Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search! First the bad news: most of the big new features planned for Ubuntu 13.04, or Raring Ringtail, haven’t made it – they’ve been pushed back to 13.10, due in October. Despite this, the Ringtail is actually rather good. Assuming you're a fan of the Unity interface and got past the privacy fiasco of last year - either because you’ …
I'm running Ubuntu and haven't seen any performance issues or graphics problems. I'm not even using a graphics card nor an up-to-date CPU. I don't seem to be the only one.
Transfer speeds are about 10% better than I see on my Windows PCs and graphics seem about the same.
I don't mind Ubuntu too much and certainly prefer the interface to Windows 8. I'm not a Mac owner nor an Apple fan but I'd say that the MacOS interface is a little nicer although there are some areas where Unity is better. This is, of course, just my opinion.
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It still sucks for graphics.
If you use a normal window manager and good quality drivers then it is fairly similar.
(At least meaning Nvidia binary drivers or Xig if you have already a license).
That is the difference between this and what Microsoft are doing is Microsoft haven't degraded performance.
(With the exception of a few very minor cases with specific games when hyperv is enabled).
Large file transfer performance is not meaningful enough. All of them work fine if you use a semi decent way depending on the situation. Linux smb 3.0 performance is obviously not going to be as good as is using anything Canocial made (Going on past experience). nfs4 and Linux might be ok now. Stuff like axel or curl is incredibly fast on Linux. The windows ui standard copy method is pretty good but still better to use robocopy (Or xcopy - probably the powershell copy but I don't know the syntax by heart).
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I absolutely hate Unity, however the Ubuntu base is great and swapping desktops is easy (Kubuntu I find better than Windows 7 to work with)
And that is the great thing about Linux in general, you actually have choice.
Windows 8 users, what choice do they have?
If you running a Nvidia card and not running any Gnome3 based desktop (like Unity) FPS in games is higher in pretty much all games I have tried in Linux - just use a non crap desktop.
"It's too bad that the new privacy features didn't make the cut for this release because one of the best new features in the Unity dash is the new Photo Search Lens, which taps not just any photos you have in Shotwell, but any images you've uploaded to Flickr, Facebook or Google."
I don't really understand the need for searching online locations for files that originated and presumably are still stored, on your hard drive.
Especially as Ubuntu's plan is to run across devices like phones and tablets... most of my photos live locally on my PC (other than those snapped on my phone), but cloud services are one way of making them accessible to mobile devices. If Ubuntu is to be used on mobile devices, it makes sense for it to have a feature like this. Concept / implementation...
"Smart Scopes are part of Canonical's long-term plan to make the Unity Dash as much a web-search interface as application launcher. The goal is to add some 100 different search providers to the Unity Dash, allowing you to search everything from websites like IMDb and DeviantArt to your browser bookmarks, Tomboy notes and more"
So Sherlock from MacOS 8 then?
When kernel 3.9 is released. I have no want or need for features found or not found in Ubuntu 13.04. What I'm interested in is upstream changes to KVM/VFIO that might make things easier for vga passthrough.
Btw am I the only one that doesn't trust some search aggregator with my login credentials? One would assume they would be encrypted but how much care is really taken (they can't store hashes since it's logging in on your behalf)? /shrug. Maybe it's fine and they've taken the proper steps. Still, it's a matter of security over convenience. To some the latter is more important.
I don't understand why people complain about the Amazon lens so much. If you don't need it, just ignore it, it appears at the bottom and so is easily ignored. But when you DO want to buy something from Amazon, it is a quick and easy Amazon search, the results appear in an easily viewable and navigable form with pictures and description making it much faster than viewing the Amazon site. Of course most importantly, every time you purchase something from Amazon, which most of us were doing anyway, Canonical gets a cut from Amazon's end. If you like your free OS, surely that is an easy, free, zero-effort and non-obtrusive way of helping pay for it?
It's also useful for discovering stuff, say searching Dash for your Greenday albums and then seeing that they have a new album out! What luck!
In all honesty the only problem (aside from the occasional slight delay in results) I have with the Amazon lens, is that it is just Amazon and that I have to open a browser and multiple tabs to check out the competitions prices.
"Of course most importantly, every time you purchase something from Amazon, which most of us were doing anyway, Canonical gets a cut from Amazon's end. If you like your free OS, surely that is an easy, free, zero-effort and non-obtrusive way of helping pay for it?"
You make a good argument IMO but there are also flaws within your reasoning. Because lets face it: without Debian there wouldn't be an Ubuntu. Most of the real work isn't done by Canonical at all, but with all the volunteers which maintain the Debian packages, which also eventually find their way into Ubuntu.
