The open source world has been eagerly anticipating the final release of Ubuntu Linux 10.04, and now it’s finally here. Canonical has been working extremely hard and it shows in the quality of this release.
To put it bluntly, Lucid Lynx rocks!
What’s New In This Release
There’s quite a lot of new stuff and changes in this release. Here’s a list of some of what you’ll find:
F-Spot replaces the GIMP
PiTiVi video editor added
GNOME 2.30
New themes: Ambiance and Radiance
New wallpaper
Linux kernel 2.6.32
New nVidia hardware driver
Gwibber social media application
Faster boot time, with a different look and feel on the bootsplash screen
Ubuntu One adds contacts and bookmark sharing
Ubuntu One music store integrated into Rhythmbox
Ubuntu Software Center 2.0
This release marks the first time that the GIMP has not been installed by default. F-Spot Photo Manager replaces it. Some people will love this and some will hate it. The thinking at Canonical is that the GIMP was too complicated an application for most ordinary desktop users. If you’re a fan of GIMP, no need to worry though. It’s still available in the Ubuntu Software Center.
Another new addition is the PiTiVi video editor. I don’t do much in the way of video editing, but I’m very glad to see this included. It’s one of the basic kinds of application functionality that users expect to find in a desktop operating system. Will it suffice for hard-core, high-end video editing? Probably not, but it should work just fine for your average desktop user.
I’ll cover the new themes and wallpaper in the desktop section. I’ll also cover the bootsplash and time changes in that section of the review. And I’ll talk about the Ubuntu Software Center in the software section.
Social Media
Access to various social media networks is now built into the Ubuntu desktop interface via Gwibber. You can access this by clicking on the envelope in the panel at the top of your screen. Or simply click Applications then Internet then Gwibber Social Client.
Gwibber lets you have all of a number of different social networks all in one application. You can connect to Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Flicker, StatusNet, FriendFeed, Qaiku and Identi.ca from the Me Menu. You can also chat with friends on Google Talk, MSN, IRC and other networks.
It doesn’t take long at all to set up your social networking accounts and updates appear in one, unified interface. This is tremendously convenient and helps eliminate the need to run these services in different browser windows. You can also easily post updates from Gwibber.
I loved having it available on my desktop. It let me read Twitter and Facebook updates at a glance and made it quick for me to post my own updates.
The Me Menu (based on Gwibber) lets you connect to Facebook, Twitter and other social media services.
Ubuntu One: Music and More
The Ubuntu One service has been enhanced to make it easier to share files and folders. And you can now share bookmarks and contacts too. Each user gets 2GB of free storage from Ubuntu One so it’s a good deal if you want to use the cloud to store files and information.
The Ubuntu One Music Store has been integrated into Rhythmbox music player. You can buy DRM-free music tracks and store or share them on the Ubuntu One service.
To access the music store, click Applications then Sound and Video then Rhythmbox Music Player. When you first launch Rhythmbox, you’ll see a message letting you know that you need to install some MP3 plugins to listen to purchased songs. Just click the Install Plugins button and your plugins will be installed for you. You can then browse the Ubuntu One music store and begin purchasing music.
The prices in the Ubuntu One Music Store seem comparable to the ones in iTunes. Individual songs go for $.99 to $1.29 and albums seem to be about $9.99 to $16.99. I only checked a few albums though so it’s possible that pricing on them could vary more. Still, it all seems very similar to what you’d pay in iTunes or other online music store.
The Ubuntu One Music Store could still use the ability for users to post their own reviews and ratings of music though. But it is definitely off to a good start and I’m sure we’ll be seeing improvements in it as time goes by.
You can now share bookmarks and contacts via the Ubuntu One service.
The Ubuntu One Music Store is integrated into the Rhythmbox music player.
(31 votes, average: 3.45 out of 5)
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This has already been added to Ubuntu Tweak, and can also be done through gconf-editor. Also, themes are able to indicate button positions.
Surprised no one mentioned this: F-Spot doesn’t “replace” GIMP, it was always there with the default install.
Ubuntu, in an attempt to be more like Mac, has placed the close buttons on the left. Emacs, in its attempt to be the worlds most unusable text editor, places their scrollbar on the left. The only thing these have in common is their shared idiocy.
You might like this change, not many others do. I would say MOST others do not.
I, like most other people, am right handed. I keep my mouse on the right side, along with my mouse pad. It’s an unnatural, uncomfortable reach across my 16×9 screen to hit the close button, where as it is a short simple gesture to close it when the buttons are in a logical place. Even on my netbook, this reach is a pain in the ass since the mouse pointer sits to the right to move the scroll bar.
I also read left to right, like most people in the Western world. Thus, I want my content on the left, and my utlitiy on the right.
I also saw no mention of how broken many things become because the buttons are now in the wrong place, and how other themes are screwed by Ubuntu’s crude and ugly hack software hack to move the buttons where a simple gconf key was all they needed.
But hey, you paragraph about how everyone will just get used to it had a very nice Kool-Aid flavor.
For the guy who said that canonical has NOTHING (sic) to do with Gnome: Canonical is a big sponsor of Gnome. I would think too that they work together in some things and Ubuntu’s desktop is quite tweaked so they could make a move on the direction posted by the reviewer.
