Ubuntu: Anyone else skipping 10.10?

[eveningsky339]

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat becomes available in just a few days.

From what I have read, there will be some interesting changes with this release, but nothing that would prompt me move on from a nice LTS release like Lucid.

Support for Karmic ends in six months, which will be a sad day for me. Karmic was my favorite of the "Human" themed releases. I have it sharing a /home partition with Lucid, which is a bit of a pain in the rear, but the nostalgia is worth it.

Looks like a quiet release for Ubuntu, which of course is prompting some people to complain about the six-month release cycle. It would appear that the Fedora camp is in the same boat; nothing earth-shattering with the release of 14.

 

[SiberianTiger]

What kernel version do they ship with Maverick? Last time I tried to install Lucid on my PC, I got a kernel panic (I believe, because it didn't like my chipset). Probably, the new kernel has the problem solved.

 

[eveningsky339]

I'm not sure but I believe it's 2.6.35. I have the lucid-backports repository enabled so I receive the newer kernels when they hit downstream, but it looks like I'm still running on 2.6.32.

 

[Artlav]

Me.
Honestly, i skipped all of latter Ubuntu's.

What made you choose Ubuntu among all the never-at-peace distros?

 

[n122vu]

Will probably stick with 10.04 on my old T41. Runs great & I don't see any reason to upgrade yet. Been playing with CentOS 5 in VirtualBox and thinking about swapping the HD out in the 41 and loading that for a bit for kicks.

 

[Wishbone]

You don't need to install Linux on a separate computer. I do it in a VMware virtual machine, pretty good for my purposes. Installation is quite painless, with only password/username as significant inputs. Unfortunately, I don't remember which version of Ubuntu I have...

 

[eveningsky339]

Me.
Honestly, i skipped all of latter Ubuntu's.

I will say I'm not entirely thrilled with the new "Light" theme...

What made you choose Ubuntu among all the never-at-peace distros?

Ubuntu was my first Linux distro, so I'm extremely comfortable with it, even more so than Windows.

I went on a distro-hopping journey after Lucid and hit a number of stops-- Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, PCLinuxOS, PC-BSD (not Linux...), NetBSD (also not Linux...), CentOS, Linux Mint, and more than I cannot recall off the top of my head. All these OS's were excellent in their own rights, but each had a deal-breaker. I have some free time before bed so I may as well ramble.

Fedora-- too unstable, support was too short for each release
openSUSE-- not a fan of KDE (though it's gorgeous and well-integrated here), enabling multimedia was a nightmare, package management via YaST felt "incomplete"
Debian-- took some work to get it where I wanted, software was often out-of-date even with backports, FOSS purism was a little much, release cycle longer than the Great Wall of China
PCLinuxOS-- no 64 bit version, felt a little too "informal," disorganized desktop, but otherwise I actually liked this one
PC-BSD-- Hardware support lags behind Linux
NetBSD-- lolwut
CentOS-- This was pretty nice, but it is more suited for servers, and it shows
Linux Mint-- I liked this one too, but... it's too... green?

All in all I choose to stay with Ubuntu for a number of reasons. The apt package management system is wonderful. Ease-of-use is a plus for me. The strong community is a big help. I prefer GNOME, though KDE is beautiful and I am fairly comfortable using it. The release cycle and length of support is just right for me-- 18 months for a normal release, which means I can still run Karmic even as Maverick looms, and 3 years for a desktop LTS release, so I technically don't have to worry about upgrading my system for that length of time if I so choose.

I think Lucid will be sticking around for a bit. Damn shame Karmic is losing support.

 

[Linguofreak]

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat becomes available in just a few days.

From what I have read, there will be some interesting changes with this release, but nothing that would prompt me move on from a nice LTS release like Lucid.

I've not really been following Maverick. I had been running Jaunty on this box (actually, being a laptop, it's more of a "slab" than a "box"), and just finished upgrading through to Lucid today, and I don't plan another upgrade until Piquant Penguin (or whatever 12.04 is called).

Support for Karmic ends in six months, which will be a sad day for me. Karmic was my favorite of the "Human" themed releases. I have it sharing a /home partition with Lucid, which is a bit of a pain in the rear, but the nostalgia is worth it.

Other than the boot screen, I don't notice too much difference between Jaunty and Lucid, and almost none between Karmic and Lucid (granted, I spent only a little bit of time on Karmic, and haven't done much with Lucid yet). Then again, i did an in-place upgrade rather than a fresh install, and I had my own theme set up that carried through the upgrade.

