ExtremeTech previews the Ubuntu Linux distro. We will be featuring two reviews of Ubuntu this week. Update: Another Ubuntu review.
Preview: Ubuntu Linux 4.10
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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How can anyone seriously think that Epiphany is “dreadful” in a Gnome Desktop environment. I can understand that many people might prefer Firefox — to each their own — but calling Epiphany dreadful is just ludicrious.
I agree. Epiphany is very usable. It was my default on Linux until Firefox 1.0-pre1 was released a few days ago.
“Users new to Linux may be unfamiliar with APT when they first start using Ubuntu, making the included software bundle even more important”
Users new to linux on the other hand propably don’t know many
applications either.
“The Ubuntu installer is not particularly pretty: It’s essentially a text based installer that functions adequately. (No, you’re not at the command prompt, so don’t panic if you’re new to Linux).”
Correct me if i’m wrong but aren’t the pics screenshots from
debians new installer?
Installed Debian for the first time yesterday.The new debian net-inst (25sept. current version) is very easy to use.Must say alot of apps 🙂 Fired up apt and downloaded all header files i could get my hands on.Amazing they have 2.4.X up to 2.6.X in allmost every relevant flavour i386,i686,k6,k7. Installing the latest nvidia driver wass a bliss.
One thing i really liked in deb’s apt-candy store were the kernel-images,(again not one image, a lot of them 🙂
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.7-k7 or kernel-image-2.6.8.1 does the job. Personally i think the kernel is most important, be honest kernel 2.6.8.1 isn’t
ancient.In my opinion it doesn’t matter if i have kde 3.2
instead of kde 3.3 or firefox 0.8 instead of 0.93 . More important i think is how fast a community can react on
new bugs,flaws and/or other security threats and bring out patches accordingly.
please don’t mind my horrible English
FireFox should replace Epiphany in the future anyway. When your used to FireFox and need to switch to Epiphany, it just sucks. Gnome should focus on the important things, which is not building a new browser interface. The best thing would be: give the FireFox devs advice on how to make it more gnome-ish.
Anyway, I’ve been using Ubuntu for a couple of days and it is a very nice experience. I agree with the writer however, on the wlan part. My usb adapter is supported by linux-wlan, so it shouldn’t be so hard to add support for it.
Strange things:
– Contact Lookup applet gets disabled for some reason; Cool applet, but it should: just work
– detecting media doesn’t always go as it should; it doesn’t detect it when you boot your computer and the media is already inserted.
– No good sound server support, more a Gnome problem, but still anoying.
– Synaptic is nice, however: I would just like to see when security fixes are available: straight on the panel.
so far i am really enjoying ubuntu. I have been using linux for 7 years and have been a debian/slack/fluxbox user. Everything works without out of the box (ibm x31) with out extra cruft or eyecandy.After 1 week my impression is they have created a distro that is hacker and new user friendly.
I only hope that the maintainers can keep things clean / stable / simple / elegant rather than bloating it up to support the many different request that are being submitted to the user lists.
great job ubuntu team ( im working on my x31 install guide for your wiki)
-best
-greg
Epiphany has security and privacy issues plaguing it. I think Firefox is the way to go right now on GNOME.
Perhaps a bit off topic .With Firefox 1.0RC1 when a a certain webpage tries to install something which you have set to disallow, it issues a bar at the top of the page which looks like the one you got with SP2 from MS. I wonder if that’s a coincidence 🙂
I agree with the review that Ubuntu could really become a great distro. After having tried it now for a few days I have to say there are still a lot of rough edges, but reading the mailing list shows that the devs are aware of this and are working on it. For example they are afaik working on a panel applet that will notify the user of security updates, just as one poster suggested here.
What I really enjoy about Ubuntu is the fact that they are focused on delivering an easy to use out of the box linux without taking away choice from those who want it. You can pretty much use the whole debian repository if you want to, but you don’t have to in order to get a working environment.
I strongly disagree with the review that Ubuntu should let people choose their packages during installation, that would somehow defeat the purpose of delivering a working out of the box linux. Btw., I’m not entirely sure, but I think there even is a way to choose the packages during installation if you change the installer to expert mode.
