The release is imminent. Ubuntu is developed in the open, so you get to see candidate release images on the page linked.
Ubuntu is not released until the release is announced. If you're in doubt, expect to see an announcement on the ubuntu-announce mailing list, or its archive at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/
Also see #ubuntu-release-party on Freenode. At the moment, the topic says "... No, it's not out yet | No, we don't have a set time for release"
(written as of Thu, 17 Oct 2013 10:55:59 +0000; obviously this post will become incorrect as soon as it actually is released)
This is the release. These aren't candidate release images. They're just likely waiting until 13:10 GMT to officially announce it. I believe 13.04 was released at 13:04 too.
From that page, it is clear that Ubuntu uses the FSF definition of "free" (and quotes it).
The suggestion that Ubuntu will be closed source in the future is FUD. Everything that Canonical ships in Ubuntu is open source with an open bug tracker and open version control.
(with the exception of proprietary drivers and Flash, etc, written outside the project, done for pragmatic reasons and optional with a clear option at installation time; this stuff has not increased but reduced in scope with things like nouveau available now).
zsync can update any file, even an empty one (just rename it to the target file name). However, I am not sure how much you would actually save by using older ISOs.
There is no "right" free software/open source spirit of community involvement. It begins and ends with the licenses used, full stop. Beyond that no one has any right to say how other people should run their projects. If they don't like it, they can fork it thanks to the licensing, but even when that happens it doesn't mean that the original maintainers were somehow less free software/open source.
Approved as in the posts need to be OK'd by a mod before being shown. And yes, they do censor heavily, try posting a well reasoned complaint about australis for instance and watch your mail not get approved.
On another project I'm involved in, I've seen Google Groups decide that legitimate posts are spam. Not sure if that's what's happening here, but it's a possibility.
The main feature I'm looking forward to is zswap in kernel 3.11 [1]. Basically instead of swapping, the kernel will first compress infrequently used pages in RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than swapping to disk.
The practical effect of this is basically the same as a free RAM upgrade!
I guess we'll never know if Apple engineers were "inspired" by Zram and Zswap Linux development. I don't think anything like this is available in Freebsd yet.
Yes, and that's exactly what makes it curious. It's a technology who's always been "known", but no modern operating system has bothered implementing it. Now we got two major OS shipping it at the same time, and I can't even see a correlation with a change of hardware (i.e. i can't see RAM being lately more scarce on PCs or Macs to the point of making this feature more useful than, say, 2 years ago, or 4 years ago, or 6 years ago).
I think it's the opposite (that it is at least in part more RAM that is driving this)
If you're going to end up swapping to disk most of the time anyway, the feature doesn't seem to be very useful. But with much faster CPUs, "many core" CPUs where your apps often won't manage to take advantage of the CPUs, and cheap RAM making lots of people buy huge amounts, the "cost" of using compression to offset swapping to disk seems to have dropped substantially, and the chance of avoiding swapping to disk entirely seems to have increased.
The big differences are (a) zswap is in mainline, zram is not, (b) zswap can swap pages out to disk when it's full, zram cannot.
Also, I wouldn't really characterize the difference that zswap makes as a constant, workload-independent percentage performance boost. Rather, it increases the amount of RAM you can use before the system moves from the "acceptable performance" regime (minimal swapping) to the "dismal performance" regime (lots of swapping). For things like running Rails apps on a relatively small VPS, or getting the most out of a limited-RAM machine like an Eee PC or Raspberry Pi, this is very important.
For programmers or IT related people, you can easily compile kernel 3.12 with in 10 commands. and reboot.It will give you latest kernel.
1. install git.
2. get linux kernel from Linus tree.
3. google how to compile kernel and compile it.
4. restart.
Note: ubuntu will elegantly handle GRUB2 for you.
That means when you reboot, you are able to choose what kernel you want to use.
Try this, and you won't need to wait for UBuntu 13.XX 14.XX for new kernel you want to use.
Not so fast. Desktop versions of new Ubuntu distros all require 3d support. And you can easily run into an obscure problem [1] that would have you reconfiguring graphics for a half a day and result in an unusable system, even if you'd try to go back to an old kernel.
As someone who doesn't use the dash, I am wondering what's in it for me.
