back to article Unchanging Unicorn: Don't be disappointed with Ubuntu 14.10, be happy

A number of Ubuntu flavours – Kubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Xubuntu and the brand new Ubuntu Mate (yes, it's official now) – this month participated in the first beta release of the next Ubuntu – 14.10, or Utopic Unicorn. The main Unity Desktop was absent, meaning what's called the second beta (and is now available) is the first and …

  1. dogged

    Cthulbuntu. Don't install a lesser evil.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: dogged

      "Cthulbuntu. Don't install a lesser evil." And just in time for Halloween!

  2. thomas k.
    Facepalm

    senior moment

    Clicked on article apparently thinking it said Vivendi and Unchanging Unicorn was a new game.

  3. knarf

    Utopic Unicorn.

    My gran had that very sore looking

  4. Eugene Crosser

    Cinnamon

    on utopic, is apparently available in the 'universe', i.e. it is again a part of official Ubuntu.

    (mate vs. cinnamon is a matter of personal preference, mate being a "resurrected gnome 2", and cinnamon - "reversed gnome 3".)

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      "reversed gnome 3"

      Oh err, a "reversed gnome 3" sounds like some illegal pr0n move!

  5. ecofeco Silver badge

    Yes, but...

    Have they fixed Grub, yet?

    1. Random K

      Re: Yes, but...

      If you're referring to the odd (but not deal breaking) boot errors when using mdadm raid1 for your swap, the answer is yes.

  6. Sporkinum

    14.04

    I did an inplace update to Kubuntu 14.04 and it broke the sound on my wife's machine. I am going to have to do a from scratch install (except for \home) and see if that fixes it. None of the various things people posted online got it going. Also, if you try to sleep the system in linux, it kills the power switch. Only way to get it back is unplug the power supply from the wall. That problem goes back a few years and was never fixed. So, at least 14.04 is still buggy for me.

    1. Steven Raith

      Re: 14.04

      Must admit, I did an upgrade to 14.10 Beta 1 while I had a hoary mix of ATI proprietary graphics on it (which were a bit spotty anyway) and it broke, badly - as in I couldn't get the display manager to work at all, and had to do a clean install (after backing up my /home from the command line, natch - full userland, just no graphics - TTY1, hallo old friend...)

      That said, the clean install has been spot on. But that's betas (and muchos fiddling) for you.

      I've recently changed jobs to a linux support position though, so Debian is very tempting - I think I'll keep Ubuntu at home though, the proprietary stuff it takes in as a option, much as though it might piss the RMS/GNU/FLOSS people off, makes it a far better everyday proposition than straight deb (and whine all you want, if you're a techy user and aren't afraid of the CLI, Ubuntu is a good introduction to CLI stuff with a good DE to fall back to if required).

      That, and I've really grown to like Unity, even enjoy it - I've tried LXDE, Awesome, XFCE, KDE and none of them really match up to Unity now that I'm familiar with it - despite the slagging it (deservedly) got initially, it's getting pretty damned mature now, and it really is a good little desktop environment. Unless you don't like unified search - in which case, you're pretty much gonna hate it, but then you're gonna hate most modern DEs.

      But if you're on the fence and willing to have a play, fire up a VM/USB key with some persistance and give it a shot - it's well worth a look these days and is easily the equal of KDE or Gnome 3, and I prefer it to both.

      Feel free to check my post history for defense/praise and slagging of Windows desktop and server, Mac OS and linux in general as reference - I'm not being particularly biased when I say Unity is definitely worth investing some time in, and I've taken enough OSs and DEs seriously enough to say that I like it...

      Steven R

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Go

        Re: Steven Raith Re: 14.04

        ".....That, and I've really grown to like Unity, even enjoy it....." After some initial unease I've also become a grudging fan of Unity. I haven't had the chance to try it on a touch-enabled device yet, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that has?

      2. Maventi

        Re: 14.04

        Agree - Unity is pretty slick these days. The workflow doesn't quite feel up to OS X standards yet but stock Windows 7 quickly feels archaic in comparison. I use all three every day.

        1. Steven Raith

          Re: 14.04

          Maventi, I agree that OS X is still slicker, but only for two reasons, realistically:

          1: 60fps desktop - Unity still needs some serious acceleration, and on ATI stuff, it seems to double or triple buffer, which can feel a touch laggy. Mir will hopefully make it as smooth on proprietary graphics as it is on the open source ones (I want proprietary for gaming, and I'm not switching drivers each time, period).

          2: Apple Trackpad support. There is - quite genuinely - no better trackpad solution than the Apple setup. Materials, touch detection, operational use - all utterly top of the class. If I could hook an Apple trackpad up to my Umbongo box and have it behave as well as it does on OS X, Apple would easily have £50 out of me (or however much it costs these days).

