Submitted by Yes, yes, it’s that time of the year again – a new Fiona Apple album confirmed (which makes anything that happens between now and spring 2011 irrelevant and annoying), MorphOS 2.6 released (will be the next news item), and, of course, a new Ubuntu release showcasing the best of the best that the Free software world has to offer in the desktop world.
Summing up the various version numbers of all the usual suspects is getting remarkably tedious and boring, so if you want to know, good luck using Google. Canonical is going all corporate on our bums with fancy press releases with quotes from ‘executives’, and apparently, this release is all about the… The… Cloud.
“Ubuntu 10.10 for desktops and netbooks is our most consumer-friendly release yet,” said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical, “Ubuntu One’s personal cloud services will put Ubuntu at the heart of many users’ computing worlds even when they need or prefer to use other platforms. Unity has the opportunity to change how we think about our use of computers and the Software Centre will bridge Ubuntu with the applications users need to switch to the world’s best OS.”
You can get this release from all the usual places, so have fun. If you’re dist-upgrading, report any win or fail in the comments.
I’ve been running Kubuntu 10.10 for the last month or so on my MBP and it’s a very stable and solid release. I’ve no complaints at all.
I wonder why Kubuntu is completely absent from the news item. After all, Kubuntu has the most interesting changes in this release: New Bluetooth stack, new web browser, and above all the completely new Kubuntu Mobile distribution for smart phones.
It is now a community project, isn’t it?
So?
It still shares the same base operating system and resides in the same repositories (same with Xubuntu).
In this release cycle KDE-related software came with the most changes.
Kubuntu Mobile is the first Ubuntu release ever targeted towards smart phones. That alone is pretty newsworthy but somehow nobody notices.
Xubuntu also had its fair amount of newsworthy changes, replacing several core components.
I really don’t get the infatuation with Gnome, KDE 4.5 looks so much better.
I think Shuttleworth is batshit crazy for pushing a purple and orange Gnome desktop. It looks like a cellphone from 2005 with a bad Halloween theme.
This looks like a modern desktop:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewcurrie/4902774513/lightbox/
I said a while back that the tide has turned in favor of KDE and I stand by that claim. Shuttleworth is wasting his time with Gnome.
Except that release after release, finger-pointing after finger-pointing, KDE 4 still performs like a dog. First I had to wait for an updated ATI driver. Didn’t fix it. Then I had to wait for the next release. Didn’t fix it. Then I had to use the open source driver. Didn’t fix it. Then I had to use the next version of the open driver. Didn’t fix it. Then I had to wait for the next release again. Didn’t fix it. And in between, I was instructed to use distribution Abc, Xyz, or Mno. Neither of them fixed it. I even tried multiple computers – old, new, laptop, desktop. Didn’t fix it.
Maybe 4.6 will finally actually be usable, but after so many bites, I’m not holding my breath.
Edited 2010-10-10 22:58 UTC
A whole Software Compilation can’t perform. Or do you have performance problems with Marble, Kopete, KWrite/Kate, Blogilo, Gwenview, Okular,…?
I certainly don’t and I find said applications among the best, if not the best, in their respective cathegories.
Judging by your comment you have problems with KWin which may has bugs itself or triggers bugs in Xorg/Mesa/Catalyst.
If Metacity, Mutter, or Compiz works well for you, the logical conclusion is to use either window manager instead of KWin. Since pretty much all window managers are easily interchangeable, doing so is a no brainer. System Settings even has a control module to select a window manager.
I think your technical knowledge is good enough to be able to distinguish between problems with the window manager itself and a bundle of applications. So please write something along the lines of “KWin doesn’t perform well foe me” or one might be inclined to call you troll even though you didn’t mean to.
“So please write something along the lines of “KWin doesn’t perform well foe me” or one might be inclined to call you troll even though you didn’t mean to”
Wow, calling one of the site’s editor a troll via backhanded passive aggressive BS. Niiiice.
Stay classy linux fanbois.
Don’t twist words in my mouth. I never wrote that Thom is a troll. I wrote that comments about KWin written in a way that they can be understood as generalizing comments about the whole Software Compilation can be incorrectly perceived as trolling.
OTOH you called me a fanboy who spreads passive-aggressive bullsh*t after I posted a pretty neutral comment about interchangeability of X11 window managers and no single comment in which I speak negatively about GNOME, Ubuntu, or anything beside the fact that I find the other Ubuntu variants newsworthy.
Considering your insult reflex, I think you’re the actual fanboy here.
So…… Someone asks someone else to explain exactly what they mean by slow (i.e. what is slow?) and that’s passive aggressive behaviour?
Wow.
Well I consider the Linux desktop to be in beta anyways so to me your experience is moot.
Gnome may be ahead in some areas today but I still think that building around it is a mistake.
Define “performs like a dog”.
My HTPC is an ancient P4 Celeron laptop with only 512 MB of RAM and an ancient Ati Radeon 7000 graphics chipset. Runs Kubuntu 9.something with Plasma Netbook from KDE SC 4.4. No problems watching Xvid encoded videos over NFS, surfing the web (although 800×600 isn’t the greatest resolution for that), or watching youtube videos.
My desktop is a simple P4 with onboard Intel graphics and 2 GB of RAM. Runs FreeBSD with KDE SC 4.5 with desktop effects disabled. No issues running K3B, Kdenlive, Firefox, Flash, H.264-encoded videos, Amarok, etc on top of ZFS. 1680×1050 resolution.
My work desktop is a single-core AMD Sempron w/2 GB of RAM and an nVidia dual-monitor setup (1280×1024 x2) and desktop effects enabled. Generally have multiple versions of Firefox and Chrome open with 5-10 tabs each, multiple Konsole windows open with 5-10 tabs each, KdeSVN, KATE, etc.
And my eeePC 1005HA runs Arch Linux with KDE SC 4.5 without issues, even when watching Xvid-encoded videos over wireless, and when connected to a 27″ monitor at 1680×1050 resolution.
Apps start quickly (depends where they’re being loaded from). Apps run quickly. Switching apps is snappy. Moving windows is snappy. Things rarely stutter (usually due to overloaded I/O system).
So, unless you are going to quantify what “slow as a dog” really means, your comments aren’t really all that useful.
Perhaps he meant greyhound.
FTFY
KDE 4 works perfectly well for me, and I suspect I’m in the silent majority otherwise the project would be pretty much dead by now. But by the same token, I wouldn’t declare KDE 4 to be a fait accompli, because I know that many people still have issues that need to be addressed, even if they don’t affect me.
Fair is fair, and context is even fairer.
What part of “I even tried multiple computers – old, new, laptop, desktop. Didn’t fix it” didn’t you understand?
Yeah, way to go.
You still can’t say it doesn’t work for me with any authority, because it works for many,many other people
myself included running very limited hardware.
So unless you can be a bit more constructive than “runs like a dog” you’re always going to sound like a troll.
Dave
My experience is no less valuable than yours. You saying “it runs fine for me and many people!” is just as meaningless as my “it runs like a dog for me and many other people!”
In other words, if I’m sounding like a troll – than so are you.
Edited 2010-10-11 09:28 UTC
As long as you don’t specify what in the software compilation that performs “like a dog”, then yes, your experience is entirely worthless. The only thing I can think of in the “general experience” of KDE that doesn’t perform well, is resizing windows. It certainly is a negative point, but you probably spend far more time bitching about KDE than resizing windows on an average day.
Typical freetardian cult-speak from you. It never fails.
http://www.tmrepository.com/trademarks/worksforme/
yeah, someone needs to fix kwin compositing, it’s damn slow.
Edited 2010-10-12 01:04 UTC
I must say that you aren’t impartial speaking of Kde. You have a long history of (only) negative comments on KDE and many of them aren’t that rational. Ok you don’t like KDE but you are also a news reporter.
Normally you say KDE doesn’t works. Maybe is your hardware, maybe is a configuration problem I don’t know. And I don’t need to know it. Have you send a bug report?
Maybe you can’t because the fact is that KDE works:
for many people (including me, my thinkpad x41, and my core duo PC).
for the rewiers of arts technica for instance.
