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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?
(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?"