According to the article, 25 seconds is the target for Jaunty (the 9.04 release) which is pretty nice right there.
Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer). Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu (ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth, "The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of the system.
I've been using Ubuntu for 2 years as my primary environment and I miss it a lot despite terrible performance of Firefox and flash. Everything else pretty much rocked.
I don't have room for a desk with a workstation PC to run it and all PC laptops are so lame these days that I'm stuck with Macbook Pro but keep toying with a double boot idea.
I think the biggest increase in popularity for ubuntu (or any linux) installs would come from providing images that include all the necessary drivers and config settings to work with specific notebook models. (Notebooks is where it's at for consumer markets at least). That way I could just download/burn/install, and it just works - no lost productivity due to fiddling.
Hardware vendors won't sell it preinstalled (Dell's offerings are weak, esp. outside of the US), and not even Lenovo is offering a linux preinstalled option. It seems that Microsoft still has tremendous leverage in the hardware markets.
Providing (official) images that are basically guaranteed to work with a range of popular notebook models would greatly increase people's willingness to switch. I really want to switch to Ubuntu/Linux, but I don't want to spend two days configuring X and getting my webcam to work.
My last 3 laptops were all Thinkpads. I switched to MBP because I couldn't stand the LCD panels they started to use: dark, dim and low contrast TN-film without 24-bit color support. [I owned their FlexView at some point, I was crushed when I got T61]
Even resolution is wrong: 15" panel shouldn't be higher than 1440x900: many web sites aren't readable at resolutions higher than that, yet Lenovo offers only 1280 and 1650 horizontal pixels (too few and too many).
Why shouldn't resolutions be as high as the technology allows? Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts, and a higher resolution allows for nice smooth fonts without hacks like anti-aliasing and cleartype. My 13.1" laptop has a resolution of 1600x900, my 4" Nokia 770 has a resolution of 800x480, and my cell phone's 3" display is 480x320. I don't think anybody's complaining about not being able to see their phones or tablets, and I certainly have no trouble using my laptop.
In what way does a higher resolution hurt anything?
Because most web site designers assume 96DPI and set font sizes in pixels?
Guys with 15" 1680x1050 laptops, can you tell me if you're comfortable reading dpreview.com with default font settings?
Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts
There are more to it than just scalable fonts. Windows is essentially hardwired to 96dpi, only fonts scale, everything else does not: there are virtually no vector graphics involved in traditional Win32 UI API, even icons are fixed bitmaps: 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 or 64x64 pixels. They have some logical units of measurement of dialog boxes, but everything else is measured in pixels, see GDI/GDI+. Switching to 120dpi on windows is downright painful: a lot of applications either start to look ugly and disproportional or sometimes even break down: UI layouts fall apart.
Every web browser can zoom in on documents. I set default zoom to 150%. dpreview.com looks fine.
PS. Windows 7 has a proper scalable interface. I don't or use like Windows, but I tried it and it works well. You don't even need to restart the entire OS to change the setting anymore either.
"Because most web site designers assume 96DPI and set font sizes in pixels?"
It's sad, but I had to lecture a web designer where I work. It's amazing how he insisted that was the only way and how every monitor in the planet should be set at the same density.
I have a 1650x1050 15" panel on this laptop, and web browsing is fine, with the latest browsers and their "zoom" support. Theoretically, you should be able to have a 200DPI display and have everything work.
(I'd swear there's a huge bug in the Firefox image scaling algorithm, but since it's persisted this long it must just be me.... resized images are a bit ugly, but as we move into a world of resolution independence, a period of "ugly" is inevitable, unfortunately.)
Boot-up times are rapidly approaching the stage where the OS isn't the bottleneck - it's the BIOS. I often wonder what the hell it's doing for those 10-30 seconds. (depending on the motherboard) EFI in Macs is definitely snappier, at least until you start booting into Linux or Windows and the BIOS emulation kicks in and waits around for a couple seconds.
Interestingly, you used to be able to get a decent speedup with hibernating (suspend to disk) but nowadays, with the bootup improvements and larger amounts of RAM (my workstation has 8GB; 4GB is pretty normal these days) it only helps if you've got lots of stuff open in your session. OSX's resume is a lot faster than Linux' though, so there's plenty scope for improvement. I suspect the problem is once again initialising the hardware - controlling the platform sure helps.
I spent the last three days converting my xps dell laptop from vista to ubuntu 8.10.
I had to spend over 25 hours to get it to work properly.
Things like trying to figure out how to make my dual monitor system work with only one of them rotated 90 degrees.
It took so much searching and reading to make sure that what I was doing was not going to mess up everything else up to the point.
I am no novice computer user.
The task of getting ubuntu to run right is not trivial.
Linux advocates should pay attention to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a Linux system in a modern computing environment instead of patting themselves on the back because Windows does some things worse. I gave up the first few times I tried to install Ubuntu. When I finally got it running I was unemployed and had the time to wrestle with it.
I purged my dell laptop of xp and installed ubuntu over it. Love everything about it except the loss of wireless. It even gave me 9 extra gigs on my hard disk, 6 more than the advertised disk space!
If the linux community could step it up on the driver front for wireless cards it would be a beautiful thing.
it really depends. my last install was awesome. It's really good at figuring out the partitioning for you. (I did a dual-boot, and I thought I'd have to manually partition but didn't because it knew what it was doing.)
The actual install is fast and comprehensive. It sets up a lot for you. I remember having to install X on Free BSD not that long ago (maybe 5 years).
I've had good luck with wifi cards, but that is still sometimes an issue.
25 hours seems like a really long time (Unless you're counting hours of ignoring it while it updates and installs all the programs you pick. That is pretty slow.)
I'm not sure what you were doing, but I've set it up on several laptops and desktops and never had to spend more than 2ish hours of my time getting it setup. (Maybe a little more to install and configure everything.)
I'm really looking forward to this release. Ive been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now, and really enjoy devloping on it. I don't have to restart my machine that often - usually only when I have to do some Windows stuff, but the faster boot time will be a welcome improvement.
When you consider just how many features are available in Ubuntu, and the general feel, it's amazing that you can get it for free.
I even like the current brown/skin theme - I must be a fan boy. The one big improvement I would like to see though is a fast Firefox port.
The most prominent change, in my opinion, seems to be the idea of bringing suspend/resume to servers. I'd imagine this would only be implemented in multi-server clusters, with extra hosts powering down but never totally interrupting service. Is there a reason this hasn't been implemented in other distros?
Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer). Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu (ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth, "The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of the system.