Personally I've tried a few distributions over the last year or so because I've been unhappy with unity but Ubuntu's ease of use still makes me return to it, although right now I'm typing this from a Debian box. I didn't like the dreadful* gnome3 speed so switched to i3. Now if I could just work out how to stop the lazy window focus...
The trouble is is that it looks like a bag of crap right now. The font rendering is all over the place, I'd be embarrassed to use this at home although it is more productive for work than anything else I've used lately.
This might all be "my fault" because I haven't properly installed the right modules or drivers or whatever, or maybe I've not properly set up my Xorg.conf or ~.i3/config but ubuntu always just worked which is why I kept returning to it.
*Possibly because this is a VM running inside windows.
> As someone who doesn't use the dash, I am wondering what's in it for me.
All other packages are updated as well. (Freshly rebased on top of Debian unstable.) So it really depends on what you are doing and which packages you are using.
I'm guessing that it has to do with the focus behaviour of the mouse. If that's the case then it would be the 'focus_follows_mouse' variable. It is set thusly:
It's a bit sparse maybe. And as "early" adopters, we probably don't care about the social crap etc. But as long as I can yank those packages whenever I want, I'm fine with that.
What I'm really excited about this time around is the launch of Ubuntu Touch, being able to use an open-source OS on my mobile phone.
You can do that now with Firefox OS, and unlike Ubuntu Touch, it's actually developed openly. Ubuntu for phones is open source in the same sense as Android -- developed behind closed doors by a company that doesn't particularly care about community input.
If you think that Ubuntu for phones is really going to be any more open than Android, I expect you'll be disappointed.
> All the Ubuntu Touch specs are public and discussed during a public developer summit online.
Interesting. Can you point me to the online discussion of Mir that took place during the first six months of its development?
> Nearly all of the core apps shipping on the image are community contributed.
... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.
> seriously there's no need to go around making things up about another OSS project.
The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious. My criticism isn't about promoting FFOS, it's about calling Canonical out on their bad behaviour.
> Interesting. Can you point me to the online discussion of Mir that took place during the first six months of its development?
Ubuntu Touch switched to Mir a week ago and was using SurfaceFlinger up until then.
Sure Mir began life as a close proof of concept but has been OSSed for a long time now, certainly long enough to see if it was a good fit for Ubuntu Touch. We could argue whether Mir is now part of Ubuntu Touch or just a component of it but that's just arguing semantics.
> ... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.
If you don't like signing a CLA you don't have to sign it. You don't have to contribute if you don't want to. You're also free to fork any of the CLA'ed software as you see fit.
> The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious.
Wayland isn't a fit for Ubuntu. In order to deliver the things we want in time for 14.04/14.10 we prefer to maintain our own stack. That's not being any less open than anyone else, it's just how it is, shrug.
I don't think you are fair to Ubuntu in this comment.
Change in Fedora or Debian Testing usually means breakage. I hear Arch breaks things now and then too. Even Windows breaks things... in all cases, this is avoided by choosing a stable or LTS variant and upgrading less frequently.
There aren't that many top tier distributions to choose from, the main choice is how much time you want packages tested before using them. If you want more testing and older packages, use Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, Redhat/CentOS... but don't stack the deck against Ubuntu by comparing its fresh distro to other people's LTS distros, compare apples to apples.
On Destkop there is reason to upgrade if you are using stock software and kernel (as I'm). Unity in 13.10 feels more responsive than in 13.04 was.
Pretty much everything is bumped to newer versions. Even things in VirtualBox work faster now (13.04 was installing 4.2.10, but 13.10 is installing 4.2.16). Dont know what is the reason for speed gains - Kernel in Ubuntu or newer VirtualBox.
One thing to do after upgrade is to disable smart scopes. No reason to share search queries with Canonical.
I was hoping that 13.10 will solve my sound problems, but no luck. Just like in 13.04 i hear crackling noises. But those are specifics of my laptop.
Yeah, I had to switch to Vmware player due to crackling noise, VirtualBox devs commented somewhere that it's all very specific to hardware and not in their "main focus", so they don't seem to be very interested fixing it.
