Ubuntu 11.04

[Zorrm]

Who is using it and what do you think thus far? Pretty big GUI changes that seems people will either love or hate.

[G1500]

Screenshot?

[Zorrm]

My theme is pretty much what comes on a fresh install, with just some slight visual changes to the icons on the left.

[armygunsmith]

I really like it. I've got one system dual booting it, and run it in a VM on my laptop. It has come such a long way, it's impressive.

[G1500]

Will have to try to get it on my extra laptop again. I think it was 9 or 10 I couldn't get to install.

Running fedora right now.

[wrestlingnrj]

I've got it on a really old POS laptop, so I can't run the new GUI, but I will probably update one of my home ones from 10.04 to 11.04 to give it a shot.

[Scratch705]

wanting to run it on a new machine i want to build later this year.

is ubuntu really easy to run? and will it be easy to run pc games on it by running that windows emulator app i read about?

[dotalchemy]

wanting to run it on a new machine i want to build later this year.

is ubuntu really easy to run? and will it be easy to run pc games on it by running that windows emulator app i read about?

"Sort of" to both questions.

Here's the thing with Ubuntu - it tries to make everything as easy as possible, almost "Windows like", and in fairness, Linux has gotten damn good at detecting hardware accurately over the past couple of years. The issue with Ubuntu is that, generally speaking, you'll get to some point where the GUI / automated backend / whatever can't do something for you. Then you're into terminal territory. An example being OpenGL support on one of my old laptops and the wireless card on it also. Ubuntu picked both of them up, but there was much screwing with configuration files and kernel modules to get the wireless card working. OpenGL was never stable on it.

Overall, I recommend Ubuntu to anyone who has limited Linux experience and wants to play. I fear though most of the time folk fall back to Windows because they're more comfortable with it and it's generally a little more polished. Remember, although they call the OS "Ubuntu", it's little more than a collection of open source packages running on a kernel - there are Quality Assurance checks, sure, but there are always cracks to fall through.

As far as running games, I'd avoid it personally. There is a commercial product which will allow you to run a hefty amount of Windows games under Linux, and they work fairly well, but if you're after gaming, you're better off just dual booting the system with Ubuntu and Windows.

Take a look at Wubi, which lets you dual boot to Ubuntu on your existing system without re-partitioning.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/wubi

[rockdogz]

I couldn't stand the new GUI - couldn't figure out how to do a thing. Went back to the classic interface.

[NSR500]

I couldn't stand the new GUI - couldn't figure out how to do a thing. Went back to the classic interface.

I have a similar experience with the Unity GUI. I quickly learned how to navigate the UI, but I felt it offered no distinct advantage over Classic. I essentially went back to Classic and ran some other theme.
Ubuntu 11.04 is good though and runs well on my gear.

[balzak]

"Sort of" to both questions.

Here's the thing with Ubuntu - it tries to make everything as easy as possible, almost "Windows like", and in fairness, Linux has gotten damn good at detecting hardware accurately over the past couple of years. The issue with Ubuntu is that, generally speaking, you'll get to some point where the GUI / automated backend / whatever can't do something for you. Then you're into terminal territory. An example being OpenGL support on one of my old laptops and the wireless card on it also. Ubuntu picked both of them up, but there was much screwing with configuration files and kernel modules to get the wireless card working. OpenGL was never stable on it.

Overall, I recommend Ubuntu to anyone who has limited Linux experience and wants to play. I fear though most of the time folk fall back to Windows because they're more comfortable with it and it's generally a little more polished. Remember, although they call the OS "Ubuntu", it's little more than a collection of open source packages running on a kernel - there are Quality Assurance checks, sure, but there are always cracks to fall through.

As far as running games, I'd avoid it personally. There is a commercial product which will allow you to run a hefty amount of Windows games under Linux, and they work fairly well, but if you're after gaming, you're better off just dual booting the system with Ubuntu and Windows.

Take a look at Wubi, which lets you dual boot to Ubuntu on your existing system without re-partitioning.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/wubi

This man speaks the truth. I really like Ubuntu, and I'd love to just use that instead of Windows, instead of delegating it to a secondary boot option. The recent Ubuntu GUIs and Compiz visual effects really create the feeling of a light-weight, high performance, aesthetically pleasing environment. But yes, I think pretty much everyone will eventually encounter something they can't figure out how to do eventually and then that whole "mainstream usability" goes out the window and you'll have to start learning Linux.

For example, I spent a couple hours the other day in the terminal and surfing Linux forums trying to get my Wifi adapter to work. Finally decided it wasn't worth the time and I'll probably just look for a different adapter that is known to work without problems.

There is also the software availability issue. While most "mainstream" apps have comparable alternatives, many of which are free (such as LibreOffice vs. MS Office), there are still a lot of important software applications that just aren't made for Linux and are without comparable Linux-based alternatives. For example, no matter how many Linux junkies say it over and over, GIMP is NOT a comparable alternative to Photoshop.

Sure, you can use Wine to run some stuff. If you're lucky it will work reasonably well and it won't take you all afternoon to get it to run properly. Or, it might run slow and glitchy, or not at all.

I think projects like Ubuntu are quite possibly a big part of the future of mainstream operating systems. As time goes on, I think MS operating systems are becoming less essential to succumb to. But today, I think Linux-based OSs are awesome for a certain group of people, but still have some way to go before becoming mainstream.

PS: I liked LinuxMint spinoff a little more personally, you might want to check that one out as well.

[Jeepers]

just built a system for Mythbuntu and so far so good the person i built it for is very happy with there free O/S ....Linux has come a long way in the last decade

[dotalchemy]

But today, I think Linux-based OSs are awesome for a certain group of people, but still have some way to go before becoming mainstream.

Quoted for truth.

I work at a VFX house and while every artist in here has a Linux system for their primary workstation, anything outside of that is Windows. Even with open source versions of software, for enterprise deployments Thunderbird is simply not comparable to Outlook (although this is more for backend protocol reasons as opposed to client facing reasons). HR / Marketing / Finance, they're all on Windows.

Linux has it's niche areas - high performance computing, render farms, webserver farms, hypervisor platforms - you really can't beat Linux in these areas, but for the average everyday desktop, Linux is still playing catchup with Windows, and this isn't helped by the fact that there are at least 10 different *popular* Linux distributions all working on their own branches of source trees. Windows at least has one development environment and an overarching plan for development futures.

I'm going to prefix this sentence with "I love Linux and happily spend a bunch of time using it, both at home and at work", but, unless you have a really good reason to use Linux, then you'll almost certainly find yourself frustrated and back to Windows within a couple of months.

Just my opinion though.

[I_Love_My_.22]

first off, Im a ubuntu noob.

I use to try ubuntu in my old laptop all the time, wireless never worked and the screen resolution was small, the frustration drove me back to windows. I think I was using 8.? well time has passed and I have a new laptop dual booted to 11.04 so far so good.

[Zorrm]

Excellent to hear. My laptop is still running it as the only OS, while my desktop is dual booting it.