All in all I’m really excited about Ubuntu, it sure shows a lot of promise.
I can’t understand how anybody would prefer Firefox to Epiphany. Eiphany is so clean and simple, and most importantly, HIG complaint. Firefox most definitely isn’t. On top of that, it uses some totally foreign widgets. What’s up with the new mini-dialogs (find, plug-in installer)? They are alien to Mac, GNOME, KDE, *and* Windows. Me no likey…
Maybe someone could answer my question. Is there a way to convince epiphany to focus the address bar when opening a new tab? Yes, it did set the default page to blank, not google. ;-D
Just my opinion although it really is a fact also. I think it is pretty laughable that they have dumbed down the interface so much in an effort to make things simple for new users that now 99% of all users hate it and no real computer newbies would touch linux with a ten foot pole unless someone set it up for them anyway so really epiphany’s userbase is about 0% except for the last few remaining gnome zealots who refuse to admit how bad epiphany has become.
Seriously. There is no longer a history dropdown from the address bar! Gee thanks guys. I really hated that features and it was sooo confusing.
And the downloader that just creates a “Download” folder on my desktop and puts stuff there without telling me!?? Hehe. Yeeaaah. Good idea again guys.
Oh no, here it comes… the clue stick…. watch out:
“fewer clicks” is not the same thing as “simplicity” and “intuitive ui”. The downloading thing is a perfect example of how wrong-headed these guys are. Clicking on the big “Desktop” or “Home” button in the new file picker dialog to specify where a file should go (even if it takes an extra click) is something that my mother (reference idiot computer user) can definitely handle. Reading the minds of epiphany devels trying to figure out where her download just went or searching the file system for her file is beyond her computing abilities or patience. Hello: The extra steps provide an important conceptual link in the minds of the user between the file that was clicked on the web page and the file that now exists on disk. Remove that link and conceptually new users are lost (shit I was lost the fist time I used it!). If you are going to remove that step then you need to somehow create that conceptual link another way. Maybe with a popup? No, that idea sucks. Maybe with a little bouncing red arrow that hovers over the newly created “Downloads” directory (don’t make directories in my ~/ that I didn’t ask for!)? No that is a stupid idea too. Hmmmm. Oh! How about using the same file picker dialog that users are accustomed to from every other gnome app to provide a consistent and coherent “file save” experience in gnome? (if you get as far as this and didn’t see the clue, reread the last paragraph a couple more times. If you still don’t get it you should retire as a ui designer)
Everyone – do yourself a favor and either use firefox or galeon (which is just like epiphany without the really idiotic parts).
The whole history of Epiphany is such a sad joke really. I remeber those first screenshots when Epiphany was still just this mysterious fork by galeon’s founder showing the cool and innovative ui to come. I was really stoked about the generalization of the search thing in the address bar in mozilla to include arbitrary searches. I was really stoked about the indexed bookmarks. I actually agreed that galeon 1.x was getting pretty bloated and I guess I was sold on the idea that bringing galeon back into line was going to be impossible. I said, bring on the fork! Well all those features are gone now (the bookmarks never really worked out in practice). Galeon really is a nicer and intuitive and simpler browser than it was in the 1.x days. Now epiphany is hardly more that the TestGtkEmbed thing. Yeah it is simple. It also sucks. The whole thing is a shame really because the end result was to fragment what was a strong development community in galeon for the promise of a new and innovative browser that simply never lived up to anyone’s expectations and the galeon will never come round thing turned out to be total BS. Now epiphany sucks and galeon development has slowed to a snails pace. Somehow epiphany is the default browser (which is embarassing more than anything). What will ultimately happen is that firefox, a non-native browser, will become (already has become?) the real gnome browser and its position will become even more entrenched as more gnome integration occurs (printing and file saving dialogs are on the way). But the user experience will be difficult since they will have to go and download Firefox or Galeon and suffer with Epiphany at first instead of being able to provide my mother with a great out of the box experience that has a chance of server her needs as her computer abilities grow. Lame. Sad. Oh well!
