Loading ...
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, First Impressions
Posted by isecore on October 19th, 2007
The new Ubuntu was released yesterday. I didn’t have time to upgrade or play with it since I was working. I figured that I shouldn’t feel stressed while upgrading. So I waited until today for the upgrade.
My system originated as a Edgy Eft (6.10) system, then got upgraded to Feisty Fawn (7.04) in April, and now it got upgraded once again. I was a little nervous about upgrading an already upgraded system, but decided that I’d try that route and if it went fubar I would just do a clean install instead.
The upgrade went just fine, however. It asked me a few questions about files that I’d customized and other than taking quite a lot longer than the Edgy-Feisty upgrade everything went fine. Some funkiness during the upgrade (icons changing, colors changing) but nothing unexpected. After a reboot I started fiddling with my new Gutsy Gibbon-system.
First impressions are very positive. Somehow the usplash went missing so I had to watch the raw kernel output instead, but it’s a minor annoyance and easily fixed. No problems there. First impressions after logging in is that Gnome 2.20 is FAST. 2.18 was a huge performance-leap over 2.16 which was kinda sluggish; 2.20 flies along like a donkey on NOS compared to 2.18. Lots of tiny details have been nicely improved - new system cursors and a smoother way of changing them, plus a nice black cursor theme. I never did like white mouse-cursors so finding that was nice.
A really nice improvement is the subpixel rendering actually looks great now. Previously I never really could tell much difference with it enabled or disabled, but now it makes fonts on-screen look really good. I mean, they look Apple-good even. Mucho impressive.
I do however find some things a bit confusing. I like how all the bits relating to on-screen appearance (background wallpaper, theme, etc) have been merged into one display rather than several separate, but I find it slightly obtuse to navigate. This is very likely just me being crotchety and used to the old way, but it took me a while. Also, I don’t like the upgraded Ubuntu Studio theme. It’s just too black. I’m a big fan of the old one and shamelessly installed it to replace the default Ubuntu-theme (which was way too garish in my eyes), but since the repository for that is now part of the Ubuntu Universe it got updated in the upgrade as well. Now it’s flat black, and not as good-looking as the old one. Again, this is a very subjective opinion.
I’ve been a big fan of the Gnome Deskbar since many moons as well, and the new one acts more like the Mac application Quicksilver which is the biggest inspiration for the Gnome Deskbar. It works just fine, but I don’t like how it now detaches itself like a separate window whenever you summon it. I liked the old style better. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a setting somewhere, but I haven’t dug very deep into Gutsy yet; the upgrade finished about 20 minutes ago!
But most of my gripes right now after trying it out are related mostly to cosmetic changes. Under the hood everything seems to work fine, and on my antiquated computer this system runs really fine. I even tried out the new desktop effects and even though I’m not as fond of them as I used to be they sure provided eye-candy.
EDIT: The new desktop-search (Tracker) has yet to blow me away. I used Beagle before, but that project seems to have stagnated and Tracker is the default search in Gutsy. I’m not completely convinced of its merits yet, but on the other hand it might not have indexed even a small part of my stuff just yet.
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.
October 19th, 2007 at 17:32
I think Im going to do a clean install of the latest Ubuntu. I have a lot of crap in my current one and it´s not the kind of crap I want to save. I am really curious =)
October 19th, 2007 at 20:07
Just upgrading! Still haven’t a clue what to expect. But you have been preaching of gutsy Gibbon since the first time i layed my eyes on your blog. So I just have to give it a try. But I’ll hold you responsible if the upgrade succeed the first time. That has never happened with Windows and shall therefore never happen when upgrading an Operating System.
Best Regards
October 19th, 2007 at 21:33
installed 7.1 yesterday and immediately got problems, my GFX card dont support the “enhanced” desktop so i had to find a forum post and trying to edit xconf and installing some packet. I realy like it, but i still cant use ubuntu due to my x-fi extreme audio is not supported AT ALL by any linux distribution out there. So for me i cant even use it for “normal” desktop use. Other then that the quality of 7.1 is realy high, going to put it (or xubuntu) on their laptop that currently is running a win2k installation from mars 2001 (yes, its true and it is still 100% stable and works perfectly fine with almost-as-new performance, despite age old 256ram and Pentium M 800mhz).
I find it beeing a nice experiment to se if my mom and pop can use it daily (mail, surfing, some office). Its to slow to run XP and win2k is not realy supported any longer, and they dont play games so what have they got to loose?
Anyway, it’s nice but still need more hardware support. I’m gonna test my creative Zen vision:m tomorrow and se if it works (didn’t in 7.04 despite claims on forums, did they even try it?).
That alls
October 19th, 2007 at 21:46
Henka: My guess is that you’ve got a 8800 series Nvidia? There’s been some issues with it, but nothing major. Some systems don’t like it, and requires some tweaking to get it going. I don’t own one myself so I wouldn’t know.
(On a sidenote, I find it somewhat amusing that these things always happen to you, and rarely to anyone else I know. I also find it amusing how it always supports your “claims”. Never the less, you should be able to find a solution in the forums, I’ll bet my last buck that someone else had the same issue as you and found a solution. If not, well, then that’s your problem.)
As for your X-Fi, well… that’s really not Linux’s fault since Creative stubbornly refuses to release either specs or a proprietary driver for it. Insinuating that it’s the communitys fault that your expensive soundcard doesn’t work is just low.
Win2k is almost decent as far as long-term stability is concerned. Provided one locks it down, don’t mess too much with it and use it exclusively for less demanding tasks then it’s almost as if it was a real operating system. I guess even Microsoft manages to produce something half-decent from time to time.
And again, suggesting that the forum-users haven’t tried plugging something in is just low, even by your standards.
October 19th, 2007 at 23:49
As I was afraid of, the installation did hang during upgrade. Sigh!
But on the upside all that was needed was some gtkd to make it work again.
Still having a little issues with flash tough but it will be hammered out eventually.
Didn’t get that WOW feeling, perhaps because of previously using 7.04 Feisty. But the screen do looks somewhat nicer in regards to resolution and typefaces.
And, of course, the internal broadcom wlan just will not work for me. Irritating as hell both for me and for by eldest daughter from whom i sole the network card that works.
October 20th, 2007 at 09:32
It just hapends to me because i use “new” hardware, and no its not a nvidia, its a ATI radeon. It did install the “closed” drivers after first boot but 3d desktop would’t work so i had to install a package (that i had to find out about on a forum somewhere) and manualy edit xconf to change a 0 to a 1, things that a normal user would’t have found out unless googeling for a hour and still the advice given on the page was “try it, didnt work for me but did for person X”.
But i give ubuntu thumbs up, it realy feel fresh with nice and clean fonts and good HID performance.