The power of being an editor was the responsibility of being the most impartial and rational when you make a statement.
Kde 4 is broken is old gnome fanboy talk. Right now there are no facts supporting that
That phrase is plain wrong.
http://www.tmrepository.com/trademarks/popular/
Very good website as far as content is concerned. The concept of making a variant of TVtropes about the most wrong open-source myths was interesting, though I’d have rather seen a more platform-agnostic variant where just about every kind of mindless fanboy gets hurt (since a brain-free platform-evangelized population is bad as a whole, no matter who is responsible).
It’s just too bad that the way that content is written and presented to the viewer (is it called “form” in English too ?) makes it look like a variant of Digg for 9 years old childs, which in turn favors mindless linking making the one quoting sound mentally equivalent to a 6 year old child.
Edited 2010-10-12 19:55 UTC
What specifically “runs like a dog” Thom?
It performs very well for me even in a Parallels VM with no acceleration whatsoever due to the Parallels Tools not supporting xorg 1.9.
Edited 2010-10-11 09:40 UTC
I don’t know. I know Kwin has major issues, but I was never allowed to say so since supposedly, everything else was always at fault (as listed in my previous comment). The problem is that due to Kwin being a mess, simple, basic stuff like resizing and dragging a window feels a lot like the Windows XP days, tearing and all. It’s not my machine (tried different machines), it’s not the driver (tried dozens of versions), it’s not open vs. closed driver (tried them both, multiple versions), and it’s not distribution (tried many of them).
There are other issues, though. Since Kwin sucks, everything that needs an effect is slow too, even basic things like opening a menu – and this on machines more powerful than god. I can run GNOME+Compiz or Windows 7 on just about anything without so much as a hickup in performance (even on first-gen Atom netbooks), yet KDE4 is still slow as a dog.
The funny thing is that when people say “KDE4 just doesn’t perform well”, you always get an excuse, the most asinine of which is “it’s just kwin, turn effects off and everything is fast again”. HOW is that any better? Are you seriously telling your users to shut off something that has become so basic that we’ve been using it for, I don’t know, 3-4 years now?
Are KDE people honestly telling me that in order to make my machine faster…. I need to turn off GPU rendering? You know, Mac OS X, Windows, and GNOME+Compiz actually get heck of a lot slower when you turn GPU rendering off! Responsiveness goes down the drain.
It’s all classic attribution theory. Kwin’s virtues are considered KDE4’s virtues, while Kwin’s flaws are never considered KDE4’s flaws.
But, I guess I’m just a troll. Just keep calling everybody who has serious cross-machine/cross-version/cross-distribution performance issues with KDE4 trolls, that’ll surely solve the problem!
Edited 2010-10-11 09:52 UTC
Weirdness indeed!
OpenSUSE 11.3 (Remix with KDE4.5.1) and Kubuntu 10.10 have worked flawlessly on every machine I’ve tried them on, even a 7yr old crappy machine.
I haven’t used any version pre-4.5.1 since the God-afwul 4.0 though, so I dunno if it’s 4.5.1 that is the answer for you or not?
That’s a curious statement to start off with. First of all, where do you get the idea that Kwin is a mess?
Yep things might be slow for some people on some hardware (they’re not for me, and I’ve got the thing running on a Macbook!) but I’m more than a little bemused that you start off with the statement that Kwin is a mess. It kind of gives the impression you have a default view of things…….
Edited 2010-10-11 13:05 UTC
Personally I can’t stand KDE, I have tried several versions of kubuntu on a test partition but there is always some irritation.
Nowadays I stick with ubuntu.
Not perfect either, shotwell is dogslow building it’s library compared to picasa and slows down the rest a lot.
Hi, Mr Holwerda. I don’t think you are a troll, I just think you are starting to run into something deeper that most Linux guys will refuse to even admit…Linux is NOT a desktop OS, it is SERVER OS. Don’t get me wrong, the amount of work that has been done while fighting the kernel devs has been amazing, but as you are seeing it is often “2 steps forward, 3 steps back” because Linus and the other devs are being paid the big bux by SERVER companies who only care about SERVER I/O and SERVER benchmarks.
See this article for an example…http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/discussions/81361-why-i-quit-kernel…
Sadly this article came out in 07 and things haven’t gotten any better, and if one would think logically it would all make sense: There is a reason why MSFT has separate server and desktop products and that is because what is good for one is often not good for the other. servers are primarily concerned with throughput, so they can serve as many user requests as possible. On a desktop things like buffering video, smoothing windows, these things matter to the end user but NOT to the server, which is often sans GUI.
Ultimately for Linux to have a real shot at being a true “third way” I truly believe the kernel will have to be forked AWAY from Linus and the other server paid kernel devs, who simply refuse to believe that what is good for one may not be good for the other. Considering Linus says “Linux isn’t designed it “evolves like a virus” I’m not sure he is the best guy to ask about desktops anyway. Link to quote..http://kerneltrap.org/node/11
So there is my 02c, and I’ll probably get called bad names too for daring to say anything other than “Gee Biff, isn’t Linux swell?” but ultimately to get Linux into every walmart and mom&pop shop it truly needs to be designed with the desktop user as job #1 and that just isn’t happening ATM.
Problem is, if you go this way, unices are just not made for desktop use, even down to the POSIX level (where text I/O and a complicated directory structure are outrageously favored). GUI on unices (and Linux in particular) is fundamentally a shoehorned afterthough.
Edited 2010-10-13 09:24 UTC
Thom,
I’m trying to understand your logic here. KDE4 is slow and buggy because Kwin is slow and buggy? Kwin is part of KDE4, not all of KDE4. You can change the windows manager. The part that bugs me is that you compare KDE4 + Kwin to GNOME + Compiz. You do know that Metacity is the default windows manager for GNOME, not Compiz? Why not use Metacity in your comparison? Oh, that’s right compositing in Metacity is not that great either. I don’t see you blaming GNOME for Metacity’s problem but you blame KDE4 for Kwin’s problems? So you changed the windows manager for GNOME but you did not do the same for KDE4? That’s not fair and you know it. If you like Compiz so much use it instead of Kwin in KDE4. Change it like you did for Metacity in GNOME. Compiz was buggy too when it first came out. Compiz is now the more mature of the two so just use it with KDE4. Buggy problems solved!
BTW I only use Compiz with KDE4.
That’s weird because KDE4 has worked perfectly for me on every system I’ve tested it on.
In fact, it’s so stable and responsive that I’ve used it as my primary desktop environment since version 4.2 (IIRC)
It’s funny how different people exeriences can differ so much
Fix what, exactly?
I love these kinds of posts. It didn’t fix this, or fix that, it performs like a dog…….and you never get to hear what the problem actually is. It reads more like an excuse for some reason……… I got it installed on a Macbook for crying out loud.
Fact is that KDE is the only open source desktop today that comes anywhere close to competing with how the proprietary competition has moved on. Like it or lump it, but these Ubuntu releases won’t amount to a hill of beans until they use or create a desktop that does what the rest of the world cares about.
Edited 2010-10-11 12:59 UTC
Don’t lie. I’ve written quite clearly what the issue is: Kwin. It might sound like just one component, but the problem with Kwin is that once Kwin has issues, it permeates into everything else. If responsiveness is bad, everything is bad. If, in this day and age, you can’t even code a properly responsive desktop (and I’ve yet to find the magic driver/hardware/distribution/KDE version combination that is responsive), then you’ve got problems – major problems.
The interesting thing is that I’ve had KDE developers confirm to me that Kwin simply has a lot of performance problems – so the people who actually code for KDE know there are problems. It’s always the armchair folk such as yourself that gets all their panties in a twist because he can’t grasp that there is a sizeable number of people who are experiencing problems with Kwin.
From day one, I’ve been extremely positive about KDE4 as a concept, and the progress has been phenomenal. It’s just that Kwin is lagging behind (literally), but because it is such a vital component, it shows in daily use quite clearly. Moving windows around, opening menus, minimising/maximising, resizing – things you do all the time – things that add up.
