8.04, Whats going to be the WOW factor?

[skymera]

Hi, I've had Ubuntu for almost a year now.

7.04 was my first experience, and it blew me away, Beryl, Wobbily windows everything!

Then hearing 7.10 was out soon i couldn't wait to see what the latest and greatest would be like!
I done a clean install and my WOW went to OH.. Wasn't as quick, nor snappy and memory usage was higher. Boot times were slower and other general stuff.

Now, 8.04 is coming out soon, it's the "make it or break it" for me. If its Gutsy Jr. Im moving distro's, but I've heard it will be uber fast and very efficient.

Anyone have outlines of what currently is different/better/worse?

Your thoughts?

[myusername]

actually from what i have tried on the beta it seems to be kinda bloated

[skymera]

oh, dosent sound good.


Anyone else have thoughts, experiences?

[myusername]

its a great distro its just come on... do we really need ekiga installed by default? why not something useful like ndiswrapper?

[skymera]

Try.

I did once think of having TWO versions to download.

One new user kernel, and one Experienced,

and the experienced kernel to have just a basic grpahics driver, limited wireless drivers, very stripped out and you configure it to your needs.
But seems never will happen.

I agree there is a "lot of junk in the trunk" here.

[gerowen]

7.10 seems to run pretty good on this machine. 7.04 didn't support about half the hardware on any of my 3 computers, so the fact that 7.10 picked up "everything" including wireless on this one out of the box is a selling point for me. I just hope that the "upgrade" doesn't break anything like they have before.

[tamoneya]

im running the beta now and it doesnt feel like beta quality. It is still kind of buggy. More like a late phase alpha.

[smartboyathome]

The LiveCD is slower than Feisty (which I started out first with), but it is really snappy once it installs for me. It is more stable than gutsy, and overall feels more polished.

[myusername]

actually feisty was my favorite version...gutsy was buggy (usplash broken, wifi didn't work etc.) thats why i use zenwalk 5 now...i love it except for lilo and no usplash

[days_of_ruin]

Just so you know not everyone has problems with gutsy.
I don't have any problems, its probably just your hardware.

[gerowen]

Gusty works absolutely flawlessly for me, no hangups, no issues with hardware. I didn't even have to configure ndiswrapper, my wireless worked out of the box.

[kamaboko]

Gusty works absolutely flawlessly for me, no hangups, no issues with hardware. I didn't even have to configure ndiswrapper, my wireless worked out of the box.

As has been mentioned time and again, your mileage may vary depending on your computer system. I can tell you that Hardy is a bust on my Vostro. Gutsy is better, but then Linux Mint is even more stable than Gutsy on my Vostro.

[tagra123]

Thw WOW for me is the speed. It feels faster.

[tdrusk]

For me it felt a little bit faster than 7.10.

When you first install Ubuntu add all your files and let the computer run for a while. 7.10 and 8.04 have file indexing. You kind of have to cut it some slack, because file indexing takes a bit and slows the computer down.

[SomeGuyDude]

I assume it's going to be little things. Which kinda perplexes me since the lack of big changes makes me wonder why Hardy had to be a different release.

[Seti]

From what I've seen so far with Hardy is that its very stable, fast and has a few nice new things, like the new System Monitor for example.
This thing is still beta, and I'm 'wowed' already.

[tubasoldier]

Hardy has been very stable on my hardware. Once I removed tracker the distro became quite snappy. Also remember that it is a Long Term Support release and it should be very stable by the time the next version comes out. But by then you will be worried about Ignacious Iguana, or whatever they call it.

[madjr]

Hi, I've had Ubuntu for almost a year now.

7.04 was my first experience, and it blew me away, Beryl, Wobbily windows everything!

Then hearing 7.10 was out soon i couldn't wait to see what the latest and greatest would be like!
I done a clean install and my WOW went to OH.. Wasn't as quick, nor snappy and memory usage was higher. Boot times were slower and other general stuff.

Now, 8.04 is coming out soon, it's the "make it or break it" for me. If its Gutsy Jr. Im moving distro's, but I've heard it will be uber fast and very efficient.

Anyone have outlines of what currently is different/better/worse?