Other than that, I did notice that the various sound-control dialogs had change when I was trying to track down a sound problem after the Jaunty -> Karmic portion of the update. (Seriously, for an LTS, can't they make a direct upgrade available for everything since the last LTS?). The upgrade had installed a software modem driver, and for some reason that was suppressing recognition of my sound card. Once that was gone, everything was ducky. Oh, and when I restarted at the end of the Karmic -> Lucid phase, I noticed that it didn't technically do a restart: It just left X, loaded the new kernel, and went from there...

 

[movieman]

I'm thinking about it after my last upgrade experience: my girlfriend gets upset if MythTV doesn't record CSI for her, so I may wait until 11.04 instead .

That said, I might put it on the netbook to get the new netbook interface, which looks interesting; though I tried the RC and the netbook interface also seems pretty buggy.

 

[eveningsky339]

I've not really been following Maverick. I had been running Jaunty on this box (actually, being a laptop, it's more of a "slab" than a "box"), and just finished upgrading through to Lucid today, and I don't plan another upgrade until Piquant Penguin (or whatever 12.04 is called).

I've been keeping an eye on Maverick for a while but there really isn't a lot of new stuff. Newer kernel which you can probably grab via lucid-backports anyway, a new font family, better support for Gwibber which I hardly use, abandoning gdebi in favor of an Ubuntu Software Center extension of some sort...

Then again, i did an in-place upgrade rather than a fresh install, and I had my own theme set up that carried through the upgrade.

Yikes, I never do that. Separate /home and fresh installs for me. Every dist-upgrade I've attempted has ended in tragedy, and from what I gather I'm not the only one. Something Canonical needs to work on IMO.

(Seriously, for an LTS, can't they make a direct upgrade available for everything since the last LTS?).

Yet another of my Ubuntu pet-peeves. :tiphat: I may send a few emails to the S-man and instigate some change.

 

[Linguofreak]

Yikes, I never do that. Separate /home and fresh installs for me. Every dist-upgrade I've attempted has ended in tragedy, and from what I gather I'm not the only one. Something Canonical needs to work on IMO.

Well, I do have /home on a separate partition (the computer came that way, plus I wanted it that way after my botched Jaunty upgrade on the other machine, though that continued even after a fresh install, due to the fact that it was dropped Linux support for my ATI card that was the cause), and I also backed it up to an external drive before the install (I wanted to just image the whole drive and backup root, but I found out that that takes a *really* long time).

My plan was to try a dist-upgrade first, then wipe and reinstall if it went badly. It seems to have gone well, (apart from uninstalling flash, so I had to reinstall it, which fortunately went without incident), so I'm not doing the wipe and reinstall.

---------- Post added at 03:10 ---------- Previous post was at 02:42 ----------

Linux Mint-- I liked this one too, but... it's too... green?

I've not tried it myself, but does default theme really matter? Practically all modern OS's are ugly as sin, so I take for granted that I'll be doing some theming, and themability is a big issue for me. (One reason that I don't use KDE, I haven't figured out how to change certain things).

 

[eveningsky339]

10.10 is running on KVM for me. Installer was fabulous, and I will say that I was floored by how good the new font looked. I was not expecting anything special in that department.

Otherwise Maverick isn't too terribly different from Lucid, so I think I'll hang on until Narwhal hits the servers.

Strangely I'm not getting anything in lucid-backports, I was waiting for my new kernel today... :compbash2:

---------- Post added 10-11-10 at 02:08 PM ---------- Previous post was 10-10-10 at 10:37 PM ----------

In conclusion, it would appear that Maverick is more or less a "polished" Lucid. Ubuntu tends to ship with a few bugs but I've read a lot of people saying that Maverick is an exception. It would appear that most of the changes are under the hood.

Since Lucid is working well for me (my only complaint is the "disappearing power button" bug), I will stick to it and wait for lucid-backports to become populated. Though it appears that this won't be happening for a while. I got my hands on the updated Gwibber and "Me Menu" but that's about it.

 

[jthill]

Maverick definitely feels snappier than Lucid.

I had problems with the dist-upgrade through update-manager (to the rc, at the time), but it was in the configure phase so dpkg --configure -a on restart fixed it all up for me. I'm glad I upgraded.