As such your argument could also be easily turned around: how much of Canonical's cut finds its way back into Debian? If Canonical likes their free OS so much to build a whole company on top of it, surely its also an easy zero-effort to help pay for it?
Yet somehow I don't see that happening.
With that in mind I think people have every right to complain or share their discomfort. The OS isn't free afterall; it has a pricetag attached. You either pay through advertisement, or invest some of your own time to de-install the whole lot, time costs money too you know.
IMO there's more to this than merely "helping pay for the OS".
@Connor
You seriously don't see a problem with every search term you make on your computer being shared with at least 2 companies, only 1 of which is anonymised, and you just have to take Canonicals word for it that the search terms they pass on to Amazon are anonymised, there is no way for you as a user to check?
No problems searching for the report you've got on your harddisk using the search terms "Terminal Cancer Doctors Report"?
If I'm looking to buy or download something, wouldn't it make sense to add the Amazon search to software center instead?
But If they're stuck on adding all of these searches to the dash, at least offer a prefix to limit the search locally, like "my editor" or "my report" so it only looks on my computer for a file or program containing the word editor or report.
"I don't understand why people complain about the Amazon lens so much."
Maybe, because, let me see, perhaps there are still people who use their computer for work or at least something constructive, other than updating their fecesbook profile, twatting, or buying crappy stuff that they don't need.
Why are software releases rushed out?
Surely its better to say "The release will be delayed 3 months to accommodate all the planned enhancements we promised you" instead of "Here is the release as promised for this date. Oh, by the way, All those features you wanted had to be dropped as we couldn't fit them in to the timeframe."
Software lives and dies by its user base. If you piss the users off by "delivering incomplete releases", you'll kill the product and they'll go elsewhere.
But someone else may see it as "the features we promised you, that you're waiting for, and are ready to ship are going to be delayed for 3 months because something else you don't care about isn't ready yet."
Some companies declare what they're going to ship and wait until it's ready. Some companies say when they're going to ship and ship the things that are ready at that time. Two systems, both good, both bad, it just depends which features you're waiting for.
In all honesty, the non-LTS releases are simply milestones for those wanting the latest and greatest as soon as stable, more or less "Community Previews" in Microsoft's newer marketing lingo for betas. The shortening of the support period from 18 months to 9 months should especially emphasize that point.
If the features get left out of the LTS releases, yeah, I can see your point - you'll have to wait two more years for the features to land in a proper release. That said, the non-LTS releases just can't afford to be delayed. You can usually add a repository for backported features as soon as they're stable (or even before, as is the case with Smart Scopes) if you just can't wait another 3 months for the features to arrive past your hypothesized 3 month delay.
Still has Unity... Oh for the love of a box that says 'click this and you never have to use, need or look at Unity.' (and all the privacy stuff, and anything to do with online searches) and I might care about ubuntu 13.
I so desparately want steam on linux, but not at the price of everything else unbuntu comes with.
Come on Gabe, bring out steam for Mint.
Almost worth an upvote for the musical notes in your reply, - Almost. I guess you are one of the small % of happy Unity users (or just a more vocal one?) so good on you for supporting it.
I have a VM with 12:10 on it and occasional dabble, but god does it stink.
However to know Mint works with Steam. Awesome.
I so desparately want steam on linux, but not at the price of everything else unbuntu comes with.
Come on Gabe, bring out steam for Mint.
As I'm sure you know, Mint basically is Ubuntu with a load of codecs preinstalled BUT without Unity or the online search privacy issue. As a rule of thumb, if it works on Ubuntu then it works on Mint - including Steam.
Considering that the Steam deb has been repackaged for every flavour of Linux under the sun, including Slackware, I'm pretty sure you could find a way of installing it on Mint. Or you could just add the official Steam repository http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ to your repositories, the way the Linux Mint blog recommends.
Still has Unity... Oh for the love of a box that says 'click this and you never have to use, need or look at Unity.' (and all the privacy stuff, and anything to do with online searches) and I might care about ubuntu 13.
You've never heard of Kubuntu? That's what I'm running Steam on. ;-)
I use Ubuntu a lot, but as Kubuntu, either download kubuntu or use the default Unity install then download XFCE and set is as the default.
No privacy issues, no Amazon hook up, and it's fast.
Unity on a two screen ( large panel displays too ) is not a good experience for me.
I have a windows VM running for those things that have no drivers / utilities / whatever yet in Linux but all my work is otherwise done on Kubuntu.
Except for one thing, accessing my office via Citrix on any flavour of linux is excriable, so for that I use the Windows VM and access it from there, orders of magnitude faster that running natively on Linux, Come on Citrix, extractum digitem !!
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