Ars Technica brings us a rather lackluster review of Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 review: Missing the boat on big changes
Canonical pushed out Ubuntu 14.04 last week. This release is the first Ubuntu Long Term Support release in two years and will be supported for the next five years.
It feels like, for Canonical at least, this Long Term Support release couldn't have come at a worse time. The company is caught in a transitional phase as it moves from a desktop operating system to a platform that spans devices.
The problem for Canonical is that it's only about 90 percent of the way to a platform-spanning OS, but it just so happens that the company's schedule calls for a Long Term Support release now.
Long Term Support releases are typically more conservative and focus on stability and long-term maintenance rather than experimental or flashy new features. Things that are 90 percent done don't make it into LTS releases. And, unfortunately for Canonical, most of its foundation-shaking changes to Ubuntu are currently only about 90 percent done and thus not part of this release.
It's an unfortunate time for a release in the cycle; Do you think they should have held off and waited for xMir? Or will they finally pry Microsoft Bob away from your cold dead hands?
Related Stories
We've had the door open for a while now, and we've put up a number of articles about Operating systems but the discussion has been rather light.
Have we just gotten mellow about the options? Are you waiting for a review of Windows 8 to plaster the pages with your disgust?
Are we at a point where all of the options are no better than the others?
Where has all the passion gone?
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/01/1514223
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/28/1457224
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/06/18/0221230
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RandomSchmoe on Monday April 28 2014, @06:20PM
"90 percent of the way" there. As every developer knows it's the last 10% that's the most work.
"The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time" - Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
The Best Comments Ever Seen On Slashcode [seenonslash.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nerdfest on Monday April 28 2014, @06:33PM
Yes, and since the 10% related to Unity and Mir, two things that should arguable not have been done in the first place, it may be a very difficult 10% that really just ends up wasting a lot of time. The only people I know that are using Unity are those that have installed Ubuntu on their own and are playing with it. People I know who actually use it day to day use KDE, Gnome-shall, or Xfce. I gave it another shot as of 14.04 ... it's still far slower than all the other DEs and is just generally frustrating. Back to KDE I went. I like Gnome-Shell, but have found it and its extensions a bit ... crashy.
In general though, I find 14.04 completely stable, and in general, a bit faster than both 12.04 and 13.10. I've upgraded six machines so far and only one machine with an NVidia card has any problems during the upgrade process. A 6 year old laptop I still have around got a fresh install and it seems far faster, although part of that is probably due to the removal of a large number of old configurations, etc. It really does fly for an old TK55 processor though (again, with KDE).
(Score: 2) by quitte on Monday April 28 2014, @07:17PM
I started using gnome shell when the beta packages entered debian experimental. It hardly ever crashed on me. Maybe you should give debian or fedora a try, since you're one of the sadly few that actually like gnome3
(Score: 2) by quitte on Monday April 28 2014, @07:24PM
...and when I run into trouble more often than not it means I forgot to enable swap again or my disk is running out of space. adding this just in case either might be an explanation to problems you were having.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday April 28 2014, @07:29PM
Did you do an upgrade or complete reinstall?
Still trying to decide whether to upgrade/reinstall or jump to Arch or something else.....
Hmmm....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday April 28 2014, @07:38PM
I did 4 machines as upgrades from 13.10, and 2 from 12.04. One I did as a fresh install as it was still at 10.04. The one with problems was and upgrade from 13.10, but it was fairly easy to solve. I had the same problem when upgrading from 13.03 to 13.10, but thought it was a hardware fault. Now I know better.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 28 2014, @06:22PM
I call this a (temporary) win.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Monday April 28 2014, @06:25PM
ok, I'm really not up to speed on the interface drama; what is up with Mir?
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 28 2014, @06:39PM
Shuttleworth: I don't need you! I'll build my own windowing system. With blackjack. And hookers.
Basically that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by mmcmonster on Monday April 28 2014, @06:51PM
Sounds good to me. How can I remove the windowing system?
(Score: 3) by emg on Monday April 28 2014, @06:52PM
"How can I remove the windowing system?"
Install Mint instead?
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Monday April 28 2014, @07:20PM
Install windows 8
(Score: 1) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 28 2014, @07:23PM
Question from the lazy KDE fan bleachers - is kubuntu basically permanently side-stepping this issue, or will Mir creep in under the covers some day?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday April 28 2014, @09:12PM
I seem to recall hearing that KDE will work with Wayland (already working). I would imagine it would be portable to use Mir, but I'm not sure anyone considers it worth the effort.
