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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: 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.