I am considering going back to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from 11.04. I don’t like Unity. Lucid Lynx will be supported until April 2013 and is surely rock solid right now since it is out more than 12 months.

I use Ubuntu on a daily basis for almost 3 years now. After reading your review, I was shocked to realise that the Big Square Orange Button in Ubuntu Software Center labelled “Featured Applications” was clickable! Oh My. Now I need to explore Lucid Lynx much more. Thanks for the awesome review of my savior distro.

I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 and I do like it very much however, today I am using Fedora 13 and this system feels more solid. Every time I use Ubuntu I get the feeling (after a while) that the whole system seems to be glued together with sticky tape instead, for instance, with Fedora with “nuts and bolts”. Perhaps a misconception on my part. Fedora 13 is equally very nice and seems as already said more solid. I love to have Ubuntu as my main system but something is holding me back and somewhere in my mind I always believe that a distro based on Red Hat is much better. Am I wrong or right?

Actually adding Flash to a 64bit computer is not so easy. You have to download the Flash 64bit .so file and add it manually, creating a plugin folder, under home/.mozilla, otherwise you have problems. The Flash provided by Ubuntu is not working properly on 64bits computers.

I’ve been running wow under linux (through wine) for quite some time now. Initially some sound problems, but since 09.10 that fiddling to get it working has gone. I installed 10.04 last night, added wine, and ran the wow.exe on my windows partition and it came up immediately. If you’re primarily a linux user I would suggest you try this. Certainly for me performance is no worse, and at times would seem better. Note: You may need to add the line ‘SET gxApi “opengl”‘ to your wtf/Config.wtf file.

Regarding steam, I installed the client and used it to download and run some games (again through wine), and with no problems. I’ll admit they were some older games, I’ll try some of the newer releases and see how I get on over the weekend time permitting.

I’m a Mac user, and I wiped my notebook’s HD clean and installed 10.4 (only, no dual boot).

Personally, I don’t like the window buttons on the left. The color scheme is too “OS X.” It’s a good step in the right direction (from that horrid brown), but I want to see Ubuntu find it’s own style.

Overall, 10.4 just feels comfortable to use, I like it!

I agree this version of Ubuntu is good, I run it and like it, but this,

“Having them on the left just feels so natural once you get used to it.”
Buttons that is… yeah, and having them on the right all your computing life feels even more natural. I guess if one loses a limb, that too feels natural once one gets used to it. What kind of an argument is that? Why should anyone get used to something they don’t want?

If you’re going to dig up that controversy from its grave and defend the stupid decision, at least make a real argument in its favor.

Nice review, I’m very excited for Lucid Lynx!

OT: Steam is a horrendous beast. Even if you own original discs, it *still* needs to decrypt game files via the net. For 3rd-world connectivity this blows, hard. I can’t even play the game I paid for.

Ubuntu, please stay away from close-minded, closed-sourced, nazi-platforms like Steam! Keep our options free, freedom of choice is everything.

Pretty amazing … LL_10.04 is practically without issue. Out of the starting gate! On beefy desktop kit I’ve been using x64_LL since beta-1 and never found the 1st gotcha. I look forward to three-years of effortless bullet_proof OS performance.

Too much to ask for even one (1) native_Linux killer usrland app eh …?

Thanks for the nice review. For wallpaper cycling see here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WallpaperTray

@ Stewart:
@Clif, yes your ATI cards will work out of box.

With 3D ATI drivers?

Great upgrade Canonical! Ubuntu went from being just ugly to butt ugly. Thank goodness for sites like gnome-look.org.

Better yet, they could study a distro like PCLinuxOS 2010-Gnome to see how it is really done. http://pclinuxos.com/?page_id=184

Joost,

I wish this was easier to do like it used to be for KDE 3.5.x…

You could also use this python script to add in other images and update the xml file automagically. Of course this either needs to be run as root, or you have to change the permissions of the /usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos.

Our very own 11yr-old programmer in our LUG created this when I simply asked if it could be done. Simply put the new images into that folder and run the script… The contents of the script are between the —— .

Jeff

————————————————————
import os

dir = “/usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/”

print “”"

2009
08
04
00
00
00

“”"

files = [f for f in os.listdir(dir) if f.endswith('.jpg')]
files.append(files[0])
for i in range(len(files)-1):
cur = dir + files[i]
next = dir + files[i+1]
print “”"
1795.0
%s

5.0
%s
%s
“”" % (cur, cur, next)

print “”
———————————————————

I have to laugh at your video screen shot you chose for flash video running on Youtube. Seriously. Polar Bear eating a Seal? What a choice, and its barely even visible. LOL!!!

Ubuntu is OK but I’ve always liked Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) better, mostly due to the way they handle patented software. I haven’t tried version 10.04 yet but with previous versions of Ububtu, things like audio and video codecs had to be installed manually. The instructions for doing this, which are on Ubuntu’s help site, are difficult for most beginners to do and sometimes still don’t work. With Linux Mint, you have a choice when downloading whether you want to have these included or not. If you download the file that includes them, then all audio, video, flash, Java, etc. work without having to install anything else. This is a much better solution. Linux Mint also includes many other improvements over Ubuntu. Give it a try!

I think Ubuntu 10.04 is getting to be a sexier OS. Love the new look and feel. Still don’t care for GRUB (delayed the release because of a bug). I would like to see chameleon in 10.10 Ubuntu release and show them Mac folk an OS cam be sexy and work well too.

Ubuntu 10.04 looks terrible. If I wanted OSX I would spent the money on a Mac. I think I will either stick with Ubuntu 9.10-which has recently been giving me performance problems for an unexplained reason- or move to Debian. I especially hate my buttons on the far left.

Bob_Jones

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.

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.

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.