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Ubuntu 12.04 Released

Got it running on my HTPC as well. Doesn't look bad but something about Unity is bogging my lowly single-core.

Probably best to torrent the LiveCD, Canonical's servers are barely getting above 50kb/s download speeds even for updates.

EDIT: Turns out Compiz is needy of more processing power...Unity 2D works better.
 
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Installed in a VM. Can't say I'm enjoying it. I think I might look into swapping to a KDE based distro.

Chakra, or Suse. Maybe build my own Arch. Dunno but Gnome 3 and Unity aren't striking my fancy.
 
Try Xfce. If you like Gnome2 you should like that. It takes more tweaking to get right, but it's very close. You could also try cinnamon and MATE, but I haven't fooled with them. I prefer sticking with more mainstream packages. If Debian ever gets them in their repos, I'll give them a try.
 
lxskllr said:
Try Xfce. If you like Gnome2 you should like that. It takes more tweaking to get right, but it's very close. You could also try cinnamon and MATE, but I haven't fooled with them. I prefer sticking with more mainstream packages. If Debian ever gets them in their repos, I'll give them a try.
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I actually really like KDE 4.8 Have you tried it recently? It's really slick and peppy now.

Jodell88 said:
Has anyone tried Cinnamon as a DE?

@Zokudu
Don't forget Mageia.
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Oh good call. They have version 2 coming out soon right? I kind of like Chakra just because of its semi rolling release. I'll be sure to check out Mageia when V2 comes out in May. I won't be doing a full reinstall till after this semester. My entire Java programming class is on that machine.
 
zokudu said:
I actually really like KDE 4.8 Have you tried it recently? It's really slick and peppy now.
Click to expand...

Not recently. I always thought KDE looked plasticy, and there's some much stuff it comes loaded with. Maybe I'll try it again some time when I'm bored.

I was just trying to get Compiz working on my setup, and everything works right except for the window decorations. My title bars inexplicably switch to Gnome3's when I enable Compiz. I'd like to get it working, but it may be a lost cause. It looks like the project's on life support. There isn't much happening over there. It would be a shame if it went under. I never used it for serious work, but the desktop effects were fun.
 
lxskllr said:
Not recently. I always thought KDE looked plasticy, and there's some much stuff it comes loaded with. Maybe I'll try it again some time when I'm bored.

I was just trying to get Compiz working on my setup, and everything works right except for the window decorations. My title bars inexplicably switch to Gnome3's when I enable Compiz. I'd like to get it working, but it may be a lost cause. It looks like the project's on life support. There isn't much happening over there. It would be a shame if it went under. I never used it for serious work, but the desktop effects were fun.
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Compiz is alive and well. Unity is just a plugin for compiz anyway.
 
Jodell88 said:
Compiz is alive and well. Unity is just a plugin for compiz anyway.
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I don't know about the "well" part. The forums are dead, and the commits are pretty light. I could see it morphing into an "ordinary" compositor for Ubuntu, but that doesn't do me much good. I already have an ordinary composior with Xfwm.
 
lxskllr said:
I don't know about the "well" part. The forums are dead, and the commits are pretty light. I could see it morphing into an "ordinary" compositor for Ubuntu, but that doesn't do me much good. I already have an ordinary composior with Xfwm.
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Development on compiz is still ongoing. While there hasn't been a stable release for a while it isn't dead by any means. Most of the development takes place on bazaar now and not git.
 
Jodell88 said:
Development on compiz is still ongoing. While there hasn't been a stable release for a while it isn't dead by any means. Most of the development takes place on bazaar now and not git.
Click to expand...

We'll see. It's looking like an Ubuntu only project. Hopefully someone will keep the fun stuff maintained.
 
I'm playing around with an Ubuntu 12.04 desktop in a VM right now. For a brand-new release, it seems incredibly polished, and aside from a few hiccups with the initial configuration, I haven't encountered any problems.

Since I've always stuck with the LTS releases, this is my first time using Unity. The radically-different menu structure certainly takes a little getting used to, but I've always "searched" for application names in OS's that support it, so it doesn't really alter how I interact with the OS. I have run into a few instances where Unity's lack of customizability is a bit of an annoyance, and I'm not sure how I feel about the behavior of maximized windows, but overall, my experience has been positive.

I'll give Ubuntu a shot for two weeks, and then I'll switch over to Kubuntu and give that a try for two weeks.
 
First annoyance: audio stuttering

I'm running Pandora within Google Chrome on another workspace, and if I do anything even moderately CPU intensive, the audio from Pandora will stutter for a brief second. And this is on a VM with four virtual CPUs.