Thanks for this concise review. I absolutely love this new release. I am (or was) generally a Mac OSX person, recently tending back to Windows 7, but this release has certainly softened my soft spot for Ubuntu. Am busy looking at Vala as a dev language.
F-Stop maybe a lot easier to use than the GIMP, particularly for common tasks like red-eye reduction. However, when I tried to use it while correcting red-eye for our Christmas cards, I found that the red colour balance for the whole picture changed for the worse. Maybe F-Stop used poor JPEG compression default settings. GIMP, while much trickier to use for the same purpose (I had to google for a step-by-step walk-through), gave me fine control and much better results.
Love the faster boot time and next version of Gnome. Disappointed that so much effort went into the (unneccessary) integration of Social Media, Ubuntu One, and a Music Store.
You can make a slideshow but you need to have the pictures in a directory and an xml file, this is a little more inconvenient than other systems, say window 7 but a lot more customizable, you can set transition time per image and exactly what time of the day the slideshow would start.
Here is an app that generates the xml for you, it has a gui so it’s really easy to use!
https://launchpad.net/wallpaper-stacks
Does F-Spot still make copies of every single picture on your hard drive? If that’s the case, then no thanks for me! The one thing I hated about F-Spot was redundant copies of all my pictures. If it still does that, fuh-get it! I’ll stick with Picasa, thank you very much!
No gimp? That’s outrageous! gnome and gtk are entirely based on gimp. Without gimp, gtk, glib, gnome is nothing and ubuntu would be totally different. Why include a video editor but not the ubiquitous image editor, gimp? gimp was one of the first major commercial-quality app for Linux.
see this page: 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners
Graphics Application of the Year – GIMP (66.48%)
That’s right, 66.48% of Linux users polled think GIMP is the best graphics application of 2009. It’s a must-have.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/
Other winners by category (perhaps they should be included in Ubuntu base distro too?):
Desktop Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (30.13%)
Server Distribution of the Year – Debian (24.24%)
Security/Forensic/Rescue Distribution of the Year – BackTrack (43.48%)
Database of the Year – MySQL (60.81%)
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (90.76%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (65.21%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – Gnome (41.96%)
Window Manager of the Year – Compiz (23.10%)
Messaging App of the Year – Pidgin (48.74%)
Mail Client of the Year – Thunderbird (53.48%)
Virtualization Product of the Year – VirtualBox (67.43%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year – Amarok (38.81%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year – Audacity (77.26%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year – VLC (46.05%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year – FFmpeg (21.94%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year – GStreamer (32.84%)
Graphics Application of the Year – GIMP (66.48%)
Network Security Application of the Year – Nmap Security Scanner (29.85%)
Host Security Application of the Year – SELinux (39.26%)
Network Monitoring Application of the Year – Nagios (51.11%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year – Eclipse (23.28%)
Text Editor of the Year – vim (35.29%)
File Manager of the Year – Nautilus (24.92%)
Open Source Game of the Year – Battle for Wesnoth (15.45%)
Programming Language of the Year – Python (27.59%)
Backup Application of the Year – rsync (48.99%)
Open Source CMS/Blogging platform of the Year – WordPress (45.20%)
Zac, if this is your first change since 08.04 you are in for one heck of a shock.
A few things. First, a question: do you want to use OSX or do you want to use Ubuntu? Because it seems like you think everything should be the way OSX does it (I respectfully but very strongly disagree). Since they changed the button placement, it’s easy to change back with some Googling but beyond that it’d be swell to have a tool to easily switch back as I prefer the buttons on the right.
A minor correction: you can cycle wallpapers in a folder. In fact, you can make them do very nice transitions. However, this isn’t (as far as I know) easy to configure, at least there’s nothing GUI to do it. I’m not sure since what version of Gnome you were able to do this, but it’s been a little while at least.
Lastly, the only thing this took after Mac was the button placement (which I dislike). Sharing a similar base color doesn’t mean anything. Beyond color, the default wallpapers and theme isn’t even close.
In closing, I know a lot of people love their OSX (which is fine), and a lot of people like their Windows (also fine). I don’t like either, so I don’t feel like it’s a great direction to start proclaiming that Linux Desktop should be more like Operating System A or Operating System B in their default installs. Reviewing the latest Ubuntu release should be judged by itself and not constantly being compared to how OSX does things.
RavenHeart: Whether it’s Gnome/Linux/Canonical’s fault is irrelevant as far as the user is concerned. The point is the screensaver and wallpaper settings should be in the same place – that’s just common sense. The fact that they’re not is confusing to an end user regardless, and the reviewer rightly points this out. For Linux to ever stand a chance of succeeding on the desktop (and to me it still seems a LONG way off being able to do that), it’s points like this that need to be addressed regardless of any technical or historical reasons.
Wow… as soon as I began reading the article I knew you were an Apple fanboi. If you like Apple that much, use Apple computers. Linux users want Linux, not OSX. Moving the buttons to the left side of the window is a TERRIBLE “improvement” and I think there will be a lot of complaints…
At least try to be objective… I think every page had some comparison to OSX or Apple. You’re supposed to be reviewing Ubuntu, not furthering Apple’s propaganda machine.
[...] DesktopLinux: Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) The open source world has been eagerly anticipating the final release of Ubuntu Linux 10.04, and now it’s finally here. Canonical has been working extremely hard and it shows in the quality of this release. [...]