What do you like the most about 9.04?

[GuDoN]

Hi Ubuntu Community,

I'm from iTechni.com.

Today I've decided to try a different approach, and dig into the community and find out what your opinion is.
I'm sure that a lot of you have already tried the beta release of 9.04.

My question to you is:
What are the features or upgraded features of Ubuntu 9.04 that you like the most, what makes your desktop or laptop computer more productive with Ubuntu and/or what do you want to see in future releases?

I'll be writing an article about this, so please submit a post of value, I'll be grateful.

If you would like to be added to the list for future surveys about similar topics, send an email to press @ itechni.com - we respect your privacy and will only contact you when we have questions or information to provide you about Ubuntu.

I'm looking forward to hear from you. If you would like to be mentioned by name, please attach your first name only.

[Peasantoid]

It understands my Bluetooth mouse's sidescroll feature (the wheel clicks sideways).

[wildman4god]

My name is Joshua

My favorite new feature in 9.04 is new artwork. This may not like much but when it comes to themes in Ubuntu if I install a theme myself for some reason and system applications (like synaptic) will not use the theme and looks ugly. But when Ubuntu puts a theme in, then system task will use the theme. Also Ubuntu is doing a nice job as this release just feels more polished.

Another feature I like is synaptic now has a get screen shot button that will, as it's name implies, get a screen shot of the app, which just helps me because i can learn a lot about an app just by looking at a screen shot.

[Newuser1111]

It works very well with my laptop.

[Sealbhach]

Faster bootup and shutdown. Hibernate now works perfectly on my Sony Vaio.

Nautilus filesystem is faster - I think this is due to ext4.


.

[swoll1980]

I like the fact that the Ubuntu evolution is slow, and steady. They don't try to do to much with a single release, and each version has been extremely stable for me. I've only had one crash in two years of using it.

[gnomeuser]

(For purposes of attribution, my name is David Nielsen)

Personally I find it hard to pick a favourite change, Jaunty is very incremental in most ways.

However I am delighted to see an official call from Canonical to work towards bringing MonoDevelop 2.0 into the release even if it was not assured that it would be ready for the feature freeze. That shows me that Mono is a first class citizen in Ubuntu which I can count on being cared for and considered important.

Another Mono related addition is bringing moonlight into the repos, this will ensure that Ubuntu users will be able to enjoy Silverlight content using only Free Software, maintained by people who care deeply about the platform and will be able to support it well. This means yet another set of internet sites will work beautifully for Ubuntu users with a minimal amount of work.

Aside that I am excited to see full ext4 support which goes beyond what any of the major distros have right now in that Jaunty is the only one with a patched grub to allow for an end to end ext4 based system. It shows that Ubuntu is willing to give trial access in the best manner possible to emerging technology.

I am also pleased to see the amount of work that went into making PulseAudio work well. The technology has moved on quite a bit and Ubuntu always did get a little slack from upstream for doing a poor job integrating it. I think those days are over now, we are seeing a solid commitment to PA now and that means doing it right. I think our users will benefit in the long run from this investment.

I also find myself enjoying the new notifications, I am still not entirely sure they are a good idea but sexy they are indeed.

I have a hit list of stuff I would like to see fixed but it is getting smaller. Still some big items left though, hopefully we can see it shrink further when Koala comes a knocking.

I would love to see a commitment to PackageKit in the next release, this is very cool technology and I believe we should start integrating it as it gives our users a lot of benefits.

dm-crypt encryption support in the main LiveCD installer.

Better support in the installer for detecting SSDs and adjusting the partitioning and filesystem selections to fit the requirements for these better.

Additional work on ALSA and PulseAudio to let digital surround output be a reality.

Webcam/VoIP support for MSN in Empathy along with custom emoticons and winks - this is a requirement for many a girlfriend out there.

Early snapshots of GNOME shell for optional install.

Banshee as the default media player.

Nouveau replacing the nv driver. This should also come with the promise to invest work in the X stack and drivers to bring us a full free KMS enabled, DRI2 capable stack with 3D acceleration for all drivers.

Plymouth replacing usplash.

Support for using GMail and other webmail services as my preferred mail client when clicking mailto: links.

Splitting up several packages into subpackages to avoid dependencies. This is needed for things like gnome-do which currently drag in Evolution by default and a bunch of other programs. It could easily be made more flexible and would be a nice addition.

Empathy as the default IM client.

