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Ubuntu Open Source Operating Systems Upgrades Linux

Ubuntu 15.10 'Wily Werewolf' Released (omgubuntu.co.uk) 191

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
LichtSpektren writes: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is now released and available, along with its alternative desktop flavors (MATE, Xfce, LXDE, GNOME, KDE, Kylin). This release features Linux 4.2, GCC 5, Python 3.5, and LibreOffice 5. The default version is still using X.org display server and Unity7; Mark Shuttleworth has said that Mir and Unity8 won't arrive until Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus." Not much has changed beyond package updates, other than replacing the invisible overlay scrollbars in Nautilus with the GNOME 3 scrollbars.

Phoronix brings us the only bit of drama regarding this release: Jonathan Riddell, long time overseer of Kubuntu, has resigned with claims that Canonical has "defrauded donors and broke the copyright licenses." Another reader adds a link to a Q & A session with Riddell.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ubuntu 15.10 'Wily Werewolf' Released More

Ubuntu 15.10 'Wily Werewolf' Released

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  • Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by metrix007 ( 200091 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:34AM (#50787391)

    I never liked Ubuntu. I cam from Slackware and it always left a horrible taste in my mouth.

    Cutting edge, poorly tested software like PulseAudio was included in a desperate attempt to keep up with windows, and easy to manage config files was replaced with junk like NetworkManager..and then Unity happened.

    How is it these days? Better? How does it compare to Mint or Fedora or Debian? How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

    • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Funny)

      by metrix007 ( 200091 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:35AM (#50787401)

      I cam from Slackware and it always left a horrible taste in my mouth

      Sigh...phrasing Lana!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?"

      That's easy. Millennial valley hipsters + money.

    • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:43AM (#50787451)
      Speaking as a user of Ubuntu MATE: It has the best hardware support of any distro I have ever used, it has the best selection of default software (except that obnoxious GNOME Keyring/Seahorse, which I replace with KeePass X). I have not had any problems with PulseAudio, NetworkManager, or systemd.

      Mint is about just as good honestly, so if you have some moral qualms against Canonical (e.g. because of the Amazon search plug-in), it's a perfectly viable alternative. Fedora is too crashy for me to use--that's just my experience. I like Debian a lot, but I have to fiddle with the defaults far too much for my taste (I give lots of Ubuntu MATE USBs to my friends and co-workers to try out, it's a lot more user friendly than Debian is).

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I prefer Windows 10. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.

        • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23, 2015 @10:37AM (#50787893)

          I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux, better install and upgrades, better privacy, better control and better overall experience. Gaming is great on Steam and Netflix is supported on Chrome Browser. The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.

          Best of luck, whatever W10 will become. I'll keep my W7 inside VirtualBox, for special applications only use. Works for me. Happy that W10 works for you.

          • I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux

            For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*

            The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.

            On a few laptops such as the EeeBook [debian.org], volunteers for the DebianOn project couldn't get sound, Wi-Fi, or suspend working at all. Should I instead ask on Ubuntu Forums for what small laptops sold now work well with Xubuntu 15.xx?

            * By "works well", I include at least graphics, multi-window window management, audio, Wi-Fi, suspend, and a bootloader that doesn't beg the user to wipe the drive every time it is turned on the way a Chromebook with Crouton does.

            • I'm currently running Ubuntu 15.10 MATE on an HP Stream 13 and everything works perfectly.

            • Ubuntu 15.10 is likely precisely what's needed - linux 4.2 feels bleeding edge.
              Should work with recent Intel graphics (never buy anything with PowerVR unless it's strictly for Windows or Android..) and acts as a stop gap to Ubuntu 16.04 or Mint 18.
              Then everything will be great - in a very small window before new hardware is released again.

            • For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*

              You mentioned chromebooks with crouton, but I've got perfect hardware support for two chromebooks (Dell Chromebook 11 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 13") running Ubuntu natively (no useless ChromeOS is present on either chromebook). (The great John Lewis [johnlewis.ie] has a simple script to rewrite the bios and bootloader; I highly recommend it). Hardware support was flaky a year ago, but since 15.04 it's been pretty much native support out of the box (the only exception being the Toshiba's microphone, which should be fixed

        • I prefer Windows 10. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.

          That's funny -- I prefer Ubuntu. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.

