Hands-on: Ubuntu goes social, gains Me Menu in 10.04 alpha 3 | Hacker News Reader

Hands-on: Ubuntu goes social, gains Me Menu in 10.04 alpha 3

arstechnica.com

Holy fuck I wish they would just stop dicking with the damn thing.

No, do not want more and more stuff added to this or that. I would really like it if things would Just Work on more and more hardware, especially more recent hardware.

Fix the stuff that doesn't work quite right, and leave the rest alone. Let users add the bling they want later on.

It's like they're in some battle with Microsoft to see who can add the most superficial crap that gets in the way of just doing stuff.

We should be glad that open source (Linux/Ubuntu) works when it does. Its such a curious case that its expected of Linux to support all myriad kinds of hardware systems. Its the responsibility of the hardware vendor to provide the drivers, not the hackers who labor hard to reverse engineer the specs when the vendors even refuses to publish how the hardware works. Few vendors really care about Linux. On the other hand, Windows has it really easy. Before the release of a new version, vendors work their asses off with Microsoft to ensure that before the OS reaches market, their drivers are already up to date. Apple has to care about only one piece of hardware which is manufactured by them (leaving peripherals of course). We should be just glad that it works when it does. Those who work to make it work, work hard. Disclaimer: On my Lenovo laptop, today, every single device works now on Ubuntu 9.04 from the card reader to webcam. It didn't always.

"We should be glad that open source (Linux/Ubuntu) works when it does. Its such a curious case that its expected of Linux to support all myriad kinds of hardware systems."

It really is impressive that things work as well as they do, but OTOH, if Ubuntu is really going to be "desktop ready" then it has to support modern hardware.

I attempted an install of Ubuntu 9.10 on an HP box with a Dell LCD monitor and an nVidia graphics card, and though it started out OK, the screen eventually went black. Turns out there was no workable default video driver in place to allow even crude graphics. Even the text/low-res installation options failed.

I did finally get it running (assorted usage of virtual terminals and ftp'ing of driver), but hibernation and suspend still don't work. And gnome-terminal has acquired some bug where it never warns you if you're closing multiple tabs.

Maybe this is an apples-and-oranges deal, but when I read of new gee-whiz crap like twitter integration in the task bar, while core behavior such as hibernation is still a crapshoot, and key apps are buggy, it makes me wonder where the priorities are.

Perhaps I'm just bitter about KDE3 being dropped for the saccharine mess that is KDE4. :(

Bottom line seems to be that OSS developers, by and large, hate working on the mundane stuff, and much prefer to invent Really Cool Stuff, regardless of any real need for it.

Shouldn't bitch about stuff that's free, but I'd like to think the people calling the shots care if the end results are properly usable.

The Magic 8 ball is telling me "Xmonad looking REALLY good". :)

For those of you that don't have Ubuntu natively installed on your computer (such as myself) there is a great answer to this problem: VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ . I installed it recently on my XP laptop, and now enjoy Ubuntu in what seems to be native speed. In fact, my dev environment of slime/emacs sbcl is runing radically faster than lispworks slime/emacs in xp. I have a dual screen setup, so I have Ubuntu in full screen mode (you can switch out with ctrl f) in one monitor, and xp in the other. Life is good.

I too am enjoying VirtualBox as a way of setting up discrete development environments. I've got one for PHP, one for Rails, and a general Ubuntu box for anything else I want to try out (e.g. Clojure).

I documented my personal "get Ubuntu running via VirtualBox on XP" experience here: http://www.sharingatwork.com/2009/10/get-started-building-we...

That's really nice having an image with the Rails environment installed. Maybe I should do the same for slime/emacs/sbcl? (I'm not sure what the demand would be)

I've been working (very slowly) on a VMWare VM tailored for Lisp hacking. I posted to

http://www.lispforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=588

to gauge demand. It didn't seem like there's much.

I still plan on eventually "completing" it, but at the moment I'm sick of trying to get Emacs to behave in some small ways like other editors.

That's not a bad idea. Lau from bestinclass.dk has a screencast on getting Clojure going in a Ubuntu VM here: http://www.vimeo.com/8398020

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