I upgraded my 13.04 system this morning and now it is unfortunately unusable. Any time I try to switch users, it consistently brings me to a black screen with a frozen mouse pointer that I cannot get out of, even when hitting Ctrl+Alt+F#. I'm downloading the iso now to try a fresh install.
Nvidia, AMD, or Intel?
Proprietary or open source drivers?
I often have problems during upgrades using the proprietary drivers. The solution is usually:
1. Uninstall proprietary drivers.
2. Reboot, make sure the fallback mesa/vesa works (i.e. you can boot to graphical login).
3. Install proprietary drivers again.
4. Reboot, make sure the graphical login works, then run glxinfo | grep -i opengl, and make sure the renderer is GeForce or Radeon or whatever, NOT "Mesa".
Yes, it's stupid, and yes, we shouldn't have these problems in 2013, but the proprietary drivers tend to just have more compatibility issues.
Here's a video of a continuous upgrade from ms-dos through every windows version all up to windows 7 (a timespan of ~20 years) that proves it's possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14
The whole time I was watching this I was thinking, how would I explain to a normal human being why it is that I can't look away. Windows 3.0 especially took me back to my adolescence, like a smell.
It's not all Canonical's faults. A highly customized install with a few extra libs here and there and some proprietary softare can easily wreck havoc on a system.
I had a continuous Arch install for 4 years without massive breakage through half a dozen major switches, including the fs layout and the systemd transition.
I just upgraded to an SSD and decided to clean slate rather than carry extra fs creep baggage that isn't linked to a package to remove, but I still have that partition around, and I'm pretty sure if I upgraded it it might still boot.
It is why I like rolling releases - rather than have catastrophic breakage every half year, you continuously migrate upwards. It means occasionally you need to pull up a web browser to see why your desktop is missing, but its better than doing a dist-upgrade and getting an unbootable system.
My Debian installation has been the same for six years and survived moving from Gnome → XFCE → Fluxbox → Awesome and installing bleeding-edge mesa and radeon drivers, plus other kinds on tinkering. Oh, and moving to an SSD.
And I since 9.10. Sure, I've had my problems with it due to certain customisations applied, but to the best of my knowledge nothing that I haven't brought on myself, and I've been able to sort it out each time without significant trouble.
I guess I should stop using my Debian machines where I did an install in previous decades (decades, plural) and copied the setup from hard drive to hard drive across several physical machine rebuilds. Up to now I had no idea that this never works smoothly.
If you're the sort of person that likes to try out stuff from different places, including compiled binaries, non-repo packages, and other fun stuff, eventually stuff will break. A lot of desktop pieces of software have config files that keep changing.
I've found that keeping your old /home around and a copy of installed packages works well enough for most situations.
Actually I do keep around a few old binaries, and I have more often seen something else: software that no longer compiles with a modern compiler, but the binary I built in 2000 still works.
We're talking about Ubuntu here - that was my point.
I've been upgrading Ubuntu Desktop for years (a decade, singular) and I've always been struggling - especially if I ventured to install an alpha and then keep upgrading that. Compared to OS X, on which I always upgrade to the first Developer Preview and keep upgrading on, although OS X comes with problems, too, the GM usually fixes it all up. With Ubuntu, it's best to script your environment and rebuild clean. At least my experience. Garbage always piles up otherwise!
I've only ever had one hose my system but that's because I locked the screen while the upgrade was in progress. The upgrade never finished because I couldn't unlock and answer any of its conflict resolution questions.
Mine (Asus Zenbook ux31a) doesn't even boot to dekstop anymore with the default kernel. X server just says fatal error, no screens found. Using kernel 3.8 now and things seems to work.
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 need to just take OpenSUSE's one-click model and get rid of their current model of App Store and the horrible app model. (My model)
5. Their Developer SDK to "Write once, run everywhere." If I had a nickel for every time that was promised (Java looking at you) Once again OpenSUSE Build Service is the most underused Linux tool in the last decade https://build.opensuse.org/ Build it there and also build packages for other Distros also.
Now after my list I have Ubuntu running my home server right now and well it is solid. I use OpenSUSE at work and Arch Linux on my tiny laptop and like those experiences more.
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.
ripb "All of your complaints seem to be about the defaults."
Only one of five is a default issue and I even declared it a default issue and how I go around defaults.
