Again I’ll present a short new features from the next Ubuntu release (this time „Jaunty Jackalope“) to an audience of about 150 to 200 visitors at the upcoming traditional „Ubuntu release party“ at c-base organized by „Ubuntu Berlin“. While it’s worth noting that this event will happen on Saturday, the 25th of April, so when the release is still a hot topic, and the very friendly guys from „Berliner Fenster„, the local metro television system, are going to support release and release party by sponsoring spots, I am curious about the new features in Jaunty Jackalope that you like emphazise – be it a litte eye candy or, a command line tool or a major innovation.
After using Jaunty for about a month now I think the graphical changes really please my eyes. I like the new notification scheme (though it feels still young and there is a lot to do like implementing it to common applications like Thunderbird), introduced by Mark Shuttleworth some months ago. Moreover while not currently using Evolution myself I am impressed about reading about „evolution-mapi„, enabling Evolution to access Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 servers by talking the native Exchange mapi protocol and and not using the neat but slow owa (web) wrapper. Yes, that seems to be a techie feature but it might improve acceptance of Ubuntu/Gnome/Evolution in enterprise setups dramatically.
Your turn now. What is your new killer feature or just tiny improvement you like most? Let me know, and I promise, I’ll try to include it into my presentation.
The reason why I switched to Jaunty some weeks ago was the free radeon driver which supports Xv and EXA for R6xx/R7xx (Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx) and do not have tearing problems like fglrx (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/303697 )
1. Eye-candy, specifically the pretty new notifications.
2. Better support for multiple monitors (no more crashes or necessity to restart compiz after xrandr). There are still plenty of bugs left, but many were fixed.
-1 (aka top 1 misfeature): either the intel driver’s new slowness (with EXA) or stability problems (with UXA).
I have to say the prettiness of the new notifications significantly outweigh everything else. You may have noticed that I put a lot of value in aesthetics. (Not all the value, since I’m using a free OS instead of a Mac).
The new version of Networkmanager works far better than with previous versions, and Ext4 is great.
But favourite?
Simply that it works well (far better than 8.04 and 8.10), and that they seem to have done good, solid work with the KDE 4.2.2 implementation. Mind you there will be a few glitches due to the Qt 4.5 shift (officially due for KDE 4.3.)
Good thing with the new kernel/Xorg/Nvidia driver combo is that the suspend/hibernation issues are resolved. 9.04 works great with ThinkPad T61.
The new notification system is just a way to say „look, there’s something new“, but it’s in no way better than the old one. Just because MS said „I don’t like buttons on notifications“ we should completely get rid of them? That’s ridiculous.
Now, some of my applications show a dialog box when they should not (e.g., Decibel Audio Player when enabling the „skip track“ action on notifications). The old system was working fine, so *why the hell change it*? Now the notifications are all black so that I can hardly read the text, and they stay for so little time on screen that I don’t have time to read what’s written on it.
Fast boot everytime.
It’s interesting to see how different the new notification system is evaluated. Some users are quite enthusiastic about it while others have cannot accept it due to different reasons (colors, features, range of implementation).
The overall look of 9.04 is just gorgeous. I’ve been running the netbook version on my MSI u120 for the past few weeks and I _definitely_ prefer it to the default OS that was on it when I bought it (winXP).
I’m currently downloading the desktop version RC for my desktop right now! *excited*!
i have been using it for a month now. for me, more stable than intrepid, , faster boot time, and slightly more polished dark theme.