Today it’s the day, Ubuntu 11.04 has been officially released and they server are now under “attack” by all the Ubuntu users that are trying to download the new release or update a former version, for me it took around 3 hours to finish the download of the 1400 packages needed to upgrade from Xubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 with two disconnection.
But Ubuntu is not the only thing released in these days; yesterday, has been released Slackware 13.37 ( codenamed leet ) and today it was also released version 2011.04 of Chakra Linux. Really a lot of news.
As wrote, while I’m writing my computer is doing the automatic upgrade of the packages, so soon enough i’ll sit ( or at least i hope so) on a working Xubuntu 11.04, but if I had to install from scratch i’m not so sure (as I was with the version 9.10) that I would choose ubuntu, it is always the most used distribution, however, i start to don’t like some things, such as default applications made with Mono or Unity instead of Gnome, perhaps petty but still signs, i’ll see in which direction they go with the version 11.10 and also for the next LTS release the 12.04.
Features of the 3 distributions in 3 rows:
Ubuntu 11.04
Unity is now the default in the Ubuntu Desktop session.The kernel shipped is the 2.6.38 and the two big changes are Libreoffice instead of Openoffice (great news) and Banshee as standard media player (not a so great news). Ubuntu is available also with XFCE and KDE.
Slackware 13.37
Slackware 13.37 uses the 2.6.37.6 Linux kernel, and also ships with 2.6.38.4 kernels for those who want to run the latest The long-awaited Firefox 4.0 web browser is included, the X Window System has been upgraded; Slackware it’s not shipped with a defaut desktop environment so you can choose one during installation.
Chakra 2011.04
The Chakra Project it’s based on ArchLinux tailored to work perfectly with KDE, in version 2011.04 there is kernel 2.6.38.4 and many packages updates. KDE got updated to 4.6.2 and Libreoffice has been ported too.
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I was on a Linux distro downloading and testing spree today and of all three I think I like Kubuntu the most. Until recently I’ve been a Ubuntu user, but they totaly broke it with this Unity nonsense. Well In part I understand them, GNOME 3 is even worse. They should just stay with GNOME 2 or even better just make Kubuntu their main distro as KDE is some awesome desktop (and some even more awesome apps) as I just found out today.
Be careful with the KDE software. I found it shakey, again needing the 3D functionality to get the desktop to behave. Its pretty but confusing (for me anyway). I don’t do well with all the secret / hidden stuff where you need six fingers on each hand to manage the shortcuts to do the simplest things.
I’ll try it out again with VBox. Thats the easiest way for me to check things out because they can be exported and saved or simply deleted if you don’t like them.
Regards,
Steve Dupuis
Ottawa, Canada
Thanks for the feedback Steve,
I don’t like too unity, just fixed a kernel problem on Xubuntu 11.04, not much differences for what i’ve saw in 1 day, Libreoffice and Mozilla 4. And i’ll keep Exaile and Parole as Music/video players 😉
Thanks for the article! I could not help noticing that you have not proof-read what you posted. The grammar is atrocious and surely if English is not your first language you should get an English speaking person to help you proof the article before posting it!
This is meant as objective criticism so please do not take this as a personal attack.
Piers,
Thanks for the feedback and i can only agree with you 🙂
Yesterday i was in an hurry and while writing also installing the Ubuntu 11.04 update (that failed miserably ;(( )
So i suppose that this time i’ve wrote worst than usual…i’ll take an eye later on this article, and as usual any suggestion is welcomed, if you want, send me a note at [email protected].
I downloaded the first ubuntu 11.04 beta and have been updating twice a day on 3 machines.
I loaded the Unity version into a VBox VM .. someone made a comment that it was like having a big iPhone on the desktop. I’m inclined to agree. I couln’t get Unity to work on my laptop, so I’m still using the Gnome 2 kit. The VM version took a lot of work to get it going. I had to update VBox to 4.0.6 and then had to run the client update (4.0.6) before it would recognize the 3D graphics.
It took a lot of hours, so I’m not looking forward to trying to upgrade it on my VM host machine. I don’t want to break what is currently working.
The software does run faster though with the new 2.6.38 kernel. That was encouraging. Firefox 4 gave me some trouble. I had to reinstall several of my add-ons even though they passed the update.
I believe they updated too much this time around. I didn’t install a lot of the standard software: Banshee, Evolution etc. Banshee worked well before they Canonized it, but now its tied to their music store and the desktop. I use VLC on three of my machines and the latest version works extremely well for audio, video and streaming. The default skins are not as pretty, but I don’t really care about eye candy. I want something functional so I’ll stick with that.
I agree with your wait and see regarding 11.10 and 12.04. Time will tell whether or not I change distros. Its a big job to reinstall 4 machines plus Wine and the Windoze applications I use there so I’m not rushing into anything.
Regards,
Steve Dupuis
Ottawa, Canada