News - Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin coming April 2012

[HEXUS]

What exactly is a Precise Pangolin, anyway?

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[aidanjt]

They really are completely excluding themselves from the workstation market, as is the GNOME project. Everyone is either going to shift to KDE, or XFCE. Thunderbird for the last release? Seriously? lol

[Steve]

Well if you can always go for Xubuntu or Kubuntu.

I typically use LTS on my Linux servers and for certain development workstations, but 10.04 LTS will be supported for quite a while yet so I won't rush to upgrade... not on my servers anyway.

[aidanjt]

One thing that really annoyed me with 10.04-11.04 was the half-assed evolution indicator support, and just as that bug was about to be fixed they replace evolution with thunderbird, wth are they thinking? Empathy and Gwibber fixes just aren't filtering down to 10.04. The dumbass dbus-based display power saving disabling just never got fixed. Now the me menu is gone and the message indicator gets flooded with status change entries. And they've paid virtually no attention to rss at all. More stupid. Gah.

They keep needlessly breaking crap over and over again. It's driving me nuts.

[crossy]

Think I'll be sticking with 10.04LTS for a while yet - at least until someone figures out a way to shoehorn Gnome2 onto 12.04. Unity is fine for consumer gear, but I've no wish to use a UI that looks like it was designed by Fisher-Price on my VM hosts.

Love Ubuntu, hate Unity...

[aidanjt]

Exactly, they should have kept all this unity touchscreen voodoo in the separate Ubuntu MID Edition.

[shaithis]

Must say I've been dabbling with linux a bit recently and have really hated that unity desktop.

Launching apps has never been so difficult

[Scribe]

Have used both myself, Unity seems a little like Marmite. As I get familiar with it it's very usable but was a big shocker at first. I'm hoping it'll get some performance tweaks in 12.04, as currently it runs faster on my laptop than my hex-core GTX480 PC.

Still Ubuntu is the closest Linux has come to something with mass appeal, I'll be keeping a close eye on the distro.

[watercooled]

+1, I hate Unity and Windows 8 for the same reason really. I've tried to work with both for a while but really can't get used to using a touchscreen interface with KB+Mouse. I'm sticking with 7 + 10.04 unless something changes.

[crossy]

Have used both myself, Unity seems a little like Marmite. As I get familiar with it it's very usable but was a big shocker at first. I'm hoping it'll get some performance tweaks in 12.04, as currently it runs faster on my laptop than my hex-core GTX480 PC. Still Ubuntu is the closest Linux has come to something with mass appeal, I'll be keeping a close eye on the distro.

Don't get me wrong - I tried Unity on a netbook and - like you say - it's actually quite usable. However, there's no hope in hell that I'd want to use it on the screen I'm using at the moment (a window running on my Windows laptop connected to an NX server on the Ubuntu box), Unity just uses too much of available screen real estate, or else you have to have micro icons.

If I do go with PP then I'll probably defect to Kubuntu. Failing that Linux Mint looks pretty usable.

[lodore]

+1, I hate Unity and Windows 8 for the same reason really. I've tried to work with both for a while but really can't get used to using a touchscreen interface with KB+Mouse. I'm sticking with 7 + 10.04 unless something changes.

I think the final version of windows 8 will be fine. One of the new features of windows 8 is the ability to have a task bar on every monitor with a dual monitor setup which shows microsoft is thinking of the traditional desktop market to. Its worth reading about the new features in windows 8 here Some of the features are intended for higher powered machines.

I have tryed unity on ubuntu and dont like it. I. I do agree with your comment about the same reason for not liking windows 8 and unity. I dont want an application launcher to take up the whole screen.

[watercooled]

They really are completely excluding themselves from the workstation market, as is the GNOME project. Everyone is either going to shift to KDE, or XFCE. Thunderbird for the last release? Seriously? lol

BTW what's wrong with Thunderbird?

[crossy]

BTW what's wrong with Thunderbird?

I think what "aidanjt" might be getting at was that Evolution was pretty well integrated with the old Gnome "classic" (i.e. the one that worked fine) desktop. Thunderbird - unless 11.10 is better - still feels like a bolt-on in comparison. Care to confirm/deny that aidanjt? (Or was it the usual Mozilla moan of excessive resource use that bugs you?)

That said, I switched to Thunderbird like a shot, because Evolution always annoyed the heck out of me. Plus the fact that T'bird is cross-platform means that I can use the same software on my Windows box (that's this one I'm typing on now), and my main machine (my Ubuntu-running VM host).

[watercooled]

Thanks, I thought there might have been some problem with Thunderbird I didn't know of (besides the weekly major version updates).

A fairly major annoyance I thought of is, with major updates, they might change the location of application data; not exactly desirable when you manually set backup locations!

[aidanjt]

I think what "aidanjt" might be getting at was that Evolution was pretty well integrated with the old Gnome "classic" (i.e. the one that worked fine) desktop. Thunderbird - unless 11.10 is better - still feels like a bolt-on in comparison. Care to confirm/deny that aidanjt? (Or was it the usual Mozilla moan of excessive resource use that bugs you?)

That's only superficial. Capability wise evolution is far superior to thunderbird. I have no problem with thunderbird being an optional MUI but it's in no way near close to being a competent replacement for evolution, and enterprise users will bail out faster than you can blink if evolution is a second class citizen in the next LTS. Unity is going to be hard enough for them to swallow.

Now if only both would kill off the retarded mbox backend store.

[crossy]

That's only superficial. Capability wise evolution is far superior to thunderbird. I have no problem with thunderbird being an optional MUI but it's in no way near close to being a competent replacement for evolution, and enterprise users will bail out faster than you can blink if evolution is a second class citizen in the next LTS. Unity is going to be hard enough for them to swallow. Now if only both would kill off the retarded mbox backend store.

Sorry to put words into your mouth earlier. I switched to T'bird originally because I found Evolution feature-poor. Oh, and reputedly, the dev team at Mozilla are putting a lot of effort into Exchange compatibility. BTW I'm not claiming T'bird is perfect - e.g. not being able to say to it that "this item isn't spam so stop warning me that it might be" is a nuisance.

As you say, what's wrong with the status quo - unless there was problems integrating Evolution with Unity?

+1 on the backend - didn't someone propose replacing it with a SQL backend, starting at SQLlite and going through to MySQL/PostgreSQL if you wanted to get fancy? Seem to remember that, plus the justifications that it'd make filing easier, plus the client itself would be zippier.