First Look: Ubuntu ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Beta Delivers Improved UI, New Features | Hacker News Reader

First Look: Ubuntu ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Beta Delivers Improved UI, New Features

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14 pointsreazalun11 comments

I just fired up the beta on my MacBook Pro (which hasn't had an upgrade since 7.10) and... wow.

No hardware issues, everything installed itself, even my keys light up again. Multiple monitor support has gone from being a 3 hour configuration nightmare to two clicks.

Far and away the best bit is the UI polish. It seems to have everything functional I liked about clunky old KDE 3.x (window shading! focus on mouse!) plus all the good bits they could swipe from OS X and Vista.

However I wish they would enable the dark theme by default, it looks much better than the light one. None of the review screen shots do it justice.

The dark theme is nice until you open Firefox. Web pages weren't designed with dark buttons, checkboxes and text inputs in mind.

To me, the first thing they should get to look nice is firefox. Everything else is secondary.

I don't understand when people complain that "XY release sucks because they included the wrong BitTorrent client". I've read serious reviewers stating this.

They need to become discriminate about what they include in their releases, to curate their art, as Jason Fried would say.

This looks very nice. I finally installed Ubuntu Hardy on my main desktop and got dual monitors working after a lot of hassle, but now I'm excited to try this out. Going to hold off on the beta until a final release though

The first time I've ever had dual monitors working in Linux was two days ago when I installed Intrepid. It took a couple of clicks and (unfortunately) restarting X. Compiz doesn't work with Xinerama (multiple screen support) either. I don't really need the extra space, so I stick with my large monitor and turn off the laptop display.

I think it must be card dependent.

My ATI card worked with dual screens and Conpiz, and didn't need an X restart.

You're right it is. Some cards work wonderfully, the one I have has apparently "many reported problems" trying to get it to work with fglrx drivers

I stuck with Radeon for now. My only loss is that I can't get any desktop effects on because my Virtual Screen size is over 3000 in width which far exceeds my cards limitations. Would be nice if it could somehow "ignore" the second monitor (my TV) only until when it's on so I could get the effects.

I tried installing the beta... But the fglrx graphics driver for my ATI card doesn't work :(

So now I'm just downloading an ISO and trying that first.

You could probably try new radeonhd driver.

Whoa, thanks so much. Didn't know about that. I haven't tried it yet, but based on it's latest 'supported devices list' it supports my ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

I've just found there are two open source drivers for ati cards under development: xf86-video-radeonhd and xf86-video-ati. One maybe better than the other.

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