Your thoughts?

gutsy was slower than festy because of tracker and file indexer.

gutsy was released buggy, but had lots of new stuff worth it.

also, i always compare the linuxmint release and see which runs better on my system. Since linuxmint is basically the same Ubuntu but released 1 month later it's usually more polished.

with an exact 6 month release cycle, bugs are to be expected from Ubuntu.... (but i think less on the lts)

hardy will be an LTS so don't expect any "big WOWs"

anyway the little wows:

-Gnome feels snapier, less buggy and has a few nice features :)

-Wubi now makes installation super easy without partitioning or burning to a CD. I hope they add Lubi too (some of us don't have windows installed). Lubi would be great tool for alpha/beta testers too! (no need to burn every alpha on a CD and with a virtual machine you can't really "feel" it 100%)

-Compiz effects seemed better integrated with metacity. But some effects seemed slower..

-hardware testing and reporting tools are nice

-theme and wallpaper looks very good, but default icons look outdated...

-firefox 3 beta is snappy. It may not work (yet) with the plugins you like. But theres the option to install ff2 so not really a big deal.

-Openoffice 2.4 (it says 2.3... dunno why), works great, much faster and many bugs been fixed!

-tracker is not a memory hog as before, indexing not on by default ! yay

-Add/remove seems a bit more intuitive now and a bit faster.

-Many new software packages.


ok now the bad:

-Xorg seems to use more memory and seems to spike cpu usage from time to time (could be a bug?)

-a few 3d effects seem slow... could be because of xorg ?

-the new pulse audio could have a few issues with some people and their hardware setups.

-flash 9,0,115 is fairly bloated and cpu intensive... If it goes too slow for you, then downgrade to 9,0,48 or install swfdec (gnash is not really best option right now)

-IPV6 seems to be still enable, makes my browsing slow damit!.... anyway turning it off is not that hard.. just gotta edit some system files or something.. :/


i think i would recommend the final release over gutsy, specially for new comers to Ubuntu!

[Bungo Pony]

Whats going to be the WOW factor?

IT'S NOT GUTSY. That's the WOW factor.

Seriously, I've hated Gutsy ever since I've installed it. It was tempting to go back to Feisty (which worked flawlessly) but I gave it a chance, and I hoped that the updates would fix the problems. They sorta did... Every boot is a hit or miss for me. Something different seems to go screwy on every boot. The feature this time around is the random freezing. Last time, everything ran slowly :(

If Hardy sucks, I'll also be moving distros. I have high hopes for Hardy being stable since it's a LTS release.

[FuturePilot]

I've found Gutsy to be very stable. Everything just worked. I've had no problems with it. I don't understand when people say Gutsy is buggy. Then again. people probably don't understand when I say Hardy is buggy because it's been nothing but problems for me. :(

[toupeiro]

WOW factor for me personally is the active directory integration and Wubi.

This is a pretty solid release, even in beta. Not sure where many of you are getting the bloat info from, but putting it side by side against my 7.10 machine its consuming less resources overall doing similar tasks with the same apps running. I've by no means gone easy on this beta either, running DVD95 while simultaneously running wow via wine in windowed mode, gimping a graphic for a wallpaper, and scp'ing files over from my other machine.

AD integration opens up some awesome opportunities. One of the many I can think of off the top of my head is the ISA proxy problems that are pretty much universal to any company with Microsoft ISA proxy servers and Active Directory might actually get resolved and we might actually get sudo passthrough with apt-get at work. How novel!

I can't really say enough about wubi either. While I will admit I have seen a performance difference, its not show stopping by any means, and it will definately raise a lot of users comfort level with installing (and thus using) linux.

[spamzilla]

Hardy is no more bloated than any release of Ubuntu - I personally wouldn't call it bloat as the preinstalled programs makes setting up Ubuntu so much quicker than Windows.

Hardy feels quicker, has new / updated programs, uses wubi, has AD integration, a better theme, new kernel with loads of new drivers and an albeit buggy pulseaudio.

IMO, Hardy as an alpha and beta is already much better than Gutsy ever was (I only really used Hardy as Gutsy on my laptop just didn't work whereas Hardy did.)

IMO its worth upgrading to Hardy even if Gutsy works fine :)

[swoll1980]

I've been running this for a week and haven't had any crashes yet (except the flash bug in firefox which still exist thanks to adobe not giving a crap) one thing I noticed that is gone is the bug I had in gutsy that would hang nautilus when I logged out so that when I logged back in I would have no desktop, would have to kill nautilus then log out log back in. So that nice I like the authorizations you can give to other users with out giving them full control. My step daughter would drive me nuts because she couldn't share folders and such. the system monitor is way nicer this time around and includes a list of drives and the amount of space used and remaining. As far as bloated goes I don't see a larger amount of programs installed by default so I don't know what thats about. If you don't like a program there are several options available to you. ie. dpkg -P "program"
apt-get remove "program" aptitude remove "program" or you can use the synaptic program (yes that was sarcasm) I will never understand that kind of complaint. Maybe I'm nuts but things like that don't bother me. I don't know for sure but I would assume ubuntu gets some kind of compensation for ekiga being installed by default. If thats the case than simply uninstalling it would be worth the trouble if it helps the project. The screen manager is a nice addition and makes using multiple displays a snap. As far as faster or slower goes I think a lot of that is placebo and I would have to see some benchmarks to believe it was faster or slower.

