Ubuntu 10.10 - Search for the ultimate question

[Tharic-Nar]

Over the weekend, Canonical released their latest version of the Debian based Linux OS, Ubuntu 10.10 - Maverick Meerkat. It was released on 10/10/10, or October 10th, 2010. The number games didn't end there, since 101010 binary is 42 decimal... the answer to the meaning of life (Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy, go read it ). Some humorous individuals then took it upon themselves to paraphrase some hitch-hikers guide as the intro to this latest announcement. So go read it .

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-October/000139.html

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I'll probably check out 10.10 at some point. However, I've had a lot of bad luck with Ubuntu. I find Canonical pushes packages into the repositories before they're ready and in some cases when still broken.

I began experiencing extremely frequent Xorg lockups after upgrading to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Within 10 mins or so of startup, the entire GUI would lock up. I discovered I could SSH into the system (HP Pavilion dv6500 intel gma965), but after weeks of experimentation gave up trying to resolve the problem.

It turned out there was an issue with the intel xorg driver that rendered the OS practically useless to anyone using an intel graphics chipset. I turned Compiz on and off, rewrote my xorg file, recompiled the xserver-xorg-video-intel package myself, even recompiled the kernel.

The issue turned out to be beyond my experience, so I hoped for a fix. 9.04 came without a fix, and so did 9.10.

By 10.04's release, the issue seemed to have been resolved, but I had long before given up on the distro.

I'm sorry for being so negative. Ubuntu has a lot of great features, and I feel it could be a great system. But the gpu corruption is just one example of many serious issues I experienced personally.

After 9.10, I went to Gentoo, which I liked a lot, but I eventually settled on Arch Linux. I use both Windows 7 and Arch in a dual-boot configuration since I like to use Linux for development and tinkering and Windows for gaming. Basically, I switch back and forth whenever I feel like it!

 

[Rob Williams]

The author of that page is Robbie Williamson... neat.

Joe, that's strange about Ubuntu, but not much of a surprise either. Intel GPU drivers are notorious for being bad in Windows, so in Linux... forget about it. Still, I've had good success with Intel under Linux before, Ubuntu in particular, so your issue is a little different. I've even run things like Google Earth no problem on Intel GPUs under Ubuntu, so I'm not quite sure what caused you to have so many issues.

As far as I'm concerned, the only way to use Linux really is with an NVIDIA card... the support is good, and releases frequent. I've seen NVIDIA release three drivers in a single month before, so if there's a bug out there, it should get squashed fast. I wish AMD would amp up its Radeon Linux drivers :-/

I upgraded to 10.10 earlier on my notebook, but I'm not really sure what's new, so it looks the same for the most part to me. The OS fonts have been improved quite a bit though, and look far more modern. I need to look into it more, and maybe get a news post up about it. Quite a significant release in some ways.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Maybe the issue was more severe with my particular chipset.

Ubuntu certainly excels with fonts. They just look great period. Particularly on laptops, fonts can look like crud after a fresh install of some distros.

 

[Rob Williams]

It could be the particular chipset, I'm not sure. I'd be willing to blame Ubuntu more so though, because things were not quite as stable back then. I used to have bad issues with ATI cards as well using Ubuntu, but that's not really the case today. My netbook has an ATI card in it and it works great. But I started things off on that notebook with 9.0x I believe. When I used to review notebooks more regularly, I used to test out Ubuntu, and always had issues on the ATI laptops, never so much Intel.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I remember when I first started using Vista, sometimes the GUI would crash. I'm not sure if it was a driver problem, but Windows would just restart the explorer.exe process. I wonder why they couldn't just implement something like that. If all else fails, just restart the GUI, rather than leave you with a frozen image of whatever you were last doing.

 

[Rob Williams]

What you describe already exists, but it might be an option in the settings. Whenever KDE has crashed on me, it'd simply restart and within seconds I'd be at the desktop.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I had forgotten KDE does that, but I'm not sure about Gnome...