          It's clear that you're a time traveller from 2002, so you may not realise that everything "just works" under linux these days too.

          I know, it's crazy. Welcome to the future.

    • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:46AM (#50787483)

      How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      It was (and still is) dead-easy to install. Even the first iteration had an extremely streamlined installation-process (the less questions you ask, the easier the process) and stellar hardware auto-detection. Coupled with one-click download of non-free drivers it is pretty obvious why Ubuntu became the mainstream-linux.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        It was (and still is) dead-easy to install. Even the first iteration had an extremely streamlined installation-process (the less questions you ask, the easier the process) and stellar hardware auto-detection. Coupled with one-click download of non-free drivers it is pretty obvious why Ubuntu became the mainstream-linux.

        Well yes, but you had other distros that were easy and desktop-oriented too. Under the hood though, it was quite glitchy. Debian had (and has) a very good reputation, but they were clearly building a server distro - release cycle, text-mode installer, asking obscure questions, no LiveCD, installing it felt more like an entry-level exam than a welcome mat. And I think quite a few Debian users liked it that way and were rather unhelpful and hostile towards n00bs. Ubuntu just took that "Debian for the desktop"

    • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Grishnakh ( 216268 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:47AM (#50787495)

      You must not have been paying attention ~10 years ago. Ubuntu rose to #1 because they put an emphasis on easy installation, and achieved it at a time when all the other distros were broken in one way or another. Back then, installing Linux was always a bit of a chore; there was always something broken that you'd have to go manually fix, which of course dissuaded most casual users who weren't familiar with the Unix command line, manually installing device drivers, editing your "easy to manage config files" with vi, etc.

      Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.

      Of course, other distros finally caught up mostly, but Ubuntu was the first one there.

      Of course, that was long before they came up with crap like Unity, the Amazon lens, etc., and this was also well before Mint came along, since Mint is itself an Ubuntu derivative.

      My advice: if you want an easy-to-install distro where you don't have to screw around with stuff, and want a sane though more traditional UI, just pick any one of the Mint flavors. I like the KDE one personally, but the others all have their fans too and seem to be good. All of them have more traditional UIs, and haven't gone for the radical new UI concepts seen in Gnome3, Unity, Windows8+, etc. The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.

      • Re:Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:50AM (#50787515)
        Mint is superior to Ubuntu in many ways. The only reason I prefer Ubuntu MATE to Mint MATE is because of the automatic security updates and backup tools, which are more convenient for when I install Linux on my co-workers' or friends' computers.
        • Begs the question: "In Many Ways"? What ways? Is the Gnome3 shell more up-to-date and running on Wayland?

          • The phrase you were looking was: Raises the question.

            • Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. "Many ways" as in "What many ways?"
          • Neither Mint nor Ubuntu have Wayland or Mir yet. I prefer Ubuntu because its scheduled backup and security update tools are easier to automate. Mint's "software center" is far superior to Ubuntu's, though. I've also found WINE and multi-monitor support to be better in Mint.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KGIII ( 973947 )

          You know that Mint is Ubuntu under the hood, right? It's a fork and still uses the Ubuntu package repos. I do use Cinnamon quite a bit. In fact, my laptop that I'm using now has Cinnamon on it if I were to actually boot to that partition. I'm booted to Lubuntu, however.

          • Yes, Ubuntu and Mint are almost the same under the hood. However, as far as I can tell, there's no way to automate security updates in Mint without writing a cron script. Plus I prefer Deja Dup/duplicity (in Ubuntu by default) to whatever Mint's backup tool is.

            Another issue is the fact that Mint is based off of 14.04 LTS packages, whereas 15.10 packages are much newer. Since I write Python 3 scripts, that's a bit more convenient for me.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by KGIII ( 973947 )

              I did end up wiping it off one computer. Xserver wouldn't stay running - it crashed. The most I could get was a few days of uptime which is antithetical to my use of Linux. It crashed and sent me to the tty screen. No amount of tweaking ever made it work on that desktop. So, I gave Lubuntu a try on it - still running it. In fact, I updated it to 15.10 via VNC last night - nary a problem and VNC still ran on boot so I was happy. (That was fun to configure...*sighs*)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Meh.

        Ubuntu was always little more than Debian with a few tweaks. They are a little bit more "desktop centric" but that about it. This persistent myth that Ubuntu was the first distribution to be "easy" is just bullshit. Most of what Ubuntu interesting was cribbed wholesale from Debian.

