Category

I was a bit disappointed to discover the 7.10 release of ubuntu wont be officially out until the middle of the month. However the team are making solid progress with a lot of new features now implemented. It leaves me with mixed feelings, seeing the long list of new gadgets and fancy things the new release will have as per default. Whilst I love the idea of Beryl/Compiz window managers installed and ready to use on first bootup, along with several features like fast user switching and the search appbar, it makes me wonder what kind of performance hit we are going to see with the default installation compared to 7.04.

It all feels highly reminiscent of Vista and I really do hope that I am wrong in this prediction. I have been toying, not quite switching over, to ubuntu since 5.04 and overall I think the project is going from strength to strength, however the number of bugs and issues that were still present, even in 7.04 makes me wonder why these little bugs / gaps in the interface are not the primary focus of this new release. Whilst many of the improvements Gnome 2.20 adds to this release will be met with enthusiasm, I can't work out why a good portion of their development time is spent working on their PIMs (e.g. Evolution mail client and Epiphany web browser.) Not all the PIM programs are like this though, there are some that seem genuinely useful and important to have in a good window manager. Given the massive use of firefox and mozilla, in my opinion, some of these default programs seem more like wordpad, IE and Outlook Express (now Mail in Vista.) Sure they have some user base, but for a lot of people, they are the first programs to be replaced either by Microsoft or Mozilla offerings. Perhaps it would make sense for these programs to be spun off to allow the core dev team to work on the more pressing issues with Gnome. I am not, however, advocating removing these programs from official distributions of Gnome as this would leave a gap for end users who just want Ubuntu to work without hassle. Sadly I am not experienced (or Gutsy enough) with Linux to install a bleeding edge version (like 7.10 tribes 4) - I will have to be patent a little while longer and I guess if I don't like it I can just move my favoritism over to another distribution. I love Linux