          Other than that, I agree with much of the rest of what you say - especially Windows 7. I'm just waiting for Windows 10 Tech Preview to get VirtualBox guest support (it works, but not with guest accessories, so no auto-resize, etc) to see if that helps. So far it seems like an improvement, but not enough of one to make me want to have Windows 10 as a boot drive for when Linux refuses to game properly (Metro Last Light seems a bit flaky on Linux...) - I'll stick with Windows 7 for now.

          Steven R

    2. Adrian 4

      Re: 14.04

      Using control chars like \h in directory names is never going to work out well.

      1. lee7

        Re: 14.04

        Err. This is Unix. You can have any character you like in a directory name. Except "/". Live with it. In nearly 30 years using Xenix/Unix/Linux, I can't recall it being a significant problem.

    3. LawAbidingCitizen

      Re: 14.04

      Try this in /etc/modprobe.d/also.conf (place it right down the bottom, after everything else):

      options snd-hda-intel vid=8086 pid=8ca0 snoop=0

  7. bert.pdx

    Roughest Beta release I've seen but was able to get it useable

    Man, this is the roughest release I've seen! Installed from gnome x64 install dvd. At least it came booting with grub working (yet unfortunately in hidden mode, and unresponsive to SHIFT unhide feature), but with black screen, no splash image, just black/grey. No video, but was able to get text terminal and bootstrap to load X to get at google/info for fixing the system. Fixed black video problem with apt-get install flgrx , but gdm was nothing but a black screen. could not get other window managers to boot from startup at first, and ran wdm starting from a text tty, tty1, so therefore no sound under tty7/8; eventually got wdm to work from startup with symlink trick and now have a regular gui login from powerup. Any pleasant gui environments tried so far, like cinnamon-session and gnome flashback session, don't work after apt-get install; so I'm for the moment stuck with regular gnome session which has incorporated horrible unity features which make it highly unpleasant and often unfunctional (eg.:like no minimize buttons on the window frames!!) Fvwm is still a working session to boot into, but it'll take time to configure. Installed the generic 3.16.3 kernel and at least the system seems stable and functions like "pm-suspend ----quirk-vbestate-restore" work beautifully. Hopefully with some tweaking a good system can be had---but all with much more work than an average beta or alpha release.

    1. Phil_Evans

      Re: Roughest Beta release I've seen but was able to get it useable

      Did you compose this in Nano? Gedit is now available on most distros, I'm told.

      1. AnonFairBinary

        Re: Roughest Beta release I've seen but was able to get it useable

        real men and women use vim, and LIKE IT!

        1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
          Devil

          Re:AnonFairBinary Re: Roughest Beta release I've seen but was able to get it useable

          "real men and women use vim, and LIKE IT!" No, real men and a few women use vi. And possibly emacs. But none of them actually like it.

  8. Greg J Preece

    Hopefully the new touchpad drivers referred to fix my problems with scrolling on my laptop. Everything else in the 14.04 upgrade on all my machines worked perfectly, but the touchpad on my MacBook Pro now spazzes out when I scroll, moving insanely fast for any small movement. Adjusting pad speed down does nothing. Apparently there was an upstream fix but after installing a .deb I found for it, no dice.

  9. roger stillick
    Linux

    UNchanging Unicorn: 14.10, be happy... Q=why no updates for 13.10 LTS ??

    the LTS thingy was one of the reasons my newest machine didn't get Mint 15...

    after 1st beta of 14.10, no further updates have came out daily... perhaps it's my fault, but still no updates for a highly touted LTS version.

    IMHO= i kinda like Gnome/under Ubuntu 13.10 once i hobbled zeitgist (ugly AI-waste of machine time)...and went to classic Gnome (looks like mint)...

    Mint has a much better software system for aps than UBUNTU (sorry, nice idea, zieitgist is stupid).

    PLEASE= who ever is doung UBUNTU 14.10... please make conversion aps to allow the... cell phone / smart phone / tablet size ?? / gaming machines / TV sets / touch screens / stylus screen / whatever...be implemented WITHOUT hobbling a KBD / screen combo i/o device that most of us use, over n over again...make U 14.10 a desktop distro, keep the APS store (it's been around for a really long time, at the very heart of UBUNTU), just stop trying for all the fad devices to, out of the box, run your stuff and make separate conversion distros for them...PLEASE...RS.

  10. Vociferous

    Touchy-feely sucky-sucky

    Even Microsoft got the memo about the retardedness of touch-first GUI design, but Canonical marches on.

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