        This bogus "legend of Ubuntu" seems to be the best explanation of it's success as anything. It's all empty marketing.

        In the old days, lot of the "manual" futzing was a product of primitive hardware that was never designed for

        • Re:Ugh (Score:4, Informative)

          by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @10:31AM (#50787843)

          Ubuntu, in the early days, was Debian made easy. You could download and install an early Ubuntu release in about the same time it took you to decide which Debian CDs you needed, and what you probably wanted to install. Of course, for experienced Debian users, Ubuntu offered little new. However, it made the system accessible to the masses.

          • Re:Ugh (Score:5, Informative)

            by cdwiegand ( 2267 ) <chris@wiegandfamily.com> on Friday October 23, 2015 @10:50AM (#50787975) Homepage

            Also Ubuntu was vastly more up to date than Debian, which always was running 2+ years old libraries. Great for long term servers, not great for cutting edge development and deployments.

          • Ubuntu, in the early days, was Debian made easy. You could download and install an early Ubuntu release in about the same time it took you to decide which Debian CDs you needed, and what you probably wanted to install.

            Hmm... that must've been in the VERY "early days." I remember trying out Ubuntu in 2006 and found it still to be a pain to even get basic things going. I owned one of the most popular Dell monitors on the market with one of the most popular and basic video cards sold in a standard Dell business desktop (which was not even a new model), and I was writing my config files manually just to get the display resolutions to work.

            Anyhow, I was distrohopping a bit at the time, and I decided to give Debian a try a

            • Hmm... that must've been in the VERY "early days." I remember trying out Ubuntu in 2006 and found it still to be a pain to even get basic things going.

              That sounds similar to my experience when I tried Ubuntu in 2006. I think it was 8.04 that was the first version that worked well enough for me to use it full-time.

            • Hmm... that must've been in the VERY "early days."

              mmm, the days when we were wondering if sarge would ever be released.....

            • Ubuntu around 2004 (warty) was were I began and even though I'd played around quite a bit in years past with Linux, where I finally took the plunge and went with Linux as my only OS. Thinking back on it, it was probably equal parts the community which was great at the time in IRC and the distro. My first experience in IRC in #debian a few years earlier... did not go well.

        • Meh.

          Ubuntu was always little more than Debian with a few tweaks. They are a little bit more "desktop centric" but that about it. This persistent myth that Ubuntu was the first distribution to be "easy" is just bullshit. Most of what Ubuntu interesting was cribbed wholesale from Debian.

          "easy" != "interesting". What made Ubuntu popular was that it was all the Debian goodness of apt, combined with all the useful goodness of software that wasn't three years out of date, and a mature, elegant theme wrapping the whole thing up. To me, Ubuntu has been the only distro I could recommend to newbies without any doubt that everything would work, and work well. And these days, when I no longer have time to build everything by hand, Ubuntu is the OS that gets out of the way and just lets me do my w

      • No, I only stopped paying attention about 3 or 4 years ago. I got tired of the pointless "Year of the desktop" nonsense, and outgrew my need to have a loyality to any one OS, understanding that some things are better for different purposes than others. Something most of the FOSS community hasn't matured enough to realize.

        10 years ago, Linux was a thing for hobbyists and people interested in computers to learn more. The config files were never difficult, although understandably for non-hobbyists/enthusiasts

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swv3752 ( 187722 )

          Mandrake, the company, made some bad business decisions. They brought in some American MBA's and started branching into some stupid directions like E-learning.

        • I got tired of the pointless "Year of the desktop" nonsense, and outgrew my need to have a loyality to any one OS, understanding that some things are better for different purposes than others. Something most of the FOSS community hasn't matured enough to realize.

          Hey, if you like having all your keystrokes sent to Microsoft, knock yourself out. But to say that it's "immature" to not want a keylogger installed on your system is rather asinine IMO.

          • No one is saying it's immature to not want a keylogger on your system.

            It's funny, there is a good chance whichever browser you are using acts as more of a keylogger than Windows 10 does. In any event, the only keylogger risk, and it's a stretch to even call it that, is with Windows 10.

            It's asinine to assume that a product is sending keystrokes and personal information just because it is closed source. The many eyes theory doesn't just apply to code.