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 need to just take OpenSUSE's one-click model and get rid of their current model of App Store and the horrible app model. (My model)
5. Their Developer SDK to "Write once, run everywhere." If I had a nickel for every time that was promised (Java looking at you) Once again OpenSUSE Build Service is the most underused Linux tool in the last decade
Defaults. Kubuntu developers have said that they will not be using Mir. Thus I expect X/Wayland to be available in the repositories and used by default by alternative flavours.
> 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.
Defaults. Alternative Ubuntu flavours provide alternative DE defaults.
> 3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.
I addressed this separately.
> 4. Software Center. They need to just take OpenSUSE's one-click model and get rid of their current model of App Store and the horrible app model. (My model)
Defaults. You can use whichever front-end to apt you wish; Software Center is just the default. If there's an alternative available in Debian, Ubuntu has it. Examples: Synaptic, gdebi-gtk. Sure, they aren't complete replacements. But if a suitable Free alternative is written, I expect that it will be packaged in Debian and be available in Ubuntu.
> 5. Their Developer SDK to "Write once, run everywhere."
Defaults. You don't have to use their developer SDK (except perhaps for apps that will work on Ubuntu Phone through the default app store; but then other distributions have no answer to that, do they?). Traditional dependency and package -based development is still available and is not going away.
Ubuntu are adding to what was there previously. They are not replacing things, except that they are using their new stuff as the default. Your complaints are about what Ubuntu are doing; except that all the traditional stuff that other distributions have are still available. This is why your arguments still boil down to arguments about defaults.
>Switching distribution because you don't like the main Ubuntu flavour's defaults is just fragmentation when there's no need for it.
What reason would you have to stay with Ubuntu if you don't like any of its defaults? If someone doesn't like Ubuntu's changes to Debian, but still uses Ubuntu, isn't that just fragmentation when there's no need for it?
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.
So what? These aren't criticisms of today's release at all.
Mir isn't even used in 13.10.
I don't think there are any distributions which ship with i3 so you would have to install i3 in any case, that isn't a fault of Ubuntu's and since you are not using it anyway, who cares if it looks like OS X to you?
Ubuntu's work is open source, the code is there under a liberal license, what do you even want?
If you don't like software center, use apt-get or synaptic. Their "App Store" isn't for you but I am glad they have one to encourage a market for Linux software. If you don't like it, don't use it, it's not harming you.
I don't know what developer SDKs have to do with anything. This isn't Android, it's normal Linux. Write a Linux app and it runs on Ubuntu.
Why would I look at OpenSUSE if I do not specifically want an RPM-based distribution oriented toward KDE? If those are your preferences then why are you even complaining about Ubuntu?
> BUT they are spending resources on Mir WHEN they could have just gone with Wayland.
They can spend resources on what they like. This isn't a zero sum game. This doesn't take other Free software away from you. This doesn't remove other Free software from Ubuntu's repositories.
> they could have just gone with Wayland.
I don't pretend to understand the technical details. But they seem to be the only ones pushing a full traditional distribution onto a phone. They've made it happen.
This is Free software. You go use Wayland on your phone that you don't have and enjoy whatever full traditional Linux distribution that doesn't exist there, and I'll use Mir on the phone I can have today and enjoy a standard Linux distribution on it.
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...
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 have issues, and see what new tricks we have to pull to use Skype, etc.
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.
To add a little more info to that article ("The app basically packages WINE and Netflix into a simple little desktop app"), the package basically shows you the Netflix site in a Firefox frame with the silverlight plugin installed.
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.
About a month ago now, my laptop's windows install decided to take a dive so I reinstalled windows and took it as an opportunity to dual boot ubuntu as well. Ubuntu worked out of the box. I'm still finding things that need drivers a month later in windows.
I don't think this opinion can be based on personal experience. One or two computers, especially developers machines are a sample size too small. Also, I've had an opposite experiences. Not to mention that what we most notice is divergence from the past trend. Regardless, I don't think many hardware manufacturers prioritize Linux for their deployment. I can see, however, that since the latest Ubuntu image is at most 6 months old, it can have more built in, while Windows 7 is many years old now, tends to require 'Windows Update' to get all the latest drivers. Overall, however, I think Windows gets way more driver support just because of the market. I don't know how you can argue that.