KDE/Qt is miles ahead of GNOME/Gtk+ (both are miles behind Windows 7, mind) – it’s just that when I have to choose between technologically advanced but unresponsive, or crude but responsive, the choice is simple.
Edited 2010-10-11 14:52 UTC
With all the respect, technology means shit if the programmer can’t make good use of it.
So make that choice, kde 4 is 100% usable without desktop fancy effects. I’ve used that way in the past and it was still quite awesome
Define “responsiveness”, “snappy”, “runs like shit”, and other subjective terms.
I can say “Windows 7 runs like a dog for me” just as easily as you can say “KDE 4 runs like a dog for me”. But you don’t give any information on WHAT runs like a dog.
Dragging windows around? I can do that on a netbook with KDE SC 4.5.1 without tearing. Sure, desktop effects are turned off, but so is Aero on Windows 7 on a netbook.
Resizing windows? Not an issue on a dual-monitor setup with KDE SC 4.5.1 and nvidia graphics. I do this a lot, as I use the drag-to-top-to-maximise feature a lot, especially when dragging from monitor to monitor. Desktop effects enabled, and a handful of effects in use.
Rotating desktops? Not an issue on the dual-monitor setup. And really catches the eyes of the co-workers walking by.
So, until you start defining what your issues are, with examples to back it up, you’re really just a whiner we should all ignore.
Well, since I’m not running either Gnome or KDE (openbox all the way, yeah baby!) maybe I’m off here but chances are it’s not about the ‘looks’?
Being colorblind does not automatically make you ‘batshit crazy’ (I was going to write ‘you insensitive clod’ here but then I realized this ain’t slashdot)
Looks are important if the goal is to win over new users. This is what Shuttleworth wants I think his Gnome favoritism is a mistake.
Looks are important I’m afraid. That’s why OS X and Vista/7 look the way they do and why they’ve started using hardware acceleration and resolution independence amongst other things.
What’s colour blindness got to do with having a decent looking desktop? But, any excuse I suppose…..
Hum, not exactly, in my opinion…
-Hardware acceleration is the last refuge of devs who don’t know how to write well-optimized code. E17 shows best how much GPU acceleration is badly overrated, in my opinion. You can make something good-looking, and even pack it with superfluous and hideous eye-candy as a technological demo using raw CPU power and still don’t get a single glitch… That is, if you know how to code.
-Resolution independence in OSX and Win7 ? Well, sure, there’s a bit of it in there, but close to none. Since when did they make applications (ie most of the user experience) resolution-independent ? Or even provide an API for that ? Since when is input resolution (ie making controls bigger when using an imprecise interface like a touchscreen or a pen tablet and smaller when using a more powerful interface like a mouse) taken into account in their resolution-independence algorithms ?
Edited 2010-10-11 14:08 UTC
It makes sense for a lot of effects to be handled by gpu. If the gpu already knows how to process effects like fading, shadow and transparency then the most efficient code is to pass it off. You do not want to needlessly waste cpu cycles doing transparency calculations.
What are you calling “efficient” exactly ? On battery-powered computers (and even on the desktop, with today’s environmental concerns), consuming little power is a very desirable form of efficiency.
CPUs have a relatively small power consumption, and are needed by every software anyway. On the other hand, a GPU consumes easily 3x as much as a CPU when under load. Is it really efficient to have the computer’s power consumption go x4 for the sake of drawing unreadable translucent windows ?
Now, let’s examine what you’re mentioning as GPU use cases.
-Small fading effects are not very intensive and they occur only once in a while so they can be handled by the CPU with no major performance hit for applications. I disagree with the alleged need for a GPU there
-Translucent things, on the other hand, eat up power ALL THE TIME. Anytime you open a menu, anytime you open a window, you have to redraw the whole layer stack when translucency is on. So in that case, you’re right, a GPU is welcome (even though not needed. Again, look at E17’s shadows. And keep in mind that applications are perfectly responsive on top of it, more than on Gnome+Compiz in fact)
But now, let’s consider what that translucency is used for :
-Windows 7’s unreadable windows borders and task bar (your mileage may vary depending on your wallpaper’s colors but in my case the result was so awful I just had to disable it and mentally thank Microsoft engineers for providing the option to do so, although they could just as well have made the Basic theme less crappy).
-OSX’s unreadable menu bars and distracting menus.
-Shadows that no one except geeks will ever notice.
See where I’m going ? When transparent effects are used, it’s either to hurt usability or to go unnoticed except for the much reduced battery life it leads to. I’ve yet to see a case where transparency is used wisely on a GUI.
Now, please not that I’m not one of these spartans who want every single OS to look as dull as RISC OS’ GUI. I sure love nice-looking UIs a lot, and am not against the use of special effect as long as it’s done properly. As horrified as I was by Windows XP’s “fisher price my first operating system” look, I’m fond of the vista-7 look as soon as a few things are done to make it look better, be more usable, and work in a smoother fashion (e.g. disabling window and taskbar translucency). I love to have those overused shiny gradients on my buttons and scrollbars, and think that the progress bars especially are quite nicely done. And I love the right to have my windows painted in any color I like, too (that’s why I don’t switch to the Basic theme, by the way, since MS recently decided that changing a window’s color was highly computationally expensive and required a GPU to be done properly).
But really, you don’t need a GPU to do all that. It’s basic use of gradient and animations, with a few fading here and there. A lot of them can be rendered in advance and just blitted on screen as needed, and the rest can be rendered in real-time with little to no performance hit (and no responsiveness hit at all if you know how to do scheduling).
On my laptop, I have that dual-gpu thing called Optimus by NVidia. You can save an hour of battery by switching to the intel GPU for most work, and going back to the nvidia GPU when needed. No, each time I use it, I think that I’d rather take an extra hour of battery by not using GPU rendering, since as I just showed it’s not needed. How is that wrong ?
Edited 2010-10-11 17:55 UTC
A GPU can handle 2D and 3D drawing with greater efficiency than a general purpose CPU due to specialization. GPUs do not have to have the same overhead required in modern x64 cpu. If you think fancy effects are a waste of power then that is a completely different subject.
You don’t need a GPU to do 3D drawing either but it sure helps since it is a cpu built for that purpose.
In Win7 Aero stays on in power saving mode but transparency is disabled since that is what takes the most power. It doesn’t have to be an either/or solution. The gpu should at the very least be taken advantage of if the computer is plugged in.
I’m not sure why you think E17 is the answer when it looks dated compared to KDE 4.5 and is developed at a glacial pace. Sure it looks better than Gnome but that isn’t saying much. I also don’t think you could push a return to cpu-only effects when the browsers are moving towards gpu rendering. It makes more sense to have a windowing system feed the gpu frames just as with a 3D game, especially when open source desktops have limited developers. They shouldn’t be bothered with optimizing fade or transparency routines when the gpu already knows how to do them.
The right tool for the right job. A GPU can crunch more numbers for heavy vector and texture calculation, yes. That’s why we use it in areas which need that, like some games, graphic applications, and recently scientific calculation software. What I question is the need for it joyfully wasting electrical power and heating up everything in something as basic as UI rendering. Take the average IE/Word user, wouldn’t he rather take battery life and laptop hardware lasting longer ?
Yes, plugging the computer in solves the power consumption problem. But then, something else comes : heat and the reduced hardware lifetime that comes from it. If we take a Word/IE user who doesn’t play any other game than Solitaire, we have to wonder : wouldn’t he rather take much cheaper hardware without GPU acceleration at all ? Hardware which despite costing less would last longer, because contrary to most cheap hardware it would not overheat that easily.
It’s not about E17’s look (E17 is horrible as far as look is concerned, we agree, although some themes look quite better than the default one). I’m talking about rendering technology here.
E17 shows what software rendering is capable of without a major performance hit, and is used here to silence people who blame things like the horrible performance of Metacity and software KWin on the limited capabilities of the CPU, and ask for a GPU when it’s not needed. Simply considering that the early Macintosh already managed to run a GUI shows how much modern CPUs are really up to, when used properly.
As time passes, people who want to use Word and browse simple websites (webmails, news…) have been asked to buy more and more powerful hardware to do the same very thing, or otherwise suffer a crappy performance. Sometimes it was justified (like, say, when memory protection was introduced), most of the time it’s not. What I’m against is unjustified power waste.