– end rant.
love,
foo
(ps – please no one bother telling me to develop my own browser becaues that is a really tangential argument and does not in any way refute the validity of my position on how much epiphany is junk)
I’ve been using Ubuntu for the last few days, and I actually managed to get a lot of stuff working on it. OK, I am not a complete newbie, but I managed to pull it off. The net and a friend were there all the way
It’s quite a stable system (no crashes so far), just like Windows. Evolution 2.0 is nice, but I think there are places that need a touch more polish.
The bundled Firefox is 0.9.x. It was not very hard to install 1.0PR.
Gaim works very well. However, sometimes it goes lala and disconnects to reconnect a few seconds later.
What’s so *boring* about Ubuntu is that it works. However, that’s something I haven’t seen in a Linux distro in a while – not at this level anyway. Give it a shot
Of course getting a new distro is always a sort of an adventure.
Using actually mepis, and pleased with it, i wanted to give a try to this new “Ubuntu” .
Easy install straight forward (a bit as the mepis, no weird questions asked at boot)
Easy upgrade in a “eth0 lan”
Gnome 2.8 very much complete and nice.
Maby some few materials not recognized (ac97 sound card even with alsa-conf ?).
But there is a but, I dont see a lot of difference with a pure debian installed system.
No special config tool, no real personalization, eye candy or spécial user interface . Just a plain debian .
My opinion is : well (c+) but to be seen later.
I was pleasantly amazed how easy it was to install Ubuntu on an Apple Powerbook. Compared with the Debian documentation, that for Ubunto was only one page – and worked first time, including automatically adding a boot manager. Great work!
My only gripe is with Broadcom, who have closed source wireless drivers, so the WLAN card doesn’t work.
That this will be the best GNOME distro in the future!
But of course I am wrong, because later they will have KDE for this distro according to their website.
I downloaded Ubuntu the other day, burnt the CD and installed it.
I had to fiddle a little bit to get the network configured (some of the options are a bit different from what I expected, more precisely the “cancel” button).
Once it started working, it defaulted to a 1024×768 resolution. I have a TFT monitor at 1280×1024. I tried to change it from the control panel but it did not allow me to do so, so I had to go and edit the XF86Config file. The lack of 1280 option was caused by my onboard video card being limited to 4 meg and the default colour depth to 24 bits, changing it to 16 made it work exactly as I expected.
Once in use… well, it was a Gnome system. I didn’t get on with it so I just decided to uninstall it.
It seemed like a good “everything works” system.
The only thing I could see is that, if there are no options to install packages, they could just unpack a tarball with all the packages already installed (like the old debian installer did) and then you can get the whole system installed in 10 min.
Ubuntu picked up my Cisco Aironet 350 card and was able to configure it very easily using DHCP, only requiring inout of the wireless-key security setting.
I recently tested Gnome 2.8 and choked when tried to add some applets to taskbar. There is about 40 applets in menu which are not categorized at all. No search capability, user has to browse up’n’down and try to find suitable applet.
I was pleased to see a clean disto it was a long time since I turned my back to linux the messy to freebsd the clean and mean OS.
I was pleased to see this one. I installed it on a G4 867mhz and this is quite fast on this hw.
I only have two concerns the first on is the lack of concistency in the Gnome save/open box dialog which is disturbing. And there is no icons on the desktop and I did not find any ways to put them back apart from creating them manually which i am sure is not the standart way.
This little try just gave me hopes to clean free desktop.
Ubuntu is an excellent preview release, and should be a welcome refuge for anyone who has used Debian. However, people who have not used Debian, or who are new to Linux, may still have problems getting around. Much of this can be eliminated by shipping good documentation with the official release.
For example, Synaptic does provide an interface that can be easier to use than apt-get, if you already know how to use apt-get. Anyone who has used apt-get will be fine. Someone who has not used apt-get will have questions.
Users of Nvidia cards will find that the proprietary driver is available, but not automatically installed. Doing so is easy with Synaptic, assuming you already know which files to install. Editing xf86config is also necessary, either manually or via dpkg-reconfigure, or, more likely, both. (The Ubuntu folks say they are working to improve the installation of the nvidia dirver.)
