[GRLUG] Ubuntu 7.10

[Michael Mol]

On 11/1/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's been a couple of weeks now
> since the launch,  does anyone here
> have anything good to say about
> Ubuntu 7.10?
>
> Many of the reviews have been
> quite bullish.  I'm running
> Kubuntu 7.04 now,  and have so
> far taking an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
> approach.  But I'd hate to miss out on
> anything either....
>
>

I actually wrote a second review on my blog, earlier this week.
Here's the text:

So I've been using it a couple weeks, now, and I figured it was a good
time to give it a second look.

I've had to leave Compiz enabled, because without it, It becomes a
hassle to have both Firefox open and watch videos using mplayer.
(Firefox hogs X11's XV extension, thanks to the flash plugin. Compiz
seems to perform the functional equivalent of providing a separate
copy of the extension to anyone who asks for it.) As a result, I've
learned a bit about its behavior.

The alt-tab behavior is nice. I realize some of you more advanced
folks (Including OS X users and Linux folks using experimental window
managers as far back as 2002) have had window previews in your
window-switching service for a while. Sure, yeah, it's a convenient
feature if you've got multiple windows from the same app loaded. (Web
development with Firefox would be a lot easier if I had this at work.)
At home, that's not really an issue for me.

What's really nice is how passing through the alt-tab list draws the
window immediately to the foreground, before I let go of alt-tab.
(FWIW, all my apps are full-screen at home, so I don't know if the
window order is permanently adjusted as I pass through.) Now, on
Windows, this would be a problem. Each time a portion of a window
becomes visible, Windows sends the application a paint message to get
it to redraw itself. At work, when my box was churning over one thing
or another, or waiting on some silly user-global lock (Damn you Visual
Studio, damn yooou!), I could watch the application ponderously fill
in the window with information.

In Gutsy Gibbon, with Compiz enabled, the screen contents just flip to
the window, pre-drawn. (If I had to guess, I'd think the window never
knew it was covered.) The screen changes quickly enough that the new
data appears to be there right at the start of the screen's next
vertical refresh.

Also, there's a neat feature for dealing with unstable applications.
If the application "stops responding", to steal a phrase from the
Windows world, the window desaturates until it's wholly in grayscale.
That way, you know why it's not doing what you thought it was doing.
This doesn't seem to work entirely, though. I was scrolling through
Google Reader--albeit painfully slowly--when the window desaturated. I
hadn't stopped scrolling, and the window was still updating, but the
window manager decided for some reason that the window had stopped
responding. However, it corrected itself, and resaturated the window
after I stopped rolling the scroll wheel on my mouse.

However, Firefox seems to have taken a hit. It's weird. Up until a
couple weeks ago, I never had noticeable stability problems with
Firefox, at work or home, despite both machines being low-end (3GHz or
2.2GHz P4s, respectively, though the work machine has 2GB of RAM and
the home machine only has 512MB/). In contrast, it's run slow or
crashed three times in the last week. This is only at home, though. My
box at work is still running strong. The obvious answer is that
Firefox's memory leaks are likely coming into play earlier on my home
box.

And I'm still irritated that I can't play StepMania. That might change
this weekend, though.


-- 
:wq