Trusty Tahr is simply beautiful.

[Copper Bezel]

Right, so I wasn't really looking forward to upgrading and was worried I'd be hit with a bunch of regressions, and I hadn't heard much about new features in Trusty, so I'd put off upgrading my u-book until last night. I actually had zero regression problems and apparently no longer have to rebuild and lock my Unity version to get proper multitouch through Touchégg, so I'm pretty happy on that front; Tomboy's Unity lens is broken, but that's nothing to do with the fine folks at Canonical; it's just the same old story of individual developers getting bored.

However, I'm simply blown away by how beautiful Trusty is in the details. I use Scale a lot (have a touchpad gesture for it, Mac-style,) and seeing that the dock and panel are visible and usable from Scale was enough to compel me to update. Finding out that typing isolates windows by title and that a second flick brought up the dash search blew my goshdarned mind. The antialiased window corners are simply beautiful - I've so missed them from Emerald - and the fact that they actually documented the theming so that I could update my theme to use them and didn't have to go searching for a new system theme after my upgrade gives Canonical points that Gnome's failed to earn in their "documentation" of GTK theming since ... ever. I was already blown away by the new modal dialogues - so much simpler and cleaner than Gnome's little pop-downs from the titlebar (always felt like the app sticking its tongue out at me) and simpler and more readable than OSX's. And I just woke up my machine a bit ago and saw the new LightDM lock screen, and ... it's simply beautiful. The fade back to the desktop is the cleanest and most polished thing I've ever seen in Unity.

I feel like this release is just about the most beautiful interface I've seen. I'm really impressed with the attention to detail that's gone into it. Nothing about it feels kludgey or, to be frank, Linuxy. It's as design-aware as Mac.

I know that a lot of attention has been focused on the mobile builds lately, and I know that there's still some resistance to the Unity interface because of its one-size-fits-all layout. But is anyone else just really impressed with this release as a piece of design work? I feel like the push to keep up with mobile is being applied to the desktop, too, and I don't feel that this release has been held back by the work on Unity 8. In a general sense, it makes me more confident in the direction of Ubuntu as an OS and Unity as a desktop than I've been, but in a more narrow sense, I'm really impressed with this iteration of the desktop in bringing a lot of parts together in a coherent way and really resulting in a readable and clean design, and I'm wondering if anyone else is interested, specifically, in the visual and workflow tweaks that have been made in this iteration and how much those kinds of details influence your opinion of an OS. Did anyone else get that feeling of just being at home, or appreciating the little considerate touches?

[RichardET]

From 1999 till 2013 I was a diehard SuSE/openSUSE guy and I was very loyal to their cause. But after I tried Ubuntu 13.04, I realized what a PC operating system should actually be, and I have been using Ubuntu ever since. And I agree, version 14.04 is a great effort, and I really feel that other distributions, including Fedora, are unable to compete against Ubuntu.

[Copper Bezel]

Well, Ubuntu is a different kind of project than Fedora, too. They may not be Debian, but they've still chosen to follow upstream more closely than Ubuntu, and in a way, I can't really fault them for that. Ubuntu seems to match Fedora for stability and general distro maintenance, but a lot of that is happening on the Debian side, right? And for the Unity project specifically, the only comparable competitors would be KDE and Gnome. Even though Unity isn't a full desktop environment, it is the sum of the interface design and polish that makes the difference between the experience on Fedora or SUSE and on Ubuntu. And that's the main thing I wanted to talk about in this thread - I agree with you completely that it's becoming an example for "what a PC operating system should actually be," and once you get rid of those awful dash search adverts, it's something that's competitive with the proprietary industry leaders and Android or Chromebook OS. (And obviously, I recognize that there's a lot more to an OS than an interface experience, too. Even looking at Ubuntu-supplied components, the always-awful and ultimately scrapped Ubuntu One client and the still-shaky Software Center are hardly best-in-class. But with each successive version, Unity where Ubuntu really keeps impressing me and standing out, and Trusty just shocked me in the extent to which it feels like they've finally got the details right.)

[linuxyogi]

Yes Ubuntu 14.04 is really beautiful but unfortunately my PC cant handle it. It runs really slow and video playback suffers due to the compositing I guess.

Lubuntu may not be that beautiful but I like to call it a "no nonsense" distro.