I've been able to play stutter-free audio under all but the most crippling loads on Windows since Windows 2000. It's unfortunately that Linux still struggles in this regard.
 
Second annoyance: performance monitoring

I tried using the GNOME System Monitor to track down what process was using the most CPU time to see if perhaps there was something non-obvious causing my audio stuttering. And what was that process? GNOME System Monitor. Yes, that's right, the application that is supposed to (among other things) monitor your system's CPU usage is using the overwhelming majority of the system's CPU 😵

I realize I can just open a terminal and use top, but still...

(And no, outside of GNOME System Monitor, I didn't find anything hogging the CPU.)
 
theevilsharpie said:
First annoyance: audio stuttering

I'm running Pandora within Google Chrome on another workspace, and if I do anything even moderately CPU intensive, the audio from Pandora will stutter for a brief second. And this is on a VM with four virtual CPUs.

I've been able to play stutter-free audio under all but the most crippling loads on Windows since Windows 2000. It's unfortunately that Linux still struggles in this regard.
Click to expand...
Linux lagging under heavy load is due to the CFQ scheduler. There's been an open bug on it for years.
 
Jodell88 said:
Linux lagging under heavy load is due to the CFQ scheduler. There's been an open bug on it for years.
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I might be a bit more understanding if it was actually under a heavy load, but there's really nothing going on other than Pandora and the general overhead of Unity + Compiz. And yet something as simple as pulling up the HTML source for Pandora is enough to cause a split-second stutter.

If that's a "heavy load," I'm scared to think how Ubuntu will perform when I start doing some gaming, virtualization, and other relatively resource-heavy tasks D:
 
theevilsharpie said:
I might be a bit more understanding if it was actually under a heavy load, but there's really nothing going on other than Pandora and the general overhead of Unity + Compiz. And yet something as simple as pulling up the HTML source for Pandora is enough to cause a split-second stutter.

If that's a "heavy load," I'm scared to think how Ubuntu will perform when I start doing some gaming, virtualization, and other relatively resource-heavy tasks D:
Click to expand...

You might have some VM weirdness going on there. I've run older versions of Ubuntu on fairly marginal equipment, and haven't had stuttering issues.
 
lxskllr said:
You might have some VM weirdness going on there. I've run older versions of Ubuntu on fairly marginal equipment, and haven't had stuttering issues.
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I get the same behavior from my laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 (on bare metal). If I've got any sort of audio player running and start doing anything CPU- or (in particular) IO-intensive, the audio will start stuttering so much that I'll simply turn it off. And if I'm doing something memory-intensive and the system starts paging heavily, I might as well just reboot at that point, because the performance will never recover.

Granted, this is an older laptop (although I wouldn't consider it especially underpowered), but I didn't have such issues with Windows 7.
 
theevilsharpie said:
I get the same behavior from my laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 (on bare metal). If I've got any sort of audio player running and start doing anything CPU- or (in particular) IO-intensive, the audio will start stuttering so much that I'll simply turn it off. And if I'm doing something memory-intensive and the system starts paging heavily, I might as well just reboot at that point, because the performance will never recover.

Granted, this is an older laptop (although I wouldn't consider it especially underpowered), but I didn't have such issues with Windows 7.
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Huh... My netbook has a CeleronM 900mhz, and 1gb ram, and I don't recall any stuttering issues. I've had problems with YouTube, but that could be expected given the specs. 100% cpu usage isn't conducive to smooth video playback :^D
 
Getting back on topic....

If I'm going to post about Ubuntu 12.04's annoyances, I think it's only fair that I also give praise where it's due. With said:

First awesomeness: The workspace switcher

The workspace switcher gives me a bird's-eye view of all of my workspaces, and I love the fact that I can drag windows amongst my various workspaces from that view. At first, I was a bit annoyed with the workspace switcher, because it takes one click to open it, but two clicks to go to a different workspace. I thought, "what am I gonna do, drag workspaces around?" Yep :awe:

The workspace switcher will also include workspaces as they span across my two monitors. Unfortunately, the switcher itself remains on the main monitor, and attempts to keep the aspect ratio of the workspaces, so my workspaces appear "squished." It works well enough for me, but I can definitely see some potential usability problems for people that have large horizontal multi-display setups.

As far as switching between workspaces, you can use a single right-click to pick a workspace, so that solved my initial gripe.
 
Apparently, gedit and Unity don't get along. Unity doesn't show that an instance of gedit is running, even though gedit is staring me right in the face. Not even alt-tab has the gedit instance listed.
 
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