't like the main Ubuntu flavour's defaults is just fragmentation when there's no need for it. There may be plenty of valid reasons, but not liking the defaults is not one of them.

> Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.

I don't think you appreciate how much work does go upstream. Thousands of patches go upstream (eg. http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu_usertag.cgi; and that's just stuff that went directly Debian and was tagged as such). Driver work for new hardware enablements go to the upstream kernel so that Ubuntu developers don't have to maintain it. And Canonical is upstream for a number of projects (eg. they pioneered faster boot speeds with upstart, which went into RHEL). You just don't see this in action because the community works, and work done in one distribution ends up in all the others. So you don't realise how much of the other distribution you're using involves work originally done in Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#43

Post by peatmoss »

baldfat wrote: post #7

Ubuntu is not going the direction I want for "my Linux. 1. Mir is a huge mistake (My opinion) 2. Unity (Well I am tiled window manager (i3) guy now so all DEs) I really don't like the flow of OS X and it is starting to really look more like OS X. DEFAULT an easily be changed. 3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream. 4. Software Center. They…

People always mention Unity as a non-selling point of Ubuntu, but I have to say I quite like it. Granted, my background is strange--last time I personally used something other than OS X for daily use was WindowMaker on NetBSD ~2003. I've used various unixen for servers / clusters, and I've supported others using Ubuntu workstations for scientific work since I used a FOSS desktop myself, but even that was 4 years ago now. Maybe I qualify a a crotchety neophyte?

The set of applications I now use has changed quite a lot recently, and now I find myself reevaluating Ubuntu. And while I gather people didn't like the change over to Unity, I'm appreciating the thoughtful UI choices and find it to be a selling point (it's been a long time since I've needed to do anything like tweak an .fvwmrc file!)

Whether or not Canonical can execute on it, I also like the direction they're going with the convergence stuff in Unity. My phone actually is approaching the level of power that I need in a desktop computer. The ability to dock it and still have Emacs seems pretty powerful. MS and Apple will get there in some form, but I suspect their visions of convergence will be somewhat more restrictive in terms of what I can do.

Whether or not they need Mir for that vision, I've no idea. However, I remember people talking about X11 replacements clear back in the long ago, and being disappointed for years. Canonical seems pretty close to delivering something that they say will enable them to do something that I think will be cool. And, I believe they've said it will be open source. Thus, I really don't get what all the flap about Mir is. If someone wants to prove the viability / superiority of Wayland by building the Ubuntu convergence phone ahead of canonical, more power to them.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#44

Post by username42 »

baldfat wrote: post #7

Ubuntu is not going the direction I want for "my Linux. 1. Mir is a huge mistake (My opinion) 2. Unity (Well I am tiled window manager (i3) guy now so all DEs) I really don't like the flow of OS X and it is starting to really look more like OS X. DEFAULT an easily be changed. 3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream. 4. Software Center. They…

I share your hate of unity, that is why I have switched to ubuntu-gnome. ubuntu-gnome is an official variant of ubuntu (not perfect, but reasonably easy to customized). As a result, it is already available here: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/13.10/releas...

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#47

Post by jon-wood »

Demiurge wrote: post #15
frank_boyd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People need to look at OpenSUSE again! Isn't it really beautiful that we actually can do this, now? We can switch platforms within the same day - without real hassle or pain. I mean tell a Windows or Apple user that they need to look at something else, and guess what their answer will be...

My guess is "why? everything is working".

Having spent yesterday setting up a new laptop to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, Ubuntu works far, far better.

Windows needed drivers installing for everything from the network interface up. And I'm still having troubles with the network - I can use wifi fine, but the wired connection refuses to pick up an IP with DHCP.

Ubuntu on the other hand needed a single change to the boot parameters to make screen brightness adjustments work. (Windows also needed a driver for this). Otherwise it works perfectly.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#48

Post by Symmetry »

I was sad to see that the option to swap caps lock and escape was gone (I think I'm blaming GNOME here). But on the other hand I ought to be doing that programaticly in my setup script, so I finally just got around to adding that there.

EDIT: I almost decided to switch to Xubuntu, but then I installed xfce, tried it out, and found that they didn't provide that option either. Besides, using xmonad with xfce is much more complicated than with GNOME.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#49

Post by jebblue »

randallsquared wrote: post #20
frank_boyd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People need to look at OpenSUSE again! Isn't it really beautiful that we actually can do this, now? We can switch platforms within the same day - without real hassle or pain. I mean tell a Windows or Apple user that they need to look at something else, and guess what their answer will be...

As someone who has installed various distros on desktops and laptops many dozens of times (maybe over a hundred) since 1997, let me point out that while there's a decent chance of having no "real hassle or pain", the chance is not insignificant that you will spend hours trying to fix something that went awry during a reinstall. I'm definitely going to wait a little while to see if other people using packages I use ha…

Using the latest release of anything usually brings some issues, including Windows and Mac. I used to upgrade each time and with 12.04 I've decided to stay on it until 14.04. Skype, Eclipse, Steam, Netflix all work fine on 12.04 and 12.04's performance is great.

Re: Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

#50

Post by jebblue »

baldfat wrote: post #21
talles wrote: post #8

Is it shipped with Mir? Their what's new page is kinda succinct: https://help.ubuntu.com/13.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html

Mir is not ready. The next release is suppose to be a LTS which is scary. My prediction: LTS will be 14.10 and Mir will be default in 14.04.

Usually the .04 release is LTS every two years, if they change that it will be a bit confusing, hope they don' do that.
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