If my OS manufacturer tells me “I’m introducing a new capability-based security system that’s more safe and efficient for desktop use than the current user/admin model, but it’s a bit power-intensive because of the need to parse complex databases so minimal specs will rise a bit”, I say “please do”. If he tells me “Look, I don’t know what to do in this release so I’m going to introduce extremely power-intensive transparency algorithms in the UI. It won’t be any easier to use, and arguably will look bad, but you now need a supported GPU in the minimal specs and your battery life will drop by 20%”, then I’m just going to slap him in the face and go look for a more serious OS vendor, rightfully in my opinion.
Again, it’s a matter of using the right tool for the right job. I’m all for web browsers getting similar capabilities as Flash as far as gaming in concerned, but for my daily web browsing I’d prefer the GPU to stay off. What I’m against in GPU rendering in browsers is when you have to keep it enabled all the time, because the “fallback” software algorithms are just as horrible-looking as the Basic theme of Vista and Windows 7, the developers having not even bothered to test them for readability apparently. If people want their computer to last 2 hours on battery when browsing the web, it’s fine, but in my case no thanks.
Debatable.
Look, to me this looks like a good example of wasted resources, in development this time. If the open source desktop has enough development resources to make KDE 4, Pulse Audio, and Compiz, it has enough resource to make E17 a mature windows manager and integrate it in all desktop environments.
It’s funny you mention the open source desktop, because I thought about mentioning it as an example of why putting a GPU everywhere is bad.
GPUs are the perfect example of effort duplication. Hardware manufacturers couldn’t bother to think about standard interfaces for software in their little holy war, so you almost have to make drivers on a per-chipset basis. The open source desktop is not a very interesting target for them, and to make things worse X11/Xorg is so horrible that its devs feel an urge to break it every few months, so the whole HW accelerated graphic stack of the open source desktop is horrible. Fixing it would require dozens of years of hard work.
And you want to make vital software like UI rendering and web browsers accelerated, knowing that software rendering will never be enough tested because devs will think “ha, users all have a working accelerated graphic stack anyway” ?
This is, in my opinion, just perfectly wrong.
Edited 2010-10-12 06:15 UTC
I find it perfectly OK when more than one DE is provided.
What I find not OK is the complete omission of news regarding the other Ubuntu variants.
KDE has a better team and toolkit. Do not underestimate that advantage.
Gnome may get the headlines but headlines do not translate into code.
KDE 4.5 looks so much better, but Gnome works.
I’ve been using KDE for more or less 8 years, but just two weeks ago I went to Gnome.
Why?
Too many reasons. Two of the most important are 1) I got tired of the general slowness of KDE 4, and 2) lack of application integration (file dialogs in kde apps and firefox for example)
As a KDE user, I tend to agree, but there are areas of Ubuntu´s desktop that are more polished than their Kubuntu counterparts. For instance, the Ubuntu software center is much better than its Kubuntu implementation: better localized and more ergonomic.
Particularly annoying is the fact that the descriptions of applications are perfectly translated into Spanish in Ubuntu´s software center and not in Kubuntu´s.
This makes absolutely no sense. Why wouldn´t the translations be shared between both desktops?
Yes. The more shades of blue, the more modern.
I’ve been running the alphas and betas of Maverick all along, and have only seen small iterative changes (i.e. Sound Menu revamp, Metacity themes etc.). All in all it’s a stable release, but it’s so incredibly dull I want to cry into my underpants.
So Thom, well done with the whole flippancy thing. Yawn.
Edited 2010-10-10 14:45 UTC
That’s why I thought I’d try out Kubuntu for a change after leaving KDE for GNOME back when 4.0 was released.
4.5.1 is much much better and feels quite “exotic” to me if that makes sense?
Rhaaa, for ****’s sake, everybody shouted at Ubuntu for being to bleeding-edge and shipping with broken last-minute implementations, and now…
its cause it seems a bit odd to bump the version number just because you integrate your store into the package manager
They are not bumping the version number
10.10 – October 2010.
All their releases are “bumping” the version number, because they’re, you know, dates
I wonder if there’s a bug in the Unicode handling of OSnews?
I have no problem at all with bleeding edge or, obviously for an early-adopter, with the associated bugs. During most releases Ubuntu feels like it’s leaping forward at a pace, but Maverick just feels like a stop-gap until unico- oops, I mean GNOME 3. Fiddling round the edges. This is one of the problems with a 6-month cycle; some releases will be inevitably humdrum.
Still, it’s provided something to moan about, and that’s always a boon!
Indeed. Steady and stable is a *good* thing for any distro that wants to win over “Joe User” en masse. Users who want to chase the bleeding edge would probably be happier with something like Fedora or Debian Unstable
“It’s like chuck norris sneezed on my desktop, and I can’t wipe it off”
upgraded from 10.04 since beta, I’ve noticed more fan activity. all the rest has achieved quite a compelling state: software center 3, cleaner font, quicker boot, quicker shut down, feels good finished, gnome 2.32 is so complete, …
overall, the system makes simple a lot of activities. I only miss a gtk port of kolourpaint and being able to run .exe files with wine from a .iso mounted with archive mounter.
now I realize is windows the one who does not make things automatically and demands hours of unproductive user attention per week. per day, if you have installed it recently.
Ubuntu 10.10 is not perfect but I think is the best desktop OS right now. That’s why I think it should be shipped OEM with 80% of desktops and laptops from now on.
Edited 2010-10-10 15:35 UTC
Are you kidding me? I literally just finished updating to 10.10 beta (or RC) on my sis’ netbook 40 minutes ago
It the 10/10/2010. Ubuntu 10.10 has been scheduled for release today for a long time.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Softpedia-Linux-Weekly-Issue-104-146…
It nice to see something arrive on time.
Just upgraded from 10.0 went well and everything seems to work ( same problems as always with flash tho).
Can I suggest ?:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
Adobe released this just a few weeks before the Ubuntu release so it didn’t make it into the release.
there is a flash-aid plugin for firefox which downloads a newer one from adobe.. seems to work on 64bit…
Is the Kubuntu better than shite? I use Ubuntu and generally like but my experience of Kubuntu is very poor. However, I’ve got Opensuse on my hard drive so I could try out KDE, but for some reason I can’t get the surround sound to work and can’t be bothered to try any more. So I could try Kubuntu but will I be disappointed should I try PCBSD instead?
Kubuntu has been good for me since KDE 4.3. I’ve been testing Maverick since beta and I think it’s really, really stable and fast. I totally recommend Kubuntu 10.10.
I like it but some people hate it. Then again, many hate Ubuntu for completely irrational reasons, I don’t care much for OpenSUSE but many swear by it.
If you have the time, who not try both?
Sorry but worse than I expected compared with Opensuse which looks beautiful Kubuntu looks drab but the serious stuff.
Firstly the Kubuntu installer overwrote my custom bootloader – possibly I missed the boot loader setting but I don’t think so – leaving Haiku unbootable, fixable but unacceptable and leading to my first trip to the command-line.
Secondly if you use a proxy Kubuntu is basically unusable. The proxy control in KDE settings only changes the user proxy settings, not system proxy settings (as can be done in Ubuntu) so the software installer, hardware drivers etc doesn’t work. You are therefore forced to fix the problem from the command-line. This gets apt working but even after this kpackagekit still doesn’t honor the proxy settings. So much of Kubuntu is basically unusable apart from at the command-line. My guess is if I enable a graphical root login I might get a usable gui. Breaking the security model I might try it though just to see.
Seriously if they can’t get the proxy settings to work this is sad. Maybe I should put a little more effort into getting the sound right in Opensuse – anyone like to suggest the “best” KDE distro?
No enabling a root graphical login doesn’t help setting all the networking as root in KDE doesn’t help kpackagekit still wont honor the proxy settings.
This is broken
does it include a fix for https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281 ?
very annoying with the increased load.
This bug is worse unfortunately https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16525.
looks like a series of kernels are b0rked :/
It was released on the 10th minute of the 10th hour of the 10th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the millennium.