I think the point was that it frequently has a simpler install experience, which is true. It doesn't have better driver support for ATI video cards or Broadcom wifi cards.
Been my experience too. But I would like to point out, in October 2013, for the first time in my twenty year history of using Windows computers, Windows 7 managed to find the drivers for a piece of hardware I have, a usb soundcard, Online!
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.
I'd reply to that: Various types of freedom and a higher degree of respect for your privacy (I know, it's not a cure-all solution, but the next step that needs to be taken by society).
Are these things something manufacturers put in the specifications for the computers the sell? Are these things something customers shopping for a computer look for?
The point is that in the linux world you're choosing between competing distributors. In your example, they're both from Apple.
In the linux world you get a combination of 1. low switching costs between competitors (because, as you point out, most of the software is the same), and 2. competition between distributors. With Microsoft and Apple, if you want to choose between competitors, the cost of switching between them is much higher.
I won't use it on desktop (I'm on gentoo for more than a decade and am very happy with it), but I use it on laptop and tried its mobile version on my nexus7 (ubuntu touch, but that's basically 13.10). It's only when I played with it on tablet that I understood what unity is about.
You compare it to macosx, and I agree, here : it's some kind of responsive interface, allowing to have the same feeling on a desktop, a laptop and a mobile. That's certainly not our usual linux environment, but I'm glad they're trying to innovate, here.
I can't wait to see what will come out of that when it's finished, because even the browser was quite unusable when I tried ubuntu touch (it keeps on clicking 25/50px above were I was tapping).
The qt5 development environment looks promising to write apps, too. Not only that will be nice to write mobile apps, but even to write desktop small apps and widgets. Each time I tried to write some kde javascript plasma widget, it was painful by lack of documentation and lack of debug features. Ubuntu sdk looks great, so far (just sad it's just for ubuntu).
Agree. Not because I necessary dislike Ubuntu, but because openSUSE is awesome. It's insanely flexible (hence the chameleon mascot), fast, YaST is great, one-click installs are great for newbies, openSUSE build service is great, and installing software/new repositories is very easy. Zypper also beats yum and apt-get...
Yeah, you can. The functionality is called "services". I'm not sure how auto-versioning would work with git though. I have packages building from SVN, and OBS updates the spec file automagically to set the version to the SVN revision.
I'll stick to 12.04 LTS for desktop and server and wait for 14.04 LTS for desktop and server. 9 months support made *.10 releases less exciting, for me somehow.
For my workstation as a web developer, I use Ubuntu with LXDE running the latest releases as it's always nice to have the latest software, if I had to support users I would use 12.04 though.
Servers is quite nice with 12.04 though, and that's what they are designed for.
To preface - The PCs I work on at home and work are fairly decent - Intel i7 Haswell, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, so it's not like my using it because my PC is old.
LXDE has some usability issues (such as random glitches, which seems to be mostly resolved since 13.04) over XFCE or other desktop environments but I find it quite a joy to use, especially as I work on a single monitor but have multiple workspaces which I can tab through using alt+scroll, or using scroll on the wallpaper - for example I have development (sublime/chrome) on workspace 1, emails on workspace 2, testing on workspace 3 (which runs in the background and is handy to run).
LXDE seems to be the only desktop environment that doesn't lag when I have quite a few things open and going off at once, but I need to re-experiment with XFCE now 13.10 has come out to give it a proper go.
Lubuntu is more lightweight, which will be important for older and lower powered machines (or if speed is a huge deal for you), but certain things might be a bit less polished. You would have to try it to see if it works for you. Xubuntu is a bit more full-featured and can feel somewhat like Gnome 2 did back in the day. But there's no reason you can't install both and try them on any Ubuntu machine, these are really just packages and defaults rather than completely different distros.
I have grown to really love Lubuntu because it strikes the perfect balance for older laptops. With a few tweaks, can look as beautiful though basic, and it uses RAM and CPU sparingly.
To me, it's a different distro because it only comes with the lightweight choices. (I found it very time-consuming to strip down Ubuntu, compared to tweaking Lubuntu upward).
The only minor criticism I could have is that it's a lot of work to make a Lubuntu theme from scratch, because of the many components to theme.
