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Does jaunty jackalope has what it takes to satisfy hungry users, who want style and others who want substance? Fortunately, they at canonical have a well thought about solution for 9.04 this time around. It’s not about new things but about speed and stability. They have focused on stability and little bit of bling. Quite a few apparent changes are there, though they claim changes to be over a thousand. The new Jaunty jackalope has very little system wide changes since Intrepid Ibex (8.10). So is the new ubuntu worth six months' work of the canonical team or they've just taken the term off for a little rest, we are going to find out.
Last summer, Mark Shuttleworth - the founder of the Ubuntu project and the chief executive officer of Canonical, stated or challenged to make a desktop rival for OSx on or before 2010. When asked about his strategies. He was quoted saying this.
"Notifications were very carefully chosen as a starting point. We wanted something which affects multiple applications. . . . We also wanted something that would be slightly controversial. We wanted to make some tough choices, like removing actions from notifications, and we knew that would trigger discussion and debate about the design process. . .it is small enough that we believed we could do it in a single cycle, but meaningful enough and visible enough that it would draw attention to the work that we're doing."
They did dig up their noses and accomplish that, in fact it produced so much controversy that they had to make that notification system optional and in course of time only for certain distros. Though later they were diplomatically included as Jaunty was released with an indicator applet. The controversy made them to make a modification such as a gnome-stracciatella-session, which allows users to press F10 when they log in and get a GNOME desktop with standard notifications. In addition, an alpha release of Jaunty included a configuration tool for notifications, but was omitted from the official release. However, Jaunty does include an Indicator applet for the panel that signals that something on the desktop requires your attention.
That being said the main focus of improvement of jaunty had been speed, stability and notifications.
I definitely wanted the new and improved ubuntu to a test ride and perhaps to replace intrepid. First off i did the recommended upgrade through synaptic. It took a while to download and install, after I did that, the changes weren't visible at all. Since the changes itself are very minimalistic moreover my previous settings were retained, i saw nothing new. Even the usplash was left unchanged however it was upgraded to the smaller version and was displayed during shutting-down process alone. Then I found somewhere that someone was bragging about mandriva 2009 spring to be one of the best. I wanted to try it hence i made a clean install of mandriva and did the testing and tried Xubuntu next and then Open GEU. I then made a clean install of ubuntu jaunty to observe the changes and simply to prove that whatever I try, i end up with ubuntu, meaning - Jaunty has no rival at-least until the next release.
The install procedure as usual was the simplest thing in the whole world; it took as much as 30 minutes. It provides with quite a few options and assumes the rest. And believe me, the 'rest' would be hassle at this point for new users.
After installing I found the new notifications to be as good as their bragging. The volume controls have gone horizontal, which is a good thing because the older vertical bar reduced the volume as soon as you clicked it. Horizontally it doesn't do that anymore. It’s quite hassle free. The mixer applet is very good and elaborate. The notifications are neat and eye-candy and yeah, Informational.
As usual nautilus is rocking, cool, efficient and faster too. Considering the features of nautilus, I daresay, it’s the most efficient file manager. It has previews even for audio files, yeah, surprisingly enough it works like a charm too. You point at an audio file and it starts playing the file. The interface is also one of the very intuitive methods around, the tabs and history boxes above are, according to me - 'God-sent'.
I went to places and my NTFS drives were listed there, I clicked on them and they were opened in nautilus, just like that, with R/w capability. Well if you're a windows user. You’ll say "So what? I can do this XP, what the heck, i can do this since Windows 95" but if you are a Linux user especially from XFCE and KDE environments you'll find this pretty handy.
Comparing with Xubuntu, OpenGEU, Mandriva and Kubuntu, Ubuntu is light years ahead and it’s here to rule. Ubuntu is far superior in terms of functionality as far as I'm concerned. For a newbie or a regular user or a power user, Ubuntu makes it easier and efficient. I can be 100% sure that they have been keeping their word when they say Linux for Human beings.
Many claim Ubuntu is not as fast and light as XFCE or Flashy and eye-candy as KDE distros but all that can be done. Flashy things can be done using compiz and as far as the lightness and spend, it doesn't get faster than this. The gap between Ubuntu and Xubuntu is a hair line and can only be realized by a semi-decade old PC. PCs that we use can hardly feel the difference. Given the advantages and stability one should obviously go for Ubuntu. It should hardly matter to an individual but for larger deployments, companies and thin clients Xubuntu will make a difference and their work will not go unappreciated there.
My Ratings:
v Speed: 5/5;
v Stability: 5/5;
v Looks: 4/5; (looks pretty much the same as gnome)
v Features: 5/5;
v Usability: 5/5;
v Overall: 4.8/5;
It doesn't get better than this or at least till October.
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