Ask HN: Thoughts on Ubuntu 10.10? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts on Ubuntu 10.10?

19 pointsbendmorris8 comments

Out of curiosity, I upgraded both my laptop (which uses the desktop version) and netbook (netbook edition) to Maverick this week.

Desktop: Not much is noticeably different. I do like the new Ubuntu font, though. Pretty nice looking.

Netbook: I absolutely hate the new interface. Unity is slow, buggy, and limits horizontal screen space, which is a deal breaker - I need every one of my 1024 pixels. No auto-hide and no customization either. After trying it out for about an hour I gave up and reinstalled 10.04. I really wanted to like this one, too.

What do you think?

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I've never used the default panel configuration.

I use a single, skinny, left-aligned panel. I replace the default icon+text 3 section menu with the single icon GNOME menu.

I replace the window list with Talika. It makes it similar to windows7. The only other thing in my panel is wireless, recycling, time.

I use no shortcuts or pinned items. Instead I access everything using Gnome-DO.

edit: on topic of actual changes I noticed\like I think the show desktop key might have been changed from CTRL+ALT+D to CMD+D

Seconded re: talika. It's only a five second install, and having large icons and not huge amounts of text makes it easier to find and switch to apps using the mouse.

Is there a way to force Talika to display icons for windows open in secondary monitors?

(Maybe a bit off topic.)

I tried to install Ubuntu10.10 yesterday. Burned the image on a CD, and tried to put it on my unix test box. At the end the install quits on me with some cryptic cannot mount foobar drive. Browsing the web for help it turns out either I should have burned a DvD instead of a CD, or I have not enough RAM for the installation. This machine was running XP for Christ's sake. :)

My point is, I'm still waiting for a Linux distro that "just works/installs". Ubuntu has some momentum at the moment, so I thought maybe this is it. But again I ended up in a 15-open-tabs browser-session on a "PC" to crawl through message boards to see what is going wrong.

I'll give it another try someday, but not anytime soon. For now, I'll stick to my freeBSD box.

I decided to try out 10.10. I used 10.04 this summer at my internship (worked flawlessly), but had never used it on this machine before. The install took nearly an hour, the first time I tried to boot and several times thereafter things would hang before the boot splash, and when it did start X was performing so poorly that it was nearly unusable (terminal could not keep up with my typing, 2-3 second delay between clicking a menu and setting it, etc.). Apparently this is caused by a kernel bug with i7 processors and/or the X58 chip-set that will be resolved in coming versions, but I have no idea how they didn't catch this in beta.

I'm currently back to using Arch. I was hoping that 10.10 might offer a more "ready out of the box" experience, but I didn't find it.

I upgraded from 10.04 over the weekend. The upgrade process went smoothly, and so did the first boot up. This is the first time I've had no major problems after upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu.

I like the small changes to the UI and the improvements to wireless support. I'd always have problems with wifi connections in 10.04, which was mostly fixed by installing wicd. This is the first release for me that's just "worked". For reference, this is on a Dell Studio 14z.

Upgraded my laptop from 10.04, the upgrade was smooth, rebooted and everything works as it is. Love the new fonts which look quite good in a smaller size. No other noticeable difference

I'm happy running Hardy 8.04 with LXDE on my laptop.

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