            • Windows 10 is widely acknowledged to have a keylogger. Even Microsoft admits it. It's not about closed-source software, it's about Windows, which is the only other viable OS on commodity hardware besides Linux. And it's not just Windows 10, the keylogger was added into Windows 8 and 7 with Windows Updates.

              So, it's a really simple choice: either you use Windows and have a keylogger with all your passwords being sent to Microsoft, or you use Linux. (Or you spend thousands for a Macbook.)

      • Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.

        Well, sort of. Ubuntu certainly got a lot closer to that sort of experience, but it wasn't a decade ago. I still tried installing it on stock computers from major manufacturers 5 years ago and would have to go through command line hoops to get some stuff working.

        Mint pulled ahead of Ubuntu around this time because (at least in my experience) it was even more focused on the casual user experience. Even when it got the hardware right, Ubuntu presented you with broken media plugins and such. Mint just fo

        • Mint pulled ahead of Ubuntu in my mind when Ubuntu went to Unity/Gnome 3 and Mint still had MATE ...

          • I think that's what I said. The move to Unity "dethroned Ubuntu from the top distro position." My post was just clarifying that Mint was not a "tiny" distro before that -- it may have been as high as #3 earlier, so hardly a minor player.

          • A quibble: Mint didn't "still have" MATE when Gnome3 and Unity came out. At least that's not how I remember it. MATE was created by the Mint community, alongside Cinnamon (a parallel project), *when* Gnome3 came out and pissed everyone off. MATE was really a fork of Gnome2, ported to use the Gtk3 libraries.

      • Not just that, but Ubuntu was probably the first with a cleaned up repository with reasonable dependencies.

        Back then it wouldn't be uncommon to have circular dependencies or installing one application will force another one to either not work or get removed.

        • I never had that problem, both in ubuntu and contemporary debian (lenny, etc.)

          But another major aspect is there are many thousands of packages, all accessible after a default installation. No need to enable additional or dubious repositories yourself and for a few occurrences using a ppa is easy enough.
          You can look for all sorts of unusual, cool or useful software with a few apt-cache search|sort commands, even software you would never have found about or didn't know you needed (or have a use for).

          There was

          • I never had that problem, both in ubuntu and contemporary debian (lenny, etc.)

            He's not talking about Ubuntu having repo problems, he's probably talking about other distros like Red Hat. A lot of stuff back then was really broken in Linux-land. Ubuntu really helped out a lot, and raised the bar greatly; it's too bad they had to screw things up later.

      • Even 10 years ago, Ubuntu wasn't the easiest to install or use. MEPIS was better on those criteria, but was a one man project without any marketing money.

    • Re:Ugh (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:48AM (#50787499)

      How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      People like yourself who seem to think that Linux has to be hard to use or else it's not cool.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get and that's something that Ubuntu stole from Debian.

        Much of the rest is just kernel level stuff and the advent of PnP standards for hardware that make automation a no-brainer. Most of what Ubuntu gets credit for was probably developed by kernel contributors like Redhat (kudzu).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get

          How does it compare to yum in Fedora and CentOS?

          • How does it compare to yum in Fedora and CentOS?

            Nowadays, they're pretty much equal. Years ago that didn't used to be the case. APT used to have far more packages available in the default repositories as compared to YUM, and used to perform quite a bit better. At some point YUM switched to using sqlite to store it's metadata which improved performance quite a bit, and the availability of the EPEL [fedoraproject.org] repository greatly increased the number of packages available to be on par with APT.

        • The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get and that's something that Ubuntu stole from Debian.

          They didn't "steal" anything. Ubuntu is based on Debian.

          You know, Open Source.

    • Re:Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by reiscw ( 2427662 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:52AM (#50787531)

      I run Ubuntu on a desktop and four laptops (two ThinkPads, an Inspiron, and an older HP G60). I upgraded them all yesterday to 15.10. It has gotten a lot more stable lately (15.04/15.10). It used to be that when I ran it (back it the 13.04 / 13.10 / 14.10 non-LTS releases) that you'd get a lot of random crashes ("your system has encountered a problem"). With the 4.2 kernel and the bug fixes they've been putting into Unity it works pretty well. I'm not a full-time developer (a math / cs teacher), but I like Unity. I like being able to do super+F to search files, super+A to search applications. It is a very keyboard friendly interface (at least to me it is).
       