I wonder if they were just trying to outdo Armistice Day…
“showcasing the best of the best that the Free software world has to offer in the desktop world.”
If that’s the best, then it’s a sad state of affairs.
– Installer crashes
– Bootsplash doesn’t work
– Multi-monitor setup doesn’t work half the time
– Resuming paused audio/video skips (plays buffer twice) and audio latency is horrible
– Font rendering still sucks unless you fiddle with dpi settings and smoothing to fit that particular font – and then all other fonts will look terrible
– No automatic handling of orphaned “installed-as-dependency” packages
– Locale settings dialog crashes sometimes and other times the settings are not applied properly (crash reported)
– Translations are horrible, only English language is usable
– GNOME Panel order still not saved if multiple panels are on the same screen edge (reported in or before 2005).
– …
The world must be out to get you personally. I haven’t experienced any of the problems you mention.
have you reported bugs of these ?
and for translation, have you pointed the bad translations ? have you tried to fix them ?
We aren’t speaking about a closed system, but FreeSoftware.
HA! Ubuntu used pulseaudio… which causes most of these problems. And it is soo integrated into everything if you remove it nothing will work quite right.
By the time you “fix” pulseaudio on Ubuntu you may as well install Debian or Sidux depending on which way you lean.
“- Translations are horrible, only English language is usable ”
that one would hold true for every operating system.
well atleast for swedish.
windows and osx and ubuntu are all horrible to run in swedish.
I just want to say one thing to the Ubuntu developers, thanks and congratulations to all the Ubuntu developers for giving Ubuntu to us (me) as a Birthday gift.
http://files.digitizor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Selection_013…
You’re right. I would ask for a refund, if I were you.
While you were busy being snarky, Apple put in the hard work to make a pixel-perfect product. The “You Can’t Innovate Like Apple” article linked in the sidebar was very informative, and I’ve been keeping it in mind as I go over 10.10. See http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/you_can…
*fap fap fap fap*
There are two extra pixels on the left side! That’s so important! The applet is nearly unusable!
Go back entering your wifi code in your appleTV (*left, left, left, down, click, right, up, up, up, click, right, down down…*, braindead.
Really, there’s no need to be so reactionary. I never said anything about it being unusable; it’s perfectly usable, but the design is simply inferior. If the difference between elegance and looking off lies in a few pixels, then yes, a few pixels matter. If you’re seriously equating good design with usability, then…well, I guess you’re perfectly happy with Ubuntu’s poorly thought-out visual design!
I listed 24 reasons why the menu is off below, take a look.
Edit: I’ve never used Apple TV, but if it’s really how you describe, then that would explain its bad market performance. I don’t actually own any Apple products, but my point was more about how methodical they are in their design. I don’t see the same kind of sustained effort come through in Ubuntu.
Edited 2010-10-10 21:09 UTC
Apparently, “reactionary” “snark” and “stay on topic” do not mean what you think they do…
You wouldn’t say that the first poster was being snide and that the second person was trying to defend Ubuntu against the suggestion that it should change?
I think you’ll find that Apple overlook the big things when working on the little things.
AppleTV’s aren’t that good, and the rest of their products have major usability issues (in fact, the first AppleTV’s shipped with broken Wifi, which made them VERY painful at first).
One basic example is that iPhoto packs all of it’s images into a weird directory structure, so when people (such as my dad) try to find them using normal filesystem tools, they find a directory full of random files. But yeah, I’m sure it’s GREAT that it can be treated as a single file (because we need to move it around so often). And whilst people bring up how Apple are amazing because their sleep lights pulse like the human heart rate (oh, detailed), they then went and omitted a sleep light from their first Aluminium iMac’s (so there was NO feedback as to what state they were in).
Apple isn’t a good example of usability. Trust me!
Edited 2010-10-11 02:52 UTC
While you were pretending to be a design expert people got on with their life and got things done with Ubuntu.
Before people downvote like roving idiots, they need to actually read the entire post–yes, I’m sorry to inform you that this includes links in the post. (Ugh…reading! How laborious!)
“Pixel-perfect” here refers to Apple’s design process, not to their end result. I don’t even own any Apple products, and I don’t really care for them at all. If you read the article, however, you’ll see that they have a design method called “pixel-perfect” where final mockups are determined down to the pixel and after they’re approved no one, neither engineers nor designers, deviate from the mockup by even one pixel. I admire that thoroughness and consistency, and I think that Ubuntu can use more of that.
Sure… whatever man…
Tell me the REASON why the design fails and then I will treat you seriously.
Exactly. Other than the terrible taste in music (I kid, I kid!) I didn’t see anything wrong with that screengrab.
With one click you have access to mute, volume, album art, track info, skip back/forward/pause and sound preferences, all in a neat little popout. I like it.
Edit: I think I see what he’s getting at: The popout hovers about a pixel or two over the edge of the taskbar. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for something “wrong”. Personally I don’t see where it’s a big deal; in fact it kinda fits the theme to me. To each his own.
Edited 2010-10-10 20:21 UTC
I read the “You Can’t Innovate Like Apple” article linked on the sidebar (http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/you_can…) and I’ve been keeping Apple’s pixel-perfect design method in mind as I’ve been going over 10.10.
Bad visual design is like bad writing. You can point out the flaws, but that doesn’t get at the whole picture. To extend the writing metaphor, every element should be thought about very carefully a la Chekhov’s gun, and it’s clear that the new volume control applet’s elements need more work:
1. What is that arrow bullet on the left next to the Rhythmbox info? Is it a control? If so, why is it flush with the edge of the menu (Fitt’s law)? Why would we even need a control there to hide it?
2. Why is there a musical notation icon next to the Rhythmbox title? Isn’t it already clear that it controls music?
3. Why is Rhythmbox even mentioned by name at all? How is that important? If you’re going to be locking in the applet with a particular music player anyhow, what’s the point of repeating its name?
4. This tiny applet is designed around no fewer than six columns, five of them left-justified and one center-justified. Very jarring.
5. The left edge of the menu is not aligned with with the left edge of the speaker button on the toolbar.
6. The speaker button is clearly meant to merge seamlessly into the volume control menu, as if it turned into a tab on a folder, yet the top edge of the menu continues and separates it from the toolbar button.
7. Why is there a drop shadow from the top edge onto the toolbar? So the menu is higher than the toolbar which is already floating off the desktop? Why are we introducing three z levels, does it serve a purpose?
8. The spacing between the volume widget in the menu and its flanking speaker icons is imbalanced.
9. The left edge of the left speaker icon is not aligned with the left edge of the “Mute” text.
10. The contrast between the right corner of the horizontal bar in the volume widget and the menu is very faint and makes it unclear where the bar actually ends.
11. The silly musical notation icon isn’t even done properly. First, the stems should be aligned with the right of the dots. Second, the bar’s shading is jagged and pixelated, which is OK but contrasts strangely with the dots’ fuzzy shading around the edges. The proportions between the bars, stems, and dots aren’t right, either, and the dots should be much rounder.
12. The gradient of the Rhythmbox controls has nothing to do with any of the other system gradients and the light source is coming straight from overhead.
13. What vertical justification were they thinking of when they aligned the album text? Is it justified relative to the album cover picture? Is it justified at all?
14. The album art and the Rhythmbox controls are both bounded by two separate boxes that are a different shade of grey from the rest of the menu.
15. Why is the “Sound Preferences…” text not aligned centrally between the spacer above it and the bottom edge of the menu?
16. The spacing between the “Mute” text and the top of the menu as well as the elements below it has nothing to do with the spacing between the other subtitles and the elements above and below it.
17. For that matter, why does the text read “Mute”? Is the sole purpose of that widget to mute the volume? Why is there text at all? Isn’t the purpose obvious?
18. Why is there a “Sound Preferences…” option? Isn’t this accessible from the options menu? How many times while changing the volume or controlling Rhythmbox through the toolbar applet have you wanted to access Sound Preferences?
19. The spacing between the rows in the Rhythmbox section is off and looks completely arbitrary.
20. Edge shading issues with the volume control slider and the speaker icons similar to what I wrote about regarding the musical notation icon.