So, a user (zeis, don't take it personally) publishes a link to the release of Ubuntu 13.10, but he's actually wrong... Despite this, his post gets 188 points of karma (as of know).
Now that's what I call a karma system that doesn't work well.
I should just post "Ubuntu 14.04 (Taunting Tiger) released" and get my own share of karma...
Same thing happened on /r/ubuntu as well. It's just plain annoying. This way the real discussion about the new Ubuntu version goes down in the noise of users stating that Saucy hasn't been released yet or doesn't even get started.
Can someone explain to me what's different about the Mac and PC versions of 64 bit Ubuntu? I've seen these Mac versions show up lately but what's in them? I can't find the data clearly on the website. Is it just different drivers and defaults?
"Unfortunately, even though Macs use a variant of EFI (an earlier version of what's now called UEFI), they apparently can't cope with multi-catalog CDs, and simply refuse to boot them. This left us in rather a quandary: we needed to support UEFI systems, but we didn't want to drop support for Macs either.
I therefore created the amd64+mac CD images, which are exactly the same as the amd64 images except that they only support BIOS booting. Macs are happy to boot these in their BIOS emulation mode." [1]
TL;DR There is no difference... Normal CDs just won't boot on Macs.
OHHHHHHH bootable. I'd never actually tried that as I've always installed in a VM. Now that makes sense as to why the Mac version wouldn't work when I tried it in a VM.
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.
Last time I was using Ubuntu+Unity as my main desktop (11.xx), I used `xmodmap` to swap my keys, and found that every so often it'd be reverted. Have you experienced similar problems with this technique?
IIRC I didn't finding any easy way of making xmodmap settings persist over reboot, so I just took had a script that runs "xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap" run at startup.
(Of course then I switched to xfce on my laptop, which seems to run its own xmodmap command after its run startup scripts or something which overrides them, which is kinda annoying, haven't found a nice way to get around that).
I do expect a reboot to require somehow reloading my settings via xmodmap. More troubling is during an X session with Unity, my settings would be reverted, and I'd have to reload with xmodmap. Other desktop environments didn't have this issue. I really should have done my part and written a bug report.
Thanks, but Xfce's startup applications list (which is just a frontend for ~/.config/autostart) is already executed after the X server starts, and after .xinitrc.
(Apologies if me saying 'runs at startup' was misleading -- obviously if I had tried to do it from a script that ran on boot, before X starts (rather than on session start) it could never have worked in the first place!).
Edit: now I've started thinking about it again, I've changed the autostart script to call another which sleeps for 10s before xmodmap, which seems to have fixed the problem.
The beta of this has been smooth for me. I had no problems doing the upgrade (but I have used Ubuntu for a while). I am enjoying the newer versions of the kernel and some packages that are key for me. If you use Unity, the dash feels faster. I'm more pleased with this release than several past ones.
Mir is only planned for 14.10. They were planning Xmir for 13.10, but that has been delayed until 14.04. I think they're underestimating the amount of work that is needed for a pure Mir environment (without X handling everything via Xmir). A lot in Mir is pretty similar as in Wayland. I don't see how they'll offer the same features as X has without Xmir quicker than Wayland. Look at the amount of missing things in the GNOME Wayland technical preview. Adding an additional layer on top of X is one thing, but replacing X means a lot of work. Latest thing is getting accessibility right, which GNOME is working upon.
What I do these days is setup a VM (vagrant, maybe), depending on what I'm doing, setup RVM, NVM or virtualenv. Juju deploy locally the services I need (mongo, postgres, redis, memcache etc). Done and done.
You could try out Sabayon Linux, it is basically a Gentoo with an installer and binary package manager. equo (rigo/apper for a GUI). The good thing is that it's backwards compatible to Gentoo's source based package manager "emerge" and a very easy to use.
What Linux/Unix distro you use is up to you though and I will not start a debate. I understand that it makes sense in the enterprise field to only use the most popular and stable OS, to benefit from the Community and Support.
However OSX and Linux Mint, Fedora and Sabayon are the most User Friendly Linuces that I know from my experience. And I've tried most of the stuff on DistroWatch and some that aren't even listed on DistroWatch.