I will install Ubuntu as soon as I assemble my next PC.

[monkeybrain20122]

Well you are lucky. i seem to hit quite a few regressions. There are others based on launchpad's bug reports, but thankfully they don't affect my use case.

On my hp netbook (actually not mine, I just set up Ubuntu for a friend), the print screen key doesn't work any more while it works in 13.10 (other people reported that none of the function keys work any more on a whole bunch of hp laptops)

hibernation seems to be quite broken on the same netbook. While it needs some tweaking in 13.10 (basically waking up wifi on resume) it works reliably. But not in 14.04, it fails to wake up maybe 3 out of 10 times.

You mention scale, I also use it. Since may be 12.04 compiz is broken in that it often forgets the hot corners on reboot. This happens basically with scale and wall flip, both of which I use. I also use expo The workaround previously was to put them at the very end of the plugin list and disable plugin auto-sorting in CCSM, scale has to be close to the bottom and wall has to be at the very bottom in 13.10. Expo doesn't matter. But in 14.04 they did something so that this doesn't work any more. Now unity shell has to be after scale (in descending order) or invoking scale would kill unity instantly, expo has to be in the very end of the list or hot corner will be forgotten (so wall cannot be at the end) In 13.10 it doesn't mattter where expo is placed. So the ordering is getting more stringent for some reason. After some juggling I finally get all three to work, but it is a pain. I shudder to think what will be broken next in 14.10.

It is cool that they don't fix compiz as I understand it is a low priority even though it is the face of Unity. Compiz in 12.04 is completely broken even though it is a LTS, it is still broken if you install 12.04.4 today so I don't expect much (I installed from ppa) But at least don't move things around so that work arounds that worked before would not stop working.

VNC doesn't work any more, there is a workaround on the bug report, but nevertheless it is a bug.

There are more if you look at the launchpad reports.

No show stopper (at least for me) but why trade in my perfectly tweaked 13.10 before its time?

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

yea it seem pretty great to me
i just setup ubuntu on dual screens with a 3Ghz core 2 duo and a 2gb GT 630 gpu ran wonderfully even on the open-source gpu drivers
was expecting to not have a very usable desktop until i had the driver installed boy was i wrong
was a little sad of the wallpaper limitations, but i have been using xfce which has awesome wallpaper options with workspaces (have not tried it dual screen though with xfce)

[Copper Bezel]

monkeybrain, those all sound like graphics-card-related issues. I don't use hot corners myself after getting Touchégg on the laptop and a decent mouse for the desktop, but I know they've caused me some trouble in the past, and I know that things tend to get worse when you're not using an Intel graphics chip (and I've basically not bought a machine with anything else in quite some time, so I don't know how well support is coming along for the others if at all.)

Are you having trouble with suspend, or with hibernate? To be honest, I've never really played with hibernate, so I don't know how consistent it was in previous versions. I depend on suspend, but I don't really understand the purpose of hibernate.

I didn't know that there was a plugin order in Compiz. This is particularly symptomatic of graphics card issues, and again, I know that support for anything but Intel has always been a weak spot in Ubuntu. In any case, I've never had a plugin crash Compiz just by being invoked except a few cases where less commonly used plugins were simply broken in a particular release.

I know that a lot of features of Compiz are considered legacy where they don't directly impact Unity's intended workflow, but Scale is being maintained, else the behavior wouldn't have changed in 14.04 as I mentioned. (Remember that the Unity Launcher invokes scale for multiple windows of the same application.) Compiz is definitely something that Ubuntu is working to maintain, at least at present (since I don't know how much of the codebase is carried over into Unity 8 - although the fact that window decorations were re-written in 14.04 under Compiz certainly says something.)

I didn't want to trade in 13.10, either, because it was quite stable and I'd tweaked it pretty heavily, and I don't like the new support cycles, but like I said, I didn't encounter any real regressions, and my tweaks from 13.10 largely stuck. It doesn't seem like there's actually a lot of change in 14.04 except for surface polish (which is exactly as an LTS should be.)

[monkeybrain20122]

monkeybrain, those all sound like graphics-card-related issues. I don't use hot corners myself after getting Touchégg on the laptop and a decent mouse for the desktop, but I know they've caused me some trouble in the past, and I know that things tend to get worse when you're not using an Intel graphics chip (and I've basically not bought a machine with anything else in quite some time, so I don't know how well support is coming along for the others if at all.)