21. What’s up with the track forward/backward buttons? Very weird positioning of the triangles, they look too crunched together. Why are the ends of the pause button’s bars rounded off but those of the forward/backward buttons not?
22. Total imbalance of whitespace between left and right.
23. The eye is being led in contradictory directions. First, the overall elements are massed in a trapezoid that leads from upper right to lower left and from upper left to lower left (unnecessarily broken by the musical notation icon and the arrow bullet). The menu’s location in the upper right of the screen reinforces this flow. But then, the Rhythmbox section goes from upper left to lower middle with massive whitespace on the right.
24. I haven’t even said anything about how crowded the toolbar looks when with the menu open.
Edit: The point here isn’t that the menu is in bad taste. I’ve tried to select design decisions (or accidents) where the purpose isn’t obvious. That’s really what brings about bad design, when every single element’s role isn’t thought about.
Edited 2010-10-10 21:16 UTC
With that kind of attention to detail, you should work in forensic science. I’ve never known anyone to be so absolutely anal about something as insignificant as a few pixels in a software widget. I can imagine a rant from you about Windows HIG violations; we would need a new comment system with room for many more characters per post.
I’m not making fun of you by the way, it’s just an observation. What looks fine to some may be jarring to others, and I agree with you in general about the aesthetically pleasing interface in OS X.
In all seriousness, perhaps you should forward your findings to the UI folks at Ubuntu? It couldn’t hurt, and maybe they can improve the UI even more for the next release.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback =). I was just thinking about sending my list along to Ubuntu, as well, though I wonder how much they care for outside design criticisms considering the button alignment debacle (not the end product, rather the way they handled it). I did a quick Google search and all I’ve found is a forum. I guess this would be a bug report on Launchpad?
The problem is that what appears to be one small issue here or one small issue there adds up to subtly distort the overall effect; in plainspeak, the damn thing just looks “off”. This has nothing to do with taste, and personally I think that the menu is tasteful despite being poorly designed. (I also think that the menu is usable, with perhaps the exception of the weird arrow bullet, if indeed that’s meant to be a control.)
What I’m trying to get at here is that the designers clearly didn’t think about the purpose of each aspect of each element. There’s empirical evidence for this. Note how the spacings between the last two subtitles and the spacers above them are equal but are unequal to the spacing between “Mute” and the top edge of the menu. It’s pretty obvious that’s because the spacing of the subtitles is completely determined by the default spacing on both sides of the GTK spacer widget; similarly, the space between the top edge of “Mute” and the top edge of the menu is equal to the space between the bottom edge of “Sound Preferences…” and the bottom edge of the menu. That’s probably just the default window manager/GTK behavior. The point is that no active decision was made about the spacing, or (weirdly) they decided that the default widget spacings were ideal. The first possibility (which is the probable one) betrays a lack of thought; the second betrays a lack of good judgement.
Most of the flaws seem to be because they didn’t think about the details. There are others, though, that were active decisions but bad ones, again not because of taste but because they didn’t think carefully enough about the element’s purpose. Why is a volume control named “Mute”? Why does it even have a title at all? Why is there a musical notation icon? Etc.
Point by point, here we go…
2 & 3: Applets can be implemented for many apps, that’s why it is important to put the logo and/or name. Doing otherwise would be a big assumption that the user will never use any other music player, or any other software outputting sound.
4: “Columns”, you mean lines? All the text is left-justified, the volume meter fills the whole space, and the controls are center-justified; how is that incoherent? Text is read from left to right, control buttons are symetrical.
9: That is no spacing: it is the void left by the missing “sound arcs”. The speaker icon on the left and the one on the right have the same dimensions. It may seem uneven, but I am not sure: the void highlights the absence of sound.
10: …Badly explained, I can’t see it.
12: …Like the gradient of the taskbar? So no, it is aligned with the gradients of other UI elements: buttons, bars, etc. Plus, a light source from the side would be ugly. We are not talking about round dock icons.
13: Yes it is. Zoom in down to the pixels. It is just that the “S” and “T” have differents weights for the eye. This is the kind of optical illusion that a professional typographer may correct on paper prints, but asking to do the same in an automated way would be a job for Heracles (or Sysiphus).
14: …What? Are you talking about the spacers? Because I can’t see the “different sade of grey”, or any box.
17: Quick access to a useful feature? One click (okay, two clicks) toggle between “no sound” and “back to the sound level it was before”? No? Really? Never used it anywhere? Even on an Apple product? Never found it useful?
18: If I rephrase it “advanced settings” or “sound mixer”, do you see the point?
20: the slider looks fine, and the sound icons may look slightly blurred because it is a screenshot hosted on a website. Have you never seen JPG compression effects on crispness?
21: …The complaint about the triangles is so ridiculous I am at loss for words.
22: Just play songs with long names from albums with long names by bands with long names.
23: …Now you’re just making stuff up.
24: Utterly unbearable.
So, over 24 items, I left 9 of them (1,5,6,7,8,11,15,16,19) for they are valid points. The vertical alignment issue, common to all GTK software, especially (they know about it, and never fixed it; that’s why I don’t like GTK). Most of them are just repeats of the others, though.
The 15 other bullet points are just dishonest, looking only at the bad side of design compromises that had to be made, or plain dumb.
Edited 2010-10-10 22:35 UTC
Man, people really need to chill out on this site. I mean the interwebs are rude, but damn.
2 & 3: I’m not aware of any API for adding subapplets to the volume menu. If there is, that makes sense…sort of. For there to be any conflict, there would have to be a separate subapplet for a different music player. Why not make it so that the title only appears when two different players are open at the same time?
4: By columns, I mean that the applet is designed with the elements lined up into six different logical columns. Columns are a layout technique rather than an element. When there are too many of them they tend to conflict and look jarring to the eye.
8 (you addressed this as 9): I think that the lack of sound “waves” coming from the speaker is enough to imply lower volume since the other speaker has sound waves. But my point wasn’t that there’s too much space between the speaker and the bar, it’s that the spacing is imbalanced with the other side. Adding some breathing room between the bar and the right speaker would fix it while keeping the same rationale (if indeed that was the rationale) intact.
10: The left end of the volume bar looks like it fades into the background and needs a little more contrast.
12: Point taken about the light source, I agree that would look weird. But the gradients are out of whack in general. The gradient for the playback controls is quite different from the toolbar, which is quite different from the volume control slider, which is quite different from the drop shadow. They don’t have to all be the same (the gradients help differentiate controls), but my question is why are they so distinct? What purpose does that serve? Seems like they could’ve made it subtler if their reason was to distinguish the controls.
13: Sorry, I think perhaps you misunderstood my point here. I’m not saying that the individual lines of text are misaligned, I mean that the entire block of the song description isn’t vertically aligned.
14: Look carefully at the pixels next to the rounded corners of the album cover and the pixels next to the playback control’s edges. The best way to see it is if you have a laptop to tilt your screen back and look at the menu from an angle. Use the eye dropper tool in Gimp if you still can’t see it, compare the color value to the grey in, for example, the upper left corner of the menu.
17: I didn’t realize that’s supposed to be a button. If it is, they need to make it clear that it is a button, because right now it looks like another subtitle. It could easily mislead people into thinking that the menu doesn’t have a mute button. P.S., I don’t own anything by Apple, I just admire how methodical their design method is, which is why I linked to that article near the top of the thread.
18: Yeah, actually that would be really useful. “Sound Preferences…” is a lot less direct than “Volume Settings…” or “Sound Mixer…”
20: Is it actually because of compression (it’s PNG, btw)? Usually image compression results in artifacts, not smooth edges. My complaint isn’t about the blurring, which looks good in itself, my complaint is that it contrasts sharply with the straightness of other parts of the element. Compare the stem and the dot of the musical notation.
21: I didn’t think it was “ridiculous”. I’ve never seen track forward/backward buttons with triangles that were so closely put together. A little bit of breathing room would be welcome.
22: No need to be facetious. A proper design should account for short song names, and besides, even with longer names the whitespace would still look imbalanced.
23: Sounds like you’ve never had to put dinner on the table with layout. Visual flow is a very important part of any design.