No matter how you dislike Windows, it's still a very solid platform to develop Desktop or Web Applications. I am biased, because I don't like Microsoft, but that doesn't allow me to judge on the effectivity of their software. It does the job. The same, or better can be said about Mac OSX, Ubuntu, Sabayon, Arch Linux and Gentoo which are the most developer friendly environments you can get your hands on. Never force your top developer or sysadmin to use another Linux/Unix than he prefers! Really don't do that. It's like giving your Top-Employee an ugly haircut, he'll leave and not come back or loose effectivity.
Now in practice you might say, this is different and people have their tastes. Totally right and they have their right to like what they want!!
But I introduced an entire development team consisting of about 20 people to Mac OSX and Ubuntu. They had the choice to choose their favorite development environment, but 50% of them switched to Ubuntu, 30% switched to Mac OSX and 20% stayed with Windows. The latter stayed with Windows, because it was too much hassle for them to port all projects and settings over. Even the most fanatic Windows user tried Ubuntu Linux out and was totally blown away after a week of trial.
This helped us to standardize development standards and deploy Ubuntu images to new employees so that they don't have to manually set things up, but can start working after only a few minutes of waiting.
At the time I arrived at the company, I had to use Windows although I requested using my favorite Linux distro. They simply had "no time", to allow me setting the machine up. The result: The Windows box I got was very instable and their ancient svn architecture (without development branch!! All changes were live and they had 500+ customers) continuously helped to crash the buggy Eclipse installation they gave me (weren't allowed to fix it myself).
That made the impression that I work slow, so the Boss sat next to me and stress-tested my ability to live-code what he braindumps into production within 10min while looking over my shoulder. They still use my work and yes, I could finally convert them partly to Git after some months. However I was moved to management and a slow OSX box. Don't get a wrong impression, I had to now work on many APIs, many Back-Ends and integrate our software. And additionally hang on the phone/headset talking with tech or ceo/sales while doing that. So after dealing with their customers and organizing things, I couldn't but quit the job. It was boring and I didn't learn new things, but were forced to use the slow or buggy machine even though I noticeably made things more effective internally. They basically used me as much as they were able to, making empty promises all way long. And to be honest, they weren't even able to do that correctly, they could've used me to do much more, but wanted me to focus only on core-value problems. Corporate culture in a Startup, I hate it! That's my experience, your mileage may vary.
I used Sabayon for about 2-3 years on my laptop with no complaints. I mean, it broke a few times, but that was my own fault, and I was always able to 'unbreak' it using recovery images and usually due to proprietary modules (grrr ATI).
I finally stopped due to my laptop itself breaking; crunchbang is my new distro of choice for my desktop. Biggest upsides: fast(er) turnaround time on updating packages compared to Gentoo (not just build time, entropy >> portage as a package management system). Current packages packages with wide selection due to Gentoo as upstream. The one caveat is that mixing gentoo/sabayon with any amount of complexity is pretty involved.
Hmm do you mean ArchBang? Because CrunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux distro. I wonder how Debian can be more up to date than Gentoo. Am I missing something?
Any one managed to get Ubuntu 13.10 on mac book air with Haswell processor ? Any better result for the graphics support on haswell ? I was hoping to buy one of these if I could run ubuntu 13.10 without much problems.
a warning for people using Anthy or other IME's : 13.10 replaces some stuff in the keyboard mechanisms, and the dash eats up a lot more keyboard shortcuts (I can't even get Alt+Shift to work! Alt+Shift!). It's frustrating, I somehow got two random keybindings to work and somehow activated ibus (not in the conventional fashion, which no longer works), but I don't know what I did so can't document it.
Frustrating how they can break such an important thing (keyboards)
Does this support touch input well? What would the experience be like if you were to install it on a Windows 8 tablet, like Acer Iconia W3, Surface Pro or others?
The release is imminent. Ubuntu is developed in the open, so you get to see candidate release images on the page linked.
Ubuntu is not released until the release is announced. If you're in doubt, expect to see an announcement on the ubuntu-announce mailing list, or its archive at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/
Also see #ubuntu-release-party on Freenode. At the moment, the topic says "... No, it's not out yet | No, we don't have a set time for release"
(written as of Thu, 17 Oct 2013 10:55:59 +0000; obviously this post will become incorrect as soon as it actually is released)