Ubuntu’s installer is the new Debian installer that is still being tested, with a few of the dialogues edited. Like every other Linux installer I’ve seen, it needs to find a better way to handle partioning and video card configuration.
Firefox RC1 in Ubuntu, and perhaps elsewhere, has at least two annoying bugs: It exits when some, seemingly random, links are clicked; the bottom dozen or so pixels extend beneath the lower Gnome panel, obscuring the status bar and preventing access to the resizing widget.
Ubuntu’s mailing lists are already quite active and helpful. The documentation on the website is mostly not there, yet (as is appropriate for a debut preview release).
hi, i wondring if this is debian?
like if you look at #debian at irc.freenode.org then they say that knoppix aint debian!
I’ve been using Redhat 7/8/9 and Fedora 1/2 on my desktop pretty exclusively, but decided to try Ubuntu out a week ago (I’ve always wanted to try Debian).
And it’s brilliant, so far. Even in this pre-release shape it’s been easier to setup and more stable than Fedora. And, for some unknown reason it’s a lot faster (maybe due to lack of some of Fedora’s bloat).
I’m definitely staying with Ubuntu.
No, it is Ubuntu.
Well FC3 will be a lot quicker than FC2 if the test releases are anything to go by
This link should explain what Ubuntu is and how it is related to Debian. I actually got this link from OSNEWS comments section from the last time we discussed Ubuntu.
http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/ubuntu_and_debian.html
The following brings tears to the eyes :sniff:
😉
:B
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/faq/helpcenterfaq….
I absolutely agree! There is a difference between making things easier and don’t make things at all…
All of your points was good.
I think the Ubuntu devs have understood this, great!
I hope they’ll have some other excellent ideas for the future; maybe this distro will be really a better distro…
I hope that others will follow the example.
(sorry for my english 😉
It looks out of place on my GNOME desktop, it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to in that it doesn’t integrate as tightly with my desktop as my beloved Epiphany does. The menus look nothing like standard gtk2.4 based menus and worse of all.. it’s not part of the i18n project for GNOME so it’s not translate in the default installation, it doesn’t seem to obey LANG – so it’s a major hassle for anyone who doesn’t have a US english desktop.
Now sadly this is the case, Firefox is so promising on so many other fronts.
that this is the best linux I have used in the last year. It is based on Debian and has most of the Debian stuff available for it (12000 apps, including KDE, if you uncomment universe in sources.list), and it was easy to set up. It has a fine set of defaults that make the system easy to get started. I am pleased with Firefox as a primary browser. I apt-get upgraded yesterday and got the Firefox 1.0RC which rocks. It is also damn fast. After a simple kernel recompile (I didn’t get real picky with the configuration, I just disabled the hardware I don’t have and set it for AMD CPU) I get faster boot times than WIndows XP and the windowing is lightening quick. All in all this distro is lean and mean.
if the devs are reading get us the new X.org and you will have a real gem.
I downloaded and installed Ubuntu, but am kind of confused about using it.
If I want a Debian system, why not simply use Debian? It seems to me that the Ubuntu team will maintain their own repository, doubling the work (I read that they will work with the Debian maintainers, but it seems that they are going to have things in parallel with the Debian team). Also, it doesn’t work with all Debian repositories. I just don’t understand why I would use this project and not Debian itself?
The most important feature I need from any distribution is MythTV. I have a MythTV server downstairs on Debian and my computer needs to have the client installed. In Debian, I add to lines to sources.list and then apt-get MythTV. I couldn’t get it working under Ubuntu since some of their dependencies didn’t meet the criteria of the installation process. Until they get MythTV in their repository, I can’t use their distribution.
My $.02
They won’t implement the new xorg release AFAIK. xorg 6.8 is the last monolethic release, the next one will be used by Debian thus also in Ubuntu.
