Ubuntu 12.04

[GJones]

It's here! And it's actually quite good, IMO. Main issues are:

- Bad out-of-the-box performance. This can mostly be solved by reducing swappiness, and disabling sync-to-vblank on weak video cards. With sync-to-vblank disabled, Unity 3D is faster than 2D with Intel 945 graphics.

- Ubuntu Software Center is still overcomplicated bloatware.

- Far too many updates, especially considering how recently 12.04 was released. (There's already 140+ MB worth of updates if you install from the live CD.)

- Unity is still a bit rough around the edges ergonomically.

All told though, I am highly impressed. This release is very, very close to being good enough to recommend to complete novices.

[GJones]

Gah... Spoke too soon.

This distro performs very well on the laptop, thank you, but is unbelievably slow and buggy on my netbook. For some reason Unity 3D has enabled all kinds of compiz effects on the underpowered netbook that weren't turn on on the more powerful laptop, and
- Compiz crashes whenever I disable one of the effects plugins
- The bug report daemon that starts when something crashes is itself a massive CPU hog
- Unity 3D takes over a minute to start
- Unity 2D is laggy and unreponsive, as per 11.10

I don't really understand this; the netbook is less powerful, but the graphics chipset is supposed to be exactly the same as the laptop's. So I'm kind of baffled about the automatic eyecandy and the Compiz crashes, never mind Unity 3D taking so long to start.

(Also, there's a bug in Brasero that causes DVD+RW burning to silently fail. Yay.)

[GJones]

Umm wow. I'm going to have to eat my words here... I got a random Xorg crash on the laptop. IMO that's totally unacceptable on a modern OS. Bye-bye Ubuntu.

[thenktor]

I've tried 11.x on a brand new netbook about 2 month ago. Unity is unusable and horrible slow. Won't try it again

[ElderDryas]

But it's real pretty....oooo...shiney!

[GJones]

Amusingly Unity 2D performs far better with DRI turned *off*. I'm getting the impression that something is borked with Xorg's direct rendering capabilities.

BTW, the "Unity 2D takes several minutes to log out" bug still exists as well. Yay!

[DavidMcCann]

Some people can't even install it! I've been testing Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu for my Linux Questions reviews and only Kubuntu installed from the live CD: the others all needed the alternative curses installer. There's a long discussion on the forum in which they rule out various hardware causes, while over 50 people have posted a bug report.

[GJones]

For my crashes the noapic kernel parameter seemed to work...

Pretty sad though. A novice's introduction to Linux should not involve crashes.

(IMO it would be nice if more distros adopted the approach of keeping desktop applications up to date, while maintaining older, stable versions of core system software, a la Slackware and RHEL. I mean, it worked for Windows XP...)

[stillborn]

2 good reviews
http://dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-pangolin.html
http://dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-p ... h-end.html

[GJones]

He calls that Thinkpad T61P "low end"? Who the heck is he kidding? That thing has a faster CPU than my Dell Precision workstation, 2 GB of RAM, a nVidia Quadro GPU with 256 MB onboard memory... And it starts with a 7200 RPM hard drive, as opposed to the normal laptop 5400 RPM, only he replaced that with an SSD. No freakin' duh he gets good results, that laptop is a monster.