24: Why should we settle for “bearable”? I want Ubuntu to look excellent.
Blaming GTK is not an excuse. I personally don’t know what compromises had to be made, but it sounds like you do. What were they? Even assuming that these flaws were the result of compromises as opposed to oversights, why shouldn’t we be free to point them out? And what do you mean by only looking at the “bad side” of these compromises? What is the “good side” of a weird looking musical notation icon? Or improper spacing?
Edited 2010-10-10 23:11 UTC
The badly drawn note or vertical spacing irregularities are valid points, I conceded that; don’t mix them back with less valid points. The variability in songs names will always leave the overall design unbalanced. Like the “S” and “T” unalignement illusion (which would require a sub-pixel shift), it can’t be solved. The Apple way would certainly have been… not to do the applet. Apple isn’t such a genius at design: they usually remove stuff they can’t manage, even if they are useful. You may call that genius (and yes, sometimes cleaning up an interface requires a great talent), but they push it to the point it is just a cheap way to avoid difficult design decisions. For example, now that iOS is adding back the complicated useful stuff such as copy/paste and multitasking, it is getting worse and worse: clutter, complexity, low discoverability, performance hit… (other, worse, example: iTunes). When you eliminate features, you better be sure you will never have to put them back, because afterthough integration can be as ugly as footprints in a zen rock garden. That is also why linux distribution design will never be as polished as Apple’s, the present poster boy of design (valid till the trend fades off, like it did with Ikea). The applet is an afterthough; wouldn’t it look fine all by itself, as a desktop widget? Sure it is not albsolutely properly aligned, but it has a logical layout, with big buttons popping out (even if this is at the cost of using a different, stronger gradient).
Thanks for correcting me, the screenshot is indeed in png; but, to go back to my point, going from a pixel-perfect render to a file in a lossy format such as JPG or PNG smoothens sharp edges, because those formats were made with photographs in mind (and because edge detection is/was computationaly heavy), even at levels of quality where there is no artifact. That is one of the reasons icons often have their own file format.
I brought up spacing and the music note icon again specifically because you did accept those points, and I was trying to address a different point that you made about compromises. You wrote that I was only looking at the “bad side” of compromises. I’m asking you 1) what those compromises were, and 2) what is the “good side” of those compromises? As far as I can tell, there aren’t any compromises in the volume control’s design, just oversights.
As to the “S” and “T” alignment thing, I still don’t think you understand what I was originally trying to say, or you understand but you somehow think that I’m disagreeing with you. You were the one who originally brought up the “S” and “T” alignment issue, and I agree completely that it would be extremely difficult to fix. Rather, what I was criticizing was that the three lines together taken as a block are not aligned properly. I’m looking at the block of text as a whole that starts from the top edge of the line “Speak Slow” and ends with the bottom edge of the line “So Jealous”. That block of text should come down a little to be center justified relative to the album art. Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood your point.
I’m not trying to defend Apple and I haven’t drawn any comparisons to their products at all; you’re the one who drew their design into this. As I said before, I don’t own any Apple products, and furthermore I don’t really have an opinion on Apple’s design other than that it’s slick. Maybe people are being thrown off because I wrote that their design is “pixel-perfect”. I urge you to actually read the article in the link, I’m using “pixel-perfect” to refer to their design process. It refers to the way that they agree on final mockups down to the pixel and don’t deviate from that final mockup once approved, not even by one pixel. I admire that method, and I think that it generally leads to results that look better than Ubuntu 10.10’s volume control menu. Not that Apple’s perfect in any way, shape, or form. So you raise good points about how Apple’s design is a cop out, but I’m not trying to say anything to the contrary.
What I am saying is that, cop out or not, Ubuntu’s volume control menu has a lot of issues with it. What iOS looks like has got no bearing on that.
But the applet shouldn’t be an afterthought! I’m not saying that the applet is illogical, non-functional, or tasteless. I’m saying that it looks off, that it’s poorly designed, and I’m pointing out specific reasons why. One can apologize for why the Linux desktop doesn’t look polished, but at the end of the day it simply isn’t up to snuff. Why should we settle for less? Why should Linux’s appearance “never be as polished as Apple’s”?
Allow me to preempt a possible reply, that “it’s a matter of limited resources”. People who do layout have a very specific skill set that doesn’t necessarily overlap with the people who do artwork/other design work for the desktop, and certainly we’re not talking about taking kernel developers or other coders away from more pressing tasks. Does Ubuntu actually have anyone who does professional layout working on any part of the distribution at all? Given the rather modest list of changes they made for 10.10, the least they could have done is find one person for a day or two to make sure that one of those changes, the volume control menu, didn’t look like crap.
The real problem is that Ubuntu’s design process lacks any transparency whatsoever. Consider the window control debacle earlier this year and how Shuttleworth came out and outright said that they were ignoring the community on the decision. After I wrote up my list, on Morgan’s advice, I tried to find a place to send my observations. Are people aware that they don’t have a mailing list for design issues? I wasn’t. They do have one for artwork, but a cursory look over the archives didn’t bring up anything significant about UI. Fedora has one that covers UI design and artwork (not to be interpreted as a defense of Fedora’s design). Am I supposed to file it as a bug? Who actually coded that applet and did they follow a UI spec?
In case posterity is reading this thread, the Ubuntu art mailing list pointed me to the Ayatana project, which is apparently in charge of design and does have their own mailing list. Not obvious at all.
“going from a pixel-perfect render to a file in a lossy format such as JPG or PNG”
PNG isn’t lossy. It is pixel-perfect.
Not true at all png can be lossy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression
but it can be used as lossless to.
Well, citing “your” sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics
Portable Network Graphics (PNG, pronounced /ˈpɪŋ/[1] ping) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression.
That’s the main usage for PNG.
If you had read the source you yourself linked you would have noticed that lossy PNG is a one-man research project. The word “research” reads right there inside brackets. It is not in any way part of the standard nor is it supported anywhere. A standard PNG file is always lossless and pixel-perfect.
And here you have shown that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. This sort of misalignment is done very often (also and especially by Apple, who do indeed have very good designers) to make an object look more “real” or “3D” (plastisch in German). This is done purposefully and it looks better that way. That you did not know this already, pretty much makes you unqualified to talk about visual design with any authority.
Ubuntu 10.10 also introduces the Unity UI for netbooks, which is quite significant. The replacement of F-Spot, Shotwell, is really nice too (F-Spot was a bloated monster IMO). A lot of polish has gone into this release, which I think is also really nice.
Where are the screenshots!
Haha, nah please allow my silliness.
I wish I could go back to Linux, but my laptop has issues. I have it plugged into a big LCD tv by HDMI, now previous versions of Ubuntu and Fedora both have failed to send sound along the HDMI cable – minor issue since I use external speakers anyway, I just like to control the volume with my remote. Second issue, and this is likely more an ATI issue, thanks to my crappy integrated video chip, if I shut down my laptop with the TV plugged in, and then go to start it without the TV (so if I should, heaven forbid, leave the house), X won’t start at all, I’m left without a GUI. I can get the multimonitor set up working as expected except for this one crippling oversight. Fixt THAT and I’ll be happy to go back. If anyone with a similar setup can tell me if it’s working correctly in the current version, that’d be awesome.
I did the upgrade form 10.04 to 10.10 and it went fine, all is working post upgrade. From previous times when this was done not always so good but this one went without a hitch.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t understand how a major release can’t have the bug fix incorporated to allow the bootloader to work correctly when using a USB/SD boot disk… (there was a bug filed for this in 10.10 RC).
It hangs on Syslinux using Ubuntu’s own USB disk creator, and any other USB disk creator.
Ubuntu’s success has relied almost entirely on 2 things:
1) APT, and the dislike for RPM
2) Making unlicensed codecs easy to install (something which Fedora dares not do). In fact, according to popcon, 70-100% of users have the codecs installed, and none are probably licensed to use all of them. It could be argued by patent owners that they are unfairly benefiting by not legally licensing things as their success mainly depends on their ease of installation. There is strangely, no EASY way to legally use the codecs though.