Someone already mentioned the inability to select packages. That was a huge disappointment for me. I’d really have a choice, e.g. I don’t want to install evolution, b/c I use thunderbird…
I use kde on my mandrake box, but I’ve to say: this gnome distro looks awesome. The one major irritation I’ve with gnome is that it uses so much screen space (on my 15″ 1024×768 tft) than kde. I can set the icon zooming at 75% but then the rest of the menu’s and dialogs are still large. If I could higher my tft’s resolution I’d certainly do it…
btw: Does Ubuntu use bootsplash? (really pretty on my mandrake box)
“btw: Does Ubuntu use bootsplash? (really pretty on my mandrake box)”
http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/WartyWarthog_2fusplash
from that page it appears so
The next release will sport a new package manager, usplash attached to D-Bus, and the new x.org.
I have really wanted to try this distribution, but I just cannot get it to install. It always fails when installing the base system at get-text.
When burning the cd in windows, how does one do it to make sure the CD that results is good? That is the only thing I can think of since burning it in my Fedora system has proven to be a very frustrating endeavor met with total failure so far.
I have been using this distro for about 5 days now and I really like it. I have no plans on using anything else right now. For bleeding edge it is very stable. I have been using RedHat/Fedora for a few years now but I am jumping ship to Ubuntu. I love Gnome and the distro to me is nothing short of beautiful.
I think it’s a very good thing that they’re maintaining their own repository. I’ve tried Libranet a few times now, and I’ve always had problems with apt because they combine their own repositories with Debian’s, so I haven’t been able to install a good portion of the software I want. Once it even broke the base installation, conflicting GDM and gconf. Similarly, if you add Debian sources to Xandros it’s extremely easy to break.
No, Ubuntu doesn’t have as much software in their repository yet, but it’s enough for most people, and I’m sure it’s only going to grow.
Hector, I’d suggest checking the md5sum of the ISO you downloaded with http://www.md5summer.org/
You’ll need the ISO and the md5sum it should be on the FTP right next to the ISO) in the same directory, and it should be easy to work out from there. Sorry, I don’t recall exactly how that program works.
You can also boot into expert mode (type ‘expert’ at the first prompt) and at the bottom of the menu it has a choice to verify boot media, or something along those lines. I would just check the media in expert mode, though, as the install can be a bit difficult if you don’t know about modules, for example.
If nothing turns up, you’ll probably need to look into your burning system (software, hardware, and media).
If you want desktop icons, check out this page: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/faq/helpcenterfaq….
This is a very nice distro; it has a polished feel about it.
“Ubuntu doesn’t have as much software in their repository yet”.
You know that Ubuntu has pretty much every package from Debian unstable, if you add the “universe” portion in sources.list? To be fair, that is actually “much software” (several thousand packages, and all), and single package is rebuilt for Ubuntu.
Nothing from non-free and contrib, yet, though.
in both Ubuntu and Firefox, such as:
Ubuntu:
Trash applet, computer menu, speed (it really seems fast on my old PII 400 desktop).
Firefox:
I needed to install Flash the other day while browsing with my fresh Ubuntu i386 box and Firefox handled it as if it was an extension….it was amazing, I clicked on a flash animation, Firefox asked me if I wanted to download “Flash”, then took care of the installation…awesome!!
1 issue still with Ubuntu:
Although many people (and developers) are using it on ibooks / powerbooks, the power management on my ibook2 dual usb does not owrk properly. I wish someone could tell me why.
For a limited time Ubuntu will send you their distro on cd free anywhere in the world. This is only untill their next revision comes out however. They even encourage you to order 10 or more since shipping costs more than pressing the cd’s
The thing about epiphany is that it lacks support for plugins, or is it the other way around? Anyhow once you try firefox with alot of the essential plugins (adblock, flashblock, etc) it really is hard to go back to your old favorite browser.
> The thing about epiphany is that it lacks support for plugins, or is it the other way around?
Jack, I once thought this is true also, but you can just click on the extension installer file (.xpi) in Epiphany and it will install just fine. I’m running flashblock right now, for what it’s worth.
Yes I do realize that, and all that software is unsupported, and some of it may not even function (I seem to remember several such reports on the mailing list). I certainly wouldn’t suggest that to what will eventually be Ubuntu’s target market. In fact, I wouldn’t even use Sid in Debian, testing is fine for me.
