I just installed 9.10 on my MSI U123 netbook. I didn't want to go with the remix... The U123 can handle a full distro. Albeit a quick experience, I've had some issues. Particularly the brightness on the netbook. When I boot up and arrive at the login screen, the brightness toggles from less bright to more bright (like you're hitting the function key to change it) about every second. When I close the lid and open it back up, the problem dissapears. I wouldn't think this is by design but I've got to look into it.

Ubuntu has gotten so much better over the past few years. I took my 5 year old laptop and slapped Ubuntu on it and it's like it's a new machine machine again. I loaded FLASH and WINE and I'm browsing and running Windows programs on Ubuntu... all this from a 650mb CD, and installation in about 20 minutes. Very happy thus far.

With regards to replacing Windows with Linux, that's simply not realistic for almost everyone. "Linux cannot yet replace windows." That's an accurate statement 99% of the time. There, I said it!

Now, for a small minority (of which I count myself a part), Ubuntu is a viable replacement for Windows. That means no native support for recent mainstream gaming and no Photoshop, of course. That isn't what I do with my computer, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant for me.

Note that I'm a Linux user. Full time. No Mac OS X for me, no Windows for me, no whatever for me. I won't convert you, and you won't convert me. Otherwise, I am pretty open-minded, as I hope you'll see (when I start pointing out all the flaws I see in my chosen OS.) With that being said, hopefully we all can have a respectful conversation? Note that I write everything from my perspective, and I'm PERFECTLY aware that my experience is nowhere near typical. When I call something hard, it might be easy for you. When I call something easy, it might be hard for you. I'd err on the side of STICKING WITH YOUR CURRENT OS.

I must say that Ubuntu 9.10 had quite a few bugs, again, and that was disappointing. I wouldn't wish Ubuntu 9.10 on anyone but myself, frankly. I did a clean installation. CLEAN INSTALLTION. And Ubuntu would not boot. I had to remove splash from the kernel line in grub.cfg (basically, I disabled the throbbing white ubuntu logo during boot.)

A fair assessment of that bug would be showstopper, even if the fix was trivial. It took me 10 seconds to fix, but the nature of the bug is severe, because any novice or intermediate user would be stymied.

After I got it to boot up, it was mostly smooth sailing from there. Mostly. I had to grab the broadcom drivers, of course, but for a clean install of any OS on the market, grabbing third-party drivers is a necessity. Besides, this took two or three clicks in total. After that, it was just typical customization things that you would do on any OS (changing themes, installing apps that I actually use, and so on.)

I had a few minor frustrations after that. YMMV, and I can completely accept that most users will find these frustrations to be MAJOR.

Ubuntu Software Center is a minor step backward to me, since it requires so many damn clicks. It also asks for your password a little too often. Hell is Ubuntu Software Center, Heaven is Vista's UAC. Oops, did I say that?

The login screen configuration tool ("Login Screen" under System --> Administration) is a major step backwards. It was such a decent control panel before, and now it has become so Spartan as to be absolutely useless.

I am noticing that a lot of open source applications have catchy names that mean very little. In Ubuntu, Canonical has tried to solve this problem by saying what the app does. For example F-Spot is the name of the application. You'll find it in the menu under F-Spot Photo Viewer. XSane is the scanning program. You'll find it under XSane Image scanning program. Scanning program is not capitalized, whereas Photo Manager was, so this is a minor inconsistency. Anyway, this doesn't apply to Ubuntu directly, but it would be great if open source devs in general gave their applications nicer names. If it's a commandline tool, I don't care so much, but if it's an app intended for the masses, please give it a better name!

There are a ton of other minor (for me) issues, but I'll stop here. I didn't give many issues, but I have to say some good things, too, right? But first, I'll have to say some bad things about Ubuntu in general.

Some commenters have already noted below that Canonical has a tendency to release the next version of Ubuntu far before it's ready. It's clear that the six-month cycle is not realistic, but they don't listen at all. For example, in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, they included Firefox 3... Beta 5. Wonderful. Including a beta release in a supposedly stable LONG TERM SUPPORT release. Why do they do this? Because Ubuntu has a policy of not updating applications in a release cycle unless it's for security reasons or it's a minor update that won't break anything. For example, if you get a six month release of Ubuntu, and a month later, OpenOffice gets a major update, you're not going to see it through official channels. You'll have to compile it yourself, find the debs yourself, or find a PPA. For me, not too difficult, but for most computer users, not possible. Another example is the rush job they did on PulseAudio. It's okay now, but it sucked when they initially put it in. I won't go in on the details; google if you must... but basically... THEY. BROKE. SOUND. 'nuff said.

So I would not mind it if Ubuntu went to yearly releases or even longer. Within each release, they could be more willing to update software. Alternatively, they could kill the concept of releases, and just constantly update software. Every few months, they can post new ISOs to make it easier to do clean installs. That way, you wouldn't have to download a gigabyte of updates after performing a clean install with your three year old Ubuntu CD.

Another good thing was the gem I found in the mouse control panel. I'm on a Dell laptop, and Dell tends to use touchpads manufactured by Synaptics. Synaptics touchpads actually can detect two fingers, so you can enable two finger scrolling. The implementation is not perfect, as it's a tad too sensitive, but by holding my fingers together rather than having them apart (think pretending your hand is a gun rather than "V" for victory), on a laptop, two finger scrolling is vastly better than edge scrolling or circle scrolling (think iPod.) Incidentally, if you're on Windows Vista or above, you can download a little app to enable two finger scrolling. You can also map the two finger tap on the touchpad to be right-click or whatever click you want. http://code.google.com/p...oll/issues/detail?id=19 and you'll find the link in the 5th comment. XP users can still use this, but horizontal scrolling will not work. Remember to disable edge scrolling in the windows control panel afterward, or else you'll have edge scrolling and two finger scrolling at the same time, which is quite redundant.