Actually that is an Intel. But same on another AMD machine (open source driver) So pretty much covers all grounds.



Are you having trouble with suspend, or with hibernate? To be honest, I've never really played with hibernate, so I don't know how consistent it was in previous versions. I depend on suspend, but I don't really understand the purpose of hibernate.


Suspend drains your battery while hibernate does not.

[sports fan Matt]

I'm just now getting a chance to upgrade..been busy with two jobs plus life. One thing I saw was the dialogues as well. Can't wait to get it downloaded. :)

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, I really, really love the new modals. I shouldn't get happy when an app locks up, but they're so pretty....

monkeybrain, while I have no use for hotcorners and find them fidgety now that I don't need them, the other bugs you're talking about clearly aren't universal, because I haven't run into them.

I asked whether it was suspend or hibernate because I wanted clarification. Again, I've never had any trouble with suspend, but never really trusted hibernate much. I don't find the battery use in suspend unduly problematic, personally, but I can understand why someone might. The reason I don't use hibernate is that it requires the machine to reboot, anyway, so it doesn't seem apt to actually save me any time the next time I open up the laptop, which to me is the purpose of suspend....

Plus, it's crazily convenient having a machine that wakes when I open the lid (lock screen password aside.)

[sports fan Matt]

I spent all day yesterday installing Trusty Tahr. It is absolutely beautiful. The only reason why I need to dual boot at this point is for MS Office since I do not fully trust Libreoffice for my excel and word processing.

[monkeybrain20122]

I spent all day yesterday installing Trusty Tahr. It is absolutely beautiful. The only reason why I need to dual boot at this point is for MS Office since I do not fully trust Libreoffice for my excel and word processing.

You can either run MSO in wine or even VB if you *have to* use it. Dual boot makes things unnecessarily complicated (especially with Win8)

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, I don't have a lot of trouble with MSO in Wine. Or at least, I didn't the last time I had it installed (2010 on 13.04 or 13.10.)

[sports fan Matt]

Actually I downgraded to W7, because of that :)

[user1397]

Dual boot makes things unnecessarily complicated (especially with Win8)


Actually I downgraded to W7, because of that :)
It is definitely more complicated that with previous Windows versions, but I was able to dual-boot 14.04 with Windows 8.1 pretty easily just by doing a quick google search.

For example, the only real problem I had was disabling secure boot, which by default is greyed out in my BIOS settings. I had to temporarily add a supervisor password for the BIOS and then I could disable secure boot. Other than that, I installed ubuntu normally and I did not have to use boot-repair or anything special to get grub working (and showing both ubuntu and windows entries).

Back on the topic though, I agree so far this release seems rock solid and polished. I haven't used such a stable ubuntu release in a while. I can finally say, unity has won me over hehe.

I am on an Acer V5 with pure AMD hardware if anyone is interested.

[monkeybrain20122]

It is definitely more complicated that with previous Windows versions, but I was able to dual-boot 14.04 with Windows 8.1 pretty easily just by doing a quick google search.

For example, the only real problem I had was disabling secure boot, which by default is greyed out in my BIOS settings. I had to temporarily add a supervisor password for the BIOS and then I could disable secure boot. Other than that, I installed ubuntu normally and I did not have to use boot-repair or anything special to get grub working (and showing both ubuntu and windows entries).



Yeah, but why go through all these troubles if you don't need Windows? You might have had an easy time but depending on the actual hardware dual booting with Win8 may be more problematic to set up, just take a look at some threads here and links to exceptions. Dual booting with Win8 also imposes other restrictions/inflexibilities like you must boot in UEFI mode and this in turn makes multibooting with other Linux distros and maintainence more tricky.

MS doesn't like dual boot and it has gone out of its way to make it difficult, I don't feel like doing any extra work and tiptoing my way around just to accomodate Windows if I don't have to. My attitude is that Linux is my OS of choice, if Windows doesn't play nice with it it can go to hell. :)

[Copper Bezel]

Since I'm using only Ubuntu on my u-book, I actually have secure boot enabled. (Pity I can't actually blacklist Windows, of course. = P)