Foo–
I agree very much with your rant. I was a Galeon user before the founder forked over to work on Epiphany. Compared to most browsers out there, I’d have to say Galeon isn’t very bloated. It definitely is faster than full-on Mozilla, and more responsive than IE on Windows.
But Galeon has such nice features that I sorely miss when I have to use a Windows machine and Firefox. Smart search field entries on your bookmark bar (Firefox has this sort of, but you need to download extensions to use it, whereas Galeon allows you to edit these boxes from the bookmark editor), a tab interface that actually works (how come you STILL can’t drag-and-drop tabs to reorder them in Firefox), a great history tracking system, an awesome bookmark editor with virtual bookmarks and drag-and-drop reordering, keyboard-controlled browsing (if you start typing the name of a link, it highlights it and you can click enter to enter the link, like autocompletion for web browsing). Download management that works. The list goes on and on…
If Galeon still received more active development, who knows what they’d come up with? Instead, I think Crispin Flowerday (who seems to be the most talented Galeon dev) has been overrun fixing bugs and such, with not much help from anyone else.
Note that I’m not against Galeon. I’ve only used it briefly, but it seemed decent enough while I did.
how come you STILL can’t drag-and-drop tabs to reorder them in Firefox
You can, try the miniT extension, it’s working quite well now. There’s also the duplicate tab extension, which can kinda-sorta be used to similar ends.
an awesome bookmark editor with virtual bookmarks and drag-and-drop reordering
I’m not sure what you mean by virtual bookmarks (no clue actually), but Firefox does have drag and drop reordering. At least it did, that’s one of the things they botched in 1.0PR.
keyboard-controlled browsing (if you start typing the name of a link, it highlights it and you can click enter to enter the link, like autocompletion for web browsing
Firefox does this too. You can toggle it in advanced preferences, as well as telling it to search all text or just links. On the keyboard control front, I do wish they had a way to ‘tab’ (obviously tab is taken) through browser controls only (back, forward, refresh, address bar, etc… if I’m missing something let me know). Btw, a lot of people don’t realize you can tab through tabs with ctrl-tab/ctrl-shift-tab.
What do you think is missing from the Firefox download manager? You can auto-download certain filetypes to certain locations with an extension, iirc. Given, pause/resume isn’t terribly functional, but that’s what wget is for.
holy *crap*, that’s one ugly theme. What the hell were they thinking?
Mandrake does vpn setup; drakvpn. It also detects and configures most wireless cards with a free driver out of the box (most 802.11b cards, quite a lot of 11g cards) – including wireless specific settings like SSID and WEP.
well, not necessarily. Epiphany is GNOME’s official standard browser, but distros don’t have to go along with that; if they think it sucks they can dump it and engineer something else in. Using Galeon or Firefox instead is relatively trivial for a distro (change the default package, configure the GNOME URL handler and MIME types appropriately, and you’re done).
you probably need to change your DPI setting to something appropriate for your monitor: measure your physical display horizontally in inches and divide 1024 by that number to get the DPI of your screen. Then set GNOME’s DPI to that number with the font properties tool. That’ll make everything look the size it’s “supposed” to – 10pt fonts will be exactly the same size as a 10pt font in print. If that’s too big for your taste, you can make the DPI setting lower, and all your fonts will get smaller. If you’re talking actual boxes etc rather than font sizes, not much that can be done I guess, I agree that GNOME’s stuff tends to be quite big but I don’t mind it. (I find it quite usable on an 800×600 display…my TV)
i installed ubuntu the next day i found out about it and i must say, that this is the first linux distro that worked smoothly on my hardware.
1) what is the adress of the so famous universe repository? so i can add debian packages to ubuntu install
2) how do i install ati radeon 9200 driver so i can have faster 2d/3d graphics and less(maybe none? just dreaming) screen tearing?
thanks for all the help
If you start up Synaptic (Computer -> System Tools, or something like that, I’m in Arch at the moment) all you have to do is check Universe. That probably means it’s in your sources and you just need to uncomment it.
There are video driver directions in the wiki:
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BinaryDriverHowto
As core windows user;), I have to say some good words about Ubuntu.