[skymera]

Seems everyone has v. different experiences.

I have no hardware problems, luckily. Apart from my 8800GT being jittery.

Im not sure to either:

Ubuntu 8.04 - Custom Kernel
Debian - Custom Kernel.

I might stick Ubuntu out, im familiar and done kernels before and it was worth it.

Fair enough it dosen't take long to setup.
But you have to spend ages taking off all the crap thats on there by default, tracker, IPv6 and other tweaks.

thanks for all the replies :)

[conehead77]

xmonad in the repos! I hope it works for me then...

[billgoldberg]

I also feel to need to tell everyone that gutsy works fine on my pc.

It's stable and very fast.

With feisty I had some hardware problems, gutsy fixed them all.

I think 8.04 will be great.

If you think it's bloated, remove the unneeded apps after installation or use a light-weight distro.

[Kivech]

I would certainly give Hardy a try. I have it running for several weeks now, and aside from some minor annoyances it runs pretty well.

You might want to consider that we can now also pick SELinux for security with predefined configuration sets (although the configuration tools are still missing, you'll miss those if you were accustomed to the Fedora tools).

The whole set seems more stable and running better than Gutsy did on my system.

Anyways, installing Ubuntu doesn't take that much time or effort. Once the final is out, give it a spin. If you don't like it, it's not that much of a big deal to reinstall what you had. Don't forget to bakup though. ;)

Kivech

[EXCiD3]

I really like Hardy over Gutsy but it does have a bloated feel to it...especially since im dual booting with Arch ;)

Hardy has been running smoothly ever since Alpha 3 for me. Hasnt really given me any trouble along the way. I think this will be a good LTS release. Theyve still got time to patch things up though.

[urukrama]

and the experienced kernel to have just a basic grpahics driver, limited wireless drivers, very stripped out and you configure it to your needs.
But seems never will happen.

You could always do a command-line install using the alternative install CD. This gives you just a basic system, to which you can add everything you like.

[hessiess]

Im still using feisty becouse sound is worse in gusty than feisty, at lest on my hardware.

somehting i dont like about ubuntu is if you try to uninstall compez it trys to uninstall gnome as well, what's up with that?

[SunnyRabbiera]

Hi, I've had Ubuntu for almost a year now.

7.04 was my first experience, and it blew me away, Beryl, Wobbily windows everything!

Then hearing 7.10 was out soon i couldn't wait to see what the latest and greatest would be like!
I done a clean install and my WOW went to OH.. Wasn't as quick, nor snappy and memory usage was higher. Boot times were slower and other general stuff.

Now, 8.04 is coming out soon, it's the "make it or break it" for me. If its Gutsy Jr. Im moving distro's, but I've heard it will be uber fast and very efficient.

Anyone have outlines of what currently is different/better/worse?

Your thoughts?

To be honest I think you got it all wrong.
For me latest doesn't always mean greatest, I mean look at Vista and Mac OSX Leopard, for many these operating systems have caused issues as they both focussed more on your vision of the "WOW" factor more then mine...
Your "WOW" factor is flashy effects, wobbly windows and other junk, but my "WOW" factor is stability.
For me both Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy have failed at this, both Feisty and Gutsy have caused issues for me in one way or another.
For me I could not even use Feisty, it had an issue that made it impossible to use for me, and Gutsy is not much better...
and I blame your vision of the "WOW" factor for it, I feel the developers are more focussed on making Ubuntu look flashy more then making it stable and functional.
Stability and functionality are my wow factor, if Hardy turns out to be another unstable mess I will not use it and stick to Mint or find another distro...

[Joeb454]

Personally I've found Hardy to be 10x better than Gutsy, it's quicker, and even though it's a beta, I've found it more stable too :)

[SunnyRabbiera]

Well I personally will hold off my judgment of Hardy till it is ready, I am hoping it will fulfill my ideal "wow" factor of stability, functionality and most important.... reliability.