      The other thing that makes it better (again, to me) than Gnome 3.14/3.16/3.18 is that it also utilizes space better (no annoying title bars, and integrating application menus into the top panel is also nice). I used to run Debian (stable) for stability but now that Ubuntu is getting more and more stable (and frankly, more stable in my opinion than Cinnamon on Mint) I've moved pretty much full time to Ubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      Cutting edge, poorly tested software like PulseAudio was included in a desperate attempt to keep up with windows, and easy to manage config files was replaced with junk like NetworkManager..and then Unity happened.

      None of that crap has anything whatever to do with Ubuntu except Unity. PulseAudio and NetworkManager (systemd too) are in just about all the distros - certainly in Fedora and RHEL. In fact they were pushed on all of us by Red Hat, with all of the distros falling over themselves panting to adopt t

      • Fedora is known to be cutting edge, that's the point. Beat software should nto have been pushed on end users, that is directly attributable to the Ubuntu dev team.

        • Fedora is known to be cutting edge, that's the point. Beat software should nto have been pushed on end users, that is directly attributable to the Ubuntu dev team.

          But that was a pervasive policy in Ubuntu -- it was trying to be as "cutting edge" as Fedora anyway. Ubuntu based a lot of its packages at the time of Pulseaudio, etc. adoption in Debian "experimental." It's not surprising that software that was alpha or barely beta releases would break all over the place (which was my experience with Ubuntu back around that time).

    • How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      This is sort of a strange way to phrase this, considering that Mint is built on top of Ubuntu (except for the newer Debian edition) . It's basically Ubuntu with a more traditional desktop and a few additional utilities. Canonical hasn't always make the best decisions, in many people's opinion, but you can give them a lot of credit, especially early on, by helping to popularize a very "friendly" version of Linux on the desktop.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @10:00AM (#50787585)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Huh, I disagree, but that's an interesting opinion.

        I disagree because Ubuntu was often the least stable, and there were easier to use distros available. No doubt they are stable now (I mean, all major operating systems are these days). I'd say Mandrake beat Ubuntu by quite a few years on being an easy to use, polished distro.

        Also, OS X is not easy to use. It's counter-intuitive as hell.

        • I would disagree about OS X. People that don't have a good knowledge of PCs seem to take to OS X pretty quickly without the need for a lot of hand holding.

        • OS X is not easy to use. It's counter-intuitive as hell.

          It depends on your background. If you already know a UI, switching to another one will feel annoying and counterintuitive unless the new one works almost exactly like the first. But I remember reading that complete computer illiterate beginners, including small children, get up to speed in Mac OS X's UI in less time than they do in other UIs. If that's accurate, the claim that Mac OS X is in general more intuitive would be correct.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Pulseaudio really has SQUAT to do with "ease of configuration". That already existed with ALSA. What pulseaudio added was "features" that ALSA didn't have.

        Ubuntu (and the rest) "just worked" fine before pulseaudio. If anything, adopting pulse too quickly caused Ubuntu to "not just work" anymore for a lot of people. It still has a bad reputation because of this.

        People are choosing to have selective amnesia when it comes to Ubuntu+pulse now.

        It's the same amnesia that cause people to pretend that Ubuntu is som

        • How does ALSA deal with hotplugging?

          Pulse Audio has kinda-sorta lumbered into a working position now. I mean sure, on one machine I had to compile a newer version from the source because if the volume was too loud it would flip to headphones at random, and sometimes just rapidly flip back and forth. And on the other machine I have to kill it every so often because the sound gets corrupt.

          But 99% of the time it works.

          Oh and this is the message you get when you try to download it:

          Typically PulseAudio would be

      • > Ubuntu "just works
        > Is it perfect? No.

        Can't I say the same about Windows, or OSX, or Android, or anything?

        Ubuntu used to be a great distro, until that awful Gnome3 distro (10.11?). Going downhill fast since then.

    • It's worth remembering why Ubuntu included software like PulseAudio and NetworkManager and why it wanted to keep up with Windows. Windows was an "it just works" system. Install Windows, Install drivers, done. Back then installing Linux was a challenge, once it was installed you had to go find your missing hardware, if you got it going then you spent ages trawling through text files, figuring out why the the default OSS output was the headphones despite nothing being plugged into it, why your network didn't

      • I don't remember Linux being difficult to install right before pulseaudio, and networkmanager; and then being easy to install afterwards.