(Score: 1) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:48AM
The sad thing is that Ubuntu was really on the verge of being a great desktop O/S. From roughly 6.10 through 10.10 I thought it was the best out there, at least for my purposes. There are probably a lot of reasons they went bad, in part it was the developing trend of seemingly the whole open source community being intent on continually discarding what works, what we like and what we use in pursuing the pied piper of mobile devices. Gnome had screwed up, it was probably necessary for Ubuntu to drop them, but Unity was certainly not the immediate answer. Maybe the Ubuntu phone will be a great thing if they ever succeed with it, but they lost a great chance to make a mark in desktop computing.
Or maybe they just wanted to one up Microsoft. If MS could make an unusable O/S, by god they could too!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Monday April 28 2014, @06:40PM
> ok, I'm really not up to speed on the interface drama; what is up with Mir?
Mir is a replacement for X, like Wayland. Wayland is already controversial enough on its own. Adding a 3rd, possibly redundant, display server to the mix seems like a recipe for needless waste to a lot of people.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Monday April 28 2014, @06:43PM
ah. ok. i can see the sides of that.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 28 2014, @06:55PM
Well, it's an effort to replace an old, horrible-internally, barely-working-but-established product with a new one out of whole cloth. So I'm not really ready to hop on that bandwagon until they actually have Mir up to a level where they can replace X11 with it entirely and have it be at least marginally better.
It turns out Unity 8 isn't coming, but the LTS is just staying on Unity 7, which kind of blows that point out of the water, unfortunately, as I didn't think that out thoroughly. I'll be crossing my fingers that Mint has an XFCE version this time around, I think. Compiz is alleged to be compatible with XFCE but didn't cooperate with me for 13.04, which would be my solution (unless Emerald works with anything else...?) to the throw-the-computer-out-the-window aggravation of having a 1-pixel-wide fucking sweet spot for resizing windows. I live in hope that this time around they'll play nice...maybe I'll do a distupgrade and see if it works before switching to Mint :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday April 28 2014, @07:25PM
I'm pretty sure I've had compiz working in Ubuntu/Xfce before. It shouldn't be a problem.
(Score: 1) by tangomargarine on Monday April 28 2014, @08:25PM
"It shouldn't be a problem."
4 little words, so much screaming in Linux-land.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday April 29 2014, @02:29AM
Those off by one errors can be killer :)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:14PM
I was counting zero-based ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 28 2014, @06:25PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by linsane on Monday April 28 2014, @07:41PM
Spot on. Also, with all the various *buntu flavours too, ideal point for an uncontroversial XP replacement.
L
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Adrian Harvey on Monday April 28 2014, @09:12PM
Exactly. In fact 90% done is the perfect time to not have them in a LTS release, because it implies they will be ready for the first normal/testing type release, where they can be bedded in and honed, (or backed out and buried) well before the next LTS. Ubuntu's cycle means the next normal release is only 6 months away and what could be a better place for a "foundation-shaking change" than that.
(Score: 1) by pogostix on Tuesday April 29 2014, @01:33AM
"Me neither"
I'm no grammar nazi but..... your sig :P
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 29 2014, @02:23AM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 28 2014, @06:56PM
Read the battery life section and a section toward the end for a good laugh:
"I typically use only a handful of apps, primarily a Web browser—Chromium with anywhere from 20 to 80 tabs—and a Terminal session with several Tmux sessions running inside it, which I attach and detach depending on what I'm doing (for development and writing I run zsh, python, ruby, vim, mutt, cmus)"
Sounds like me, but instead of wasting time and memory with an ultra top heavy GUI, I just run xmonad.
All I need is chromium, konsole, and occasionally Steam. Everything else is ugly tailfeathers getting in the way. Computers are now a technology designed to get in the way, slow stuff down, lower productivity; although in a stylish manner.
Then much later we get
"Ubuntu is one of the most polished desktops around, certainly the most polished in the Linux world"
This is a problem I often see in tech journalism. Everybody's an expert on what the end user needs which is totally different than what any normal human being ever actually uses. I know what the best dogfood in the world is, although I'd never eat my own dogfood of course, and most of our customers are actually cat owners not dog owners, and it turns out most of the dogs hate the food anyway. But other than that, yeah man, awesome dog food!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday April 28 2014, @07:34PM
All I need is chromium, konsole, and occasionally Steam.
"Well I'm gonna go then. And I don't need any of this. I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this.
[picks up an ashtray]
And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.
[walking outside]
And I don't need one other thing, except my dog.
[dog growls]
I don't need my dog."
Love that movie! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Horse With Stripes on Monday April 28 2014, @09:20PM
I read the ARS review, and it didn't mention anything about what changed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server. Didn't mention the server at all.
To me the important part of LTS is that I can rely on it for five years, which is a sufficient amount of time between server upgrades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:10AM
Well, at least someone at Canonical has their head screwed on right then.