The ability to completely remove things like OpenOffice including translations without having that also pull the translations from everything else.

dpkg is a bit frail, additionally debhelper is annoying and unhelpful. I would like to see dpkg replaced by Conary but this is a long term desire and would require a miracle of the big ones to make happen.

Process separation in the default browser, Google Chrome has shown just how effective this is for security and for the stability of the web browser. I believe we should make it a priority to have this in the default browser and it probably the single most important application on the desktop.

[binbash]

speed + ext4

[beercz]

Working media keys!

That was the only thing that wouldn't work in 8.10, but did work in 8.04 :???:

Bliss!!!

[BeachBum]

speed + ext4

+1

Big improvements here across the board.

[inobe]

it works very well for it's stage in development !

"the new filesystem"

i recommend a clean install, just don't upgrade if your running 64bit yikes.

[Tibuda]

First speed. Second, the default wallpaper. This is the first I'm not changing it.

I'm still not using Ext4, as I'm using the same /home partition in both Intrepid and Jaunty (dualboot). I'll switch to Ext4 as soon as I get rid of Intrepid.

[Kareeser]

it works very well for it's stage in development !

"the new filesystem"

i recommend a clean install, just don't upgrade if your running 64bit yikes.

Really? my 64-bit machine upgraded just fine... but then again, I have a single filesystem, /.

[Saint Angeles]

i've been using ubuntu since feisty and i've seen and heard many problems/complaints... but i gotta say, jaunty has impressed me more than any of the others i've used so far. it seems to work out of the box on every computer i throw it on and the boot time is ridiculously fast. even the install only took me like, a half hour.

my desktop has an ATI video card and uses the madwifi proprietary driver for my wireless card, but these two things installed perfectly with zero configuration needed on my part. they even worked on the live CD and i have no idea how they can do that!

i think that they are going to make this OS illegal pretty soon because it is just too good for people to comprehend. make sure you download and make as many copies as you can before this happens!

[handy]

That it is not on any of my machines. :)

[GuDoN]

Thank you to all who have contributed.

http://www.itechni.com/?p=265

[Paqman]

Boot speed and the new notifications system.

[Pasdar]

Faster boot up, shutdown... bluetooth works now, the new notification thingy, and certain graphical issues that seem to have been fixed

[ctc26]

My name is Joshua

My favorite new feature in 9.04 is new artwork. This may not like much but when it comes to themes in Ubuntu if I install a theme myself for some reason and system applications (like synaptic) will not use the theme and looks ugly. But when Ubuntu puts a theme in, then system task will use the theme. Also Ubuntu is doing a nice job as this release just feels more polished.

Another feature I like is synaptic now has a get screen shot button that will, as it's name implies, get a screen shot of the app, which just helps me because i can learn a lot about an app just by looking at a screen shot.
I was scimming over this thread and happened to see this common problem being mentioned. To the poster and all others that have this issue, the fix is to place the extracted theme in 'usr/share/themes' rather than '~/.themes'. That way the configuration files of your custom theme will have the privilages to address all applications.

ctc26

[3rdalbum]

It understands my Bluetooth mouse's sidescroll feature (the wheel clicks sideways).

I notice you're listed as an Ubuntu 8.04 user... Intrepid also does sidescroll.

I like the boot speed, but it's a pity they couldn't do something about the speed at which Gnome starts up.

[Kareeser]

I was scimming over this thread and happened to see this common problem being mentioned. To the poster and all others that have this issue, the fix is to place the extracted theme in 'usr/share/themes' rather than '~/.themes'. That way the configuration files of your custom theme will have the privilages to address all applications.

ctc26

You could also make some symlinks to the root account :)

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2007/09/18/theme-applications-running-as-root-in-ubuntu/

[Polygon]

what do i like about 9.04? the fact that it has a horrible kernel bug which makes it lock up frequently on my computer, and the fact that almost no action has been taken on the bug report either. Looks like i'm sticking with intrepid.

[Peasantoid]

I notice you're listed as an Ubuntu 8.04 user... Intrepid also does sidescroll.
Oh hey, thanks for noticing me. :)
I'd upgrade, but Intrepid isn't an LTS release — it's a little too cutting-edge for my tastes.

[edm1]

fscking my 320GB HD takes about 5 seconds. New wave is pretty nice too.

[jespdj]

What I like best about Ubuntu 9.04 is that Sun Java 6 update 13 is in the repository, which finally contains a 64-bit native Java plug-in from Sun. That means that the difficulties of running Java in your 64-bit browser are now finally over.

I've tried the beta version on three different computers and it runs perfectly on all three.