        WAY before pulseaudio, Linux may have been difficult to install, for a lot a reasons; but not just before.

        Besides, how often do you install an OS? A debian install used to last for years.

        • Re-read my comment: I didn't say that PulseAudio and NetworkManager made installing Linux easier.
          I said It's worth remembering why they were trying to keep up with Windows, and why (by extension) they adopted software LIKE PulseAudio and NetworkManager.

          Those two are just another 2 programs that moved Linux to an easier to manage, easier to administer OS that works as opposed to what it was back before Ubuntu was popular; a toy / serious tool for nerds willing to dedicate serious time to making it work.

          Peopl

    • @metrix007: "How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?"

      The large userbase, works best out of the box, installing/upgrading can't be any easier using Synaptic and you've got a choice of desktops.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:44AM (#50787457)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      I've done it three times with 100% success and no issues except needing to reconfigure some samba settings - it even warned me about this and was unable to merge them together. I could have kept the original but I opted to wipe and just reconfigure.

  • So what does it change into during a full moon? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sims 2 ( 994794 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:47AM (#50787497)

    Windows?

  • Ubuntu with tweaks (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iTrawl ( 4142459 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @09:52AM (#50787533)

    Installing cairo-dock, and, optionally, running xfwm4 as the WM, makes Ubuntu actually very usable in my case. Greased lightning usable. And cairo-dock even has some bling thrown in! It put it to the left and made it autohide, so it kind of looks like Unity when in use.

    I like Unity's menu-in-titlebar feature. I lose that with cairo-dock, but that's compensated by not having a gnome-style top bar - well... you do, but it goes under the applications and comes up when you hover the clock (which overlays a small part of the titlebar (when application is maximised) that is otherwise useless anyway).

    The root of my preferences lies in this need: as much space for _my_ application and as little as possible for the OS, but easily accessible when I need its functions, without running any occult desktop environments :)

  • I look forward to the next release, Xenophobic Xenu. And they say that there's going to be some big changes with Yogic Yosafbridge.

  • too many broken things right after a fresh clean install of ubuntu, ill stick with trusty ol Debian

    it has been almost two years since slackware Slackware released a distro, thats a long time but at least Debian and Slackware can be depended on to actually make something rock solid and stable.

  • I'm looking forward to Xenophobic Xylophone...

  • I started using Ubuntu in the 5.x series. I loved it. I loved Gnome way more than KDE. The Gnome 3 came out. I thought that Unity was better than Gnome 3 and I happily continued to use Ubuntu. Then Gnome 3 became really good. I moved to Fedora, and started to flip flop back and forth every six months to compare the changes in Unity vs Gnome 3. I got to a point where I thought Gnome 3 had pretty much kicked Unity's ass and I saw no reason to go to Ubuntu.

    Then I discovered Arch Linux. I don't think I

  • ubuntu's side of the story, re: jonathan riddell (Score:5, Informative)

    by dmoen ( 88623 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @11:13AM (#50788169) Homepage

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150618010547/http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2015/05/29/community-council-statement-jonathan-riddell/

    I'm not taking sides, just providing extra information that's not in the original post.

  • On a related topic, where in the hell do they come up with these wackyfunny names for the releases???

    Someone obviously has vast amounts of free time and a giant encyclopedia collection.

  • Maybe all these developers and outfits could begin to forgo the cutesy release names. It's really getting old, not to mention harder to find decent names.

  • Mark Shuttleworth has said that Mir and Unity8 won't arrive until Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus."

    Just like 6 months ago we heard it wouldn't be in 15.04, but would be in 15.10 and 6 months before that we heard it wouldn't be in 14.10 but would be in 15.04 and 6 months before that...
    Wager on hearing the same thing 6 months from now? "Well 16.04 is an LTS, it's all about stability, so no risk taking with another version of Unity. It will be available in 16.10".

  • LMDE still systemd free (Score:4, Informative)

    by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Friday October 23, 2015 @05:48PM (#50790921)

    Systemd Will Be Adopted Starting With Linux Mint 18 And LMDE 3
    http://linuxg.net/systemd-will-be-adopted-starting-with-linux-mint-18-and-lmde-3/

    Still able to avoid that awful crap for another few years.

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