[mivo]

Gutsy worked sufficiently well for me, except that I needed special boot parameters for my board and video card (8800GTS), which required quite some fuzzing around to figure out. I still hve no graphical boot up screen. But once it worked, it worked really well and reliable. Don't really have any complaints. Feisty generally had a better feel to it, though, and the Gutsy beta was fairly troublesome for me.

I haven't played much with Hardy yet. Didn't have the time to really test this time around, so I only looked at the Live CD. I also didn't want to chance the stability of my work machine, and my other box runs Arch happily, and I wouldn't want to have to reinstall everything. ;)

I'll do a clean install of Hardy a week or two after release, depending on the feedback here in the forum.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Yeh i too will wait, if i see too many bugs being reported with Hardy I simply wont use it...

[skymera]

To be honest I think you got it all wrong.
For me latest doesn't always mean greatest, I mean look at Vista and Mac OSX Leopard, for many these operating systems have caused issues as they both focussed more on your vision of the "WOW" factor more then mine...
Your "WOW" factor is flashy effects, wobbly windows and other junk, but my "WOW" factor is stability.
For me both Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy have failed at this, both Feisty and Gutsy have caused issues for me in one way or another.
For me I could not even use Feisty, it had an issue that made it impossible to use for me, and Gutsy is not much better...
and I blame your vision of the "WOW" factor for it, I feel the developers are more focussed on making Ubuntu look flashy more then making it stable and functional.
Stability and functionality are my wow factor, if Hardy turns out to be another unstable mess I will not use it and stick to Mint or find another distro...

Correction, my wow factor isn't glitz.

My wow factor is speed and stability. The glitz just made me get Ubuntu..
To be honest i hardly have the glitz enabled. It should stay optional.

[ghandi69_]

For me, Gutsy was considerably faster than feisty was, so that was my wow factor.

This was probably due to the fact that it was the first distro that successfully detected my Nvidia 7600 GT card, I was never able to get it to work until gutsy.

I also am looking forward to the dual monitor setup utility and any kind of improved wireless detection.

[mivo]

Hardy is going to have a dual monitor setup utility? Oh-ho! I hadn't heard of that before. Might actually be able to use my old 19"display as a secondary monitor, then. :) (The card supports it, but I haven't been able to get that to work.)

[SunnyRabbiera]

Correction, my wow factor isn't glitz.

My wow factor is speed and stability. The glitz just made me get Ubuntu..
To be honest i hardly have the glitz enabled. It should stay optional.

well you made it sound that way, your post seemed to comment on the desktop effects at least the part about Feisty.
Me I ignore the "wow" factor, remember the Windows Vista slogan is "the wow is now"
I am still waiting for this wow they speak of.

[DMK62]

Stability for me would be a wow factor as well as updates that do not cause major breakage. Also quicker fixes being implemented ( flash in gutsy ). For some people Gutsy has been rock solid and for them Hardy may be unstable. Experiences will always differ because no two setups ( hardware, software etc ) are the same.

Being a little bored yesterday I downloaded both the Ubuntu and Kubuntu beta's ( alternate cd ).

Ubuntu

Fsck failed on first boot on the ext3 partition on my 2nd drive. When logging in I got an error message that there was no Home partition ( I parititioned a separate Home during install ) and I was able to login and my Home was there after I rebooted. Permissions in my Home partition were messed up. Firefox was set to root only for permissions. The new Hardware Driver manager did install the nvidia driver ok but it detected my card as a 6800 and not a 6200. Changed it to 6200 series and it seemed to be ok. I actually liked the new firefox 3 beta 5. It loaded pages and graphics much faster than firefox 2.x. Side mouse buttons worked in firefox without having to edit xorg.conf.

Kubuntu

Fsck failed on first boot on the ext3 partition on my 2nd drive. I did have a Home partition on initial boot ( woohoo ). Fiirefox 3 beta 4 runs a lot better than firefox 2.x on Kubuntu Gutsy. Side mouse buttons worked in firefox without having to edit xorg.conf. The Driver Manager jockey-kde is buggy in Kubuntu. It will install the drivers but does not show them as being enabled. I also ran into several dbus errors when trying to load gtk apps in Kubuntu. Desktop effects refuses to work even when enabled.

Both of them being beta's I was not expecting everything to work. Hopefully they will be able to get the major bugs fixed in the next couple of weeks.

Dale

[AlanR8]

Gutsy ran well on my machines, 5 behind the router....Hardy runs faster

[sdowney717]

With hardy BETA , I can now full screen you tube videos using the full screen button seamlessly.

There are lots of subtle improvements, But I can no longer do compiz fusion.