Personally, I feel Ubuntu is bad for Linux:
1) They totally messed up Pulseaudio (they didn’t do ANY research clearly), and that left users with a mindset Pulseaudio was junk.
2) They are working on gimmicky stuff like faster booting, whilst their hibernation is MUCH more broken than other distro’s.
3) I’m suspicious how secure Ubuntu client REALLY is. 2 years ago, fork bombs worked fine in Bash.
4) Even the Ubuntu Music is simply rebranded 7Digital. The problem is, 7Digital uses Mp3’s, and Ubuntu provides no one-click way to license Mp3 support. Rather than do things properly, they clearly rushed.
5) I’ve seen some jokingly bad bugs which hang around AGES.
Anyway, good luck with 10.10, but I refuse to use a distro which seems to contradicts itself and believes that acting innocent will be enough to allow them to escape legal issues. Frankly, Fedora might not have the gimmicks, but I changed recently, and it is a LOT more usable. Furthermore, they don’t take legal risks and work towards fixing the foundation of Linux, rather than simply replacing a few roofing tiles.
Edited 2010-10-11 02:18 UTC
Server upgrade went without issues using do-release-upgrade. One laptop was already running the beta, so it’s now on release as well, no problems. The other laptops are not in a hurry, but I might try a fresh install on one.
I have made a clean install and had to do a couple of fixes concerning the “text mode” splash screen when using fglrx. Apart from that, some desktop bugs have been ironed out.
This release is mainly a quiet evolution of Lucid Lynx. Not revolution like their first thought when pushing GNOME 3 for this release. And by that, this release might be the LAST stable release to be followed by a couple of uncertain mess coming up when GNOME 3 ships with it.
One good point is that finally Flash Player is usable in 64-bit native mode. I think a definitive move to 64 bit is possible now, when it comes to our dependency on Adobe’s hellish daily bread. Only issue is that the overall system memory footprint is much larger on 64 bit systems.
Edited 2010-10-11 03:30 UTC
Hibernation is still ***ked.
I prefer GNOME over KDE, and day of the week. KDE just looks so childish to me, for some reason.
Hmmm…
I really hope you are not basing your experience on Kubuntu!
Kubuntu is hands down the most buggy implementation of KDE4 of all distro’s I am aware of. Please use PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora or anything else in stead of Kubuntu and you will see what I mean.
Maybe they improved things with Kubuntu 10.10, but I don’t hold my breath…
Anyway – using KDE or Gnome is just a case of personal preference. For me KDE4 is far better than Gnome, because I really love to have control over every aspect of my desktop. Gnome gives me the feeling I am treated like a child – not capable to make decisions. But -as I said- that’s just a personal feeling…
In my experience Kubuntu 10.10 wipes the floor with OpenSUSE 11.3 in performance, stabilty and (most importantly for me) the amount of software available in the repositories. (No, Packman + OBS just doesn’t compare to Universe + Multiverse + Launchpad PPA’s it I’m afraid!)
There is less fannying around involved as well. Font rendering etc…
Well – I think we have different experiences then. As far as I know (and there is nothing that points otherwise) Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with KDE4 dumped on top of it. There is no attempt to integrate Gnome and KDE applications (Like Fedora, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS have done very well). IF you want to use a ‘buntu with KDE I would like to advise using Mint..
And response time? Are you sure you are not comparing the two systems with different drivers? You know -for instance- that openSUSE (and several other distro’s like Fedora) use the nouveau drivers as replacement for the closed source Nvidia drivers? This gives a big performance loss in my opinion. I always remove the nouveau drivers and install the Nvidia drivers, because I like to play a game now and then (X3-Reunion, Doom3, Quake4, Prey etc.) and the Nvidia drivers have excellent 3d-acceleration.
And software repositories. Well – I will agreed that the standard repositories for openSUSE are a bit limited, but there are a lot of 3th-party repo’s you can add. And fedora has a huge repository too. Anyway – I don’t think this is very critical, because all disto’s supply enough software for my purposes.
Anyway – my experiences with Kubuntu are not that good. As an example – the last version has a network applet that not even let you configure your network card – something all other distro’s seems to get right. As sayd – that’s just an example.. there are lots of annoying little things that give the impression there is still a lot of work to do, and that is not very acceptable in a (presumably) finished product.
But – I will give Kubuntu 10.10 a run. It is possible I will be nicely surprised (but -as I said earlier on- I won’t hold my breath).
I was very pleasantly surprised.
it’s amazing!
I upgraded from 9.10 to 10.10 on my laptop yesterday, and from Lubuntu 10.04 to the 10.10 beta 2 last week.
I honestly don’t notice any major changes since 10.04 (I had been using Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop, then switched to LXDE).
The GNOME Ubuntu on my laptop features a new font among other things, but there is nothing new that is too exciting.
I would have liked to have seen LibreOffice, if not included by default included in the repositories, but I suppose the announcement of the project was too close to the deadline.
All in all its a stable release, it looks nice and performs quite well on my hardware. Lubuntu does the same on my old desktop box.
I’ve heard many people are disagreeing with the regular 6-month release cycle, but I have to say the release cycle is one of the reasons I use Ubuntu.
A couple months ago I installed Debian via net-install on a very old Pentium III. After using it for about a week I noticed how outdated the software was, and it bothered me, as I’m a big advocate of the latest and greatest software.
I also had several crash issues with my Intel Integrated graphics card (i8xx series) which made Ubuntu and Lubuntu 10.04 crash at times. I was forced to use small workarounds that I had to re-apply at every kernel update and it was irritating me.
If not for the 6-month cycle I would have to wait even longer for my graphics issue to be fixed and would probably switch to another OS in search of stability. My graphics card works beautifully on 10.10 .
Many people who do not have stability issues that don’t have a permanent fix yet take the cycle for granted.
I’ve experimented all the problems thom have had with Kwin, with different hardware, different vid. cards, etc. I think is a very bad bug that should be fixed because is so old, annoying and showstopper.
Now by the other hand, Ubuntu 10.10 is awesome, good release and the best Linux desktop out there.
If he’s talking about KWin and its native in-built composition effects and stuff, then he’s probably right. It’s slow as a fat dog, broken and stupid, even with your latest greatest proprietary graphic driver working. It’s a plain mess.
I would advise him to replace KWin with Compiz. Of course, all of this has to be manually set up, and it can be annoying as hell. Last time I tried KDE it was demanding more RAM than GNOME, so there is this as well.
Since this is not machine related as he speaks, I can only think this is what he is talking about…
Edited 2010-10-11 15:47 UTC
Which effects? Which driver? Which version of Xorg? Which kernel version? Which hardware?
I also have had problems like Thom described… Sorry guys… I really wanted to like KDE4 (any version) but it never worked for me…
It looks pretty decent but in many ways it just doesn’t work for me. Applications that crash (due to the desktop environments, things that run perfectly fine in any other WM), bad behavior of windows like tearing, misplacement of new windows, terrible interaction with java apps etc.
It’s kind of the reverse of 4DWM of Sgi Irix (or CDE in lesser form) to me
an interface which was not necessarily pretty or optimal. But made me get things done incredibly well..
On other Ubuntu topic, 10.10 has many nice improvements specially when installing.
Though I still do not (and probably never will) get used to the look and feel of Ubuntu.
I really do find the Ubuntu theme the most ugly piece of graphics I’ve ever seen.
Since Windows-7 microsoft finally has an OS (the first of MS in my opinion) that looks really really good out of the box. OS-X however gray apples interface is looks really really good out of the box.
Ubuntu? for me…. not so much… dare I say it’s plain ugly.
I know taste differs and I do not want to bash people but I am baffled why apparently many people think it looks fine.
I also find this strange.
It isn’t an anti-Linux outlook either, Linux Mint looks a thousand times better.
Purple and orange….just no.
Edited 2010-10-13 07:41 UTC
Well, in the brown and orange days I tended to like the look of Ubuntu. I eventually changed theme color and background to blue one day when I was bored, but most of the time it was just good enough.
Guess it’s the same problem that I have with Windows XP’s default theme : I just can’t stand it, but most people just manage to get used to it pretty quickly.
still cannot play shockwave game