1. No unnecessary choices. This is really really good news for many first-time linux users (why actually I need to choose between two or more desktop engines, two browsers and so on, especially when I’m not familiar with new system at all?). If only Ubuntu dev’s could continue this way (and get some financial support behind)…
2. Clean desktop, clean menus, clean Gnome. It just looks nice:)
2.a. It looked so good that I even burnt it to CD, after trying it in VirtualPC
And installed to another PC (not happened so far with other distros)…
Well, some minor Windows incompatibility problems though (who cares about Windows?).
Did lock our little LAN sysadmin out of domain:) (some problems with samba/win network client);
didn’t allow change display resolution within VirtualPC (problems with detecting simulated monitor/videocard);
did render NTFS partition on same harddrive temporary unbootable (grub couldn’t load XP boot sector until there wasn’t LBA explicitly specified in BIOS).
Generally, I like Ubuntu. Probably I’ve to buy another HDD and install Ubuntu besides XP and FreeBSD – XP for work, FreeBSD for tweaking and Ubuntu for experience:)
I find that I just HAVE to make one comment. I feel sorry that there were (and still are) so many people that think KDE is horrible because of the default Keramik Theme but then GNOME 2.8 comes out with this terribly ugly looking theme and only one person other then me comments on it.
Am I missing something here? What makes this theme ok but Keramik crap?
-Locri
I feel sorry that there were (and still are) so many people that think KDE is horrible because of the default Keramik Theme but then GNOME 2.8 comes out with this terribly ugly looking theme and only one person other then me comments on it.
Am I missing something here? What makes this theme ok but Keramik crap?
First of all, GNOME 2.8 did not “come out with this terribly ugly looking theme”, the default theme of Ubuntu is their very own Human theme, which is based on Industrial. A similar theme was proposed for the new default theme of GNOME, but it’s not yet.
Second, Human is a lot simpler and cleaner than Keramik. The main criticism against Keramik is, that it looks messy, noisy and unpolished, which is simply not the case with Human.
Third, it’s not yet the final theme which will be used for Warty Warthog and most people couldn’t care less. :p
I really like the colors and style of Ubuntu, it’s very different from your typical blueish styles and makes a very decent appearance. The Industrial theme has always been a little bit unpolished in my eyes, so I’m not enjoying it as much as Bluecurve yet, but it’s very usable and will hopefully become even better in the future.
“First of all, GNOME 2.8 did not “come out with this terribly ugly looking theme”, the default theme of Ubuntu is their very own Human theme, which is based on Industrial. A similar theme was proposed for the new default theme of GNOME, but it’s not yet.”
Ahh, sorry.. I was looking at the screenshot and seeing the Glider theme (which looks VERY similar aside from color) and thinking that was the theme. It always confuses me that in GNOME the theme decides the color settings, but that’s besides the point.
“Second, Human is a lot simpler and cleaner than Keramik. The main criticism against Keramik is, that it looks messy, noisy and unpolished, which is simply not the case with Human. ”
Actually, to me it doesn’t look any simpler or cleaner. The multiple bands of color look like they should be gradient but then someone left the color settings on 8-bit. Obviously this is all up to personal preference, but I truly don’t see how this theme could be considered better then Keramik. When it gets down to it I personally perfer Plastik, but I’ve never had any major qualms over Keramik. Some of the GNOME themes aren’t that bad (I kind of like Crux) but it’s always annoyed me that I can’t choose the colors that I want to put in without re-creating the theme myself.
Oh well, to each their own.. and maybe I’ll try Ubuntu just to see what GNOME 2.8 is like… but so far I’m content with Mepis and KDE 3.3
-Locri
Actually, to me it doesn’t look any simpler or cleaner. The multiple bands of color look like they should be gradient but then someone left the color settings on 8-bit.
Ah, now I understand. For some funky reason, the screenshots in the review article actually ARE in 8-bit.
It does not look like that with more colors. This is a better screenshot of how the Ubuntu theme currently looks like:
http://www.linuxbeta.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=103&slide…
(I just picked one randomly out of the slideshow)