The good, about Linux and Ubuntu in general, and also this specific release. If you're still reading, I love you. Lots.

Ubuntu in general was the first Linux distro I was able to use full time, starting with about Ubuntu 6.10. (I went Ubuntu near-full-time for a year or so after that, then went full time with 8.10.) Before that, I used Fedora Core 2, which was pretty good, but Fedora Core 3 killed Linux for me for a bit. So props to Ubuntu - they converted me.

Running a LAMP stack with MediaWiki and Drupal were not exactly easy, but easier than I thought they would be. Setting up what Ubuntu calls Remote Desktop (VNC) was easy, and setting it up over ssh was also trivial. My printer (Samsung ML-1710, an older laser printer) worked with previous versions and with this version of Ubuntu right away. Plug it in, print. Thanks, whoever wrote splix, the reverse-engineered Samsung Printer Language driver.

Foreign language support is good. I suppose many people won't care, but I do use it, so that was nice. Unfortunately, not everything is translated for my language, but blame the specific app. My language is not the highest priority, but it's not exactly a dead language, with over 80 million speakers in total.

And the good in general about Linux? It is so ubiquitous. Desktop computing, sure, there's my desktop and that bum over there, but servers? It's doing okay. Embedded devices, cell phones? Yup. Superclusters? It's the Microsoft of the Top500 list.

Just check this site: http://computingplugs.com/index.php/Main_Page
He runs it off a SheevaPlug, which is a computer that's a little bit bigger than an A/C adapter. In terms of computing power, it's a little bit slower than a Pentium 3 800 MHz, except when it comes to floating point, where the Pentium absolutely dominates. He runs a LAMP stack off it in addition to MediaWiki. You can view his CPU usage and so on here: http://computingplugs.co...ug_Real_time_Statistics He has a Drupal plugin to allow comments, and he also uses it as a media server (do not confuse media server with media center - this box does absolutely no decoding.) He also runs a mail server off that box in addition to his torrents. Average power consumption is 5 watts, and peak power consumption with full CPU usage and hard drive spinning is 11 watts... less than a CFL. Someone posted the link to this site in the comments on a Slashdot story, so he was mini-slashdotted, yet his little plug computer survived. What other kernel can use a lot of the same code and shine on the lowliest embedded device and shine on the largest superclusters?

Just a random little note: I find it funny when Windows users tell Mac users to use Windows and learn more about their computer. I find it funny when Mac users respond to Windows users they just want something that works. Why? Because I also find it funny when Windows users tell (insert alternative OS here) to use Windows, because it just works. And finally, I find it funny when said alternative OS user responds that Windows users should use (insert alternative OS here) to learn more about how their computers work... =)

Thanks for putting up with this wall of text... that is, if you actually put up with this wall of text. If you didn't, then let me apologize.

whatcolorisanorange:

Do you know anything about Arch Linux? I keep dropping packets with my new netbooks Atheros driver. I use Pacman to grab packages, but I dont know how to grab outside the repository from the command line. I don't have kde installed yet.

I'm not familiar with Arch Linux, and I don't have any wireless cards based on the Atheros chipset either. Sorry that I couldn't be of help. Your best bet might be the Arch Linux forums and a whoooooole lot of Google searches.

Thanks anyway..

You might like Arch If you get it installed correctly. It's a fun little project.

It is as nice as before (8.04) and the Software Center is a good addition but replacing Windows 7?
Any Linux distro has a long way before replacing a Windows OS. They have to learn to program for users and not for geeks. And of course, it needs software support but that barrier will be gone when most applications go web oriented.

I agree! However, we still have a while before the concept of using the browser as the OS to access "cloud" apps is the norm. Non-tech people want a device that instantly connects to the cloud with ONE BUTTON to access all of their apps. They don't want to know how or why it works, just that it does. When grandparents can do it without thinking about it, then it works. Until then, we're stuck with Windows vs OS X vs Linux.

It will be nice if Gnome ever joins the 21st century. It is easily the ugliest of the 4 major UIs

Gnome resembles Mac OS X more than any other non Apple user interface. It would be nice if KDE 3 and 4 weren't so buggy though.

you like 7 boy must be an m leming

Ubuntu Linux 9.10 is buggy as hell. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on a computer that had Nvidia's nForce 430 chipset, an AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 processor and 3GB PC-533 DDR2 RAM. I used a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4650 PCI Express graphics card w/1GB DDR2 memory, not the integrated motherboard graphics. When I installed the proprietary ATI graphics drivers and rebooted, all I got was a blank screen. This appears to be a very common bug in every other Linux distribution I've tried, but ATI's driver worked fine in previous versions of Ubuntu. I also installed Ubuntu 9.10 on another computer that had a motherboard with Intel's P35 and ICH9R chipset, an Intel Core 2 E8500 CPU, 8GB DDR2-800 RAM and an ATI Radeon 4770 PCI Express graphics card. In this case, ATI's proprietary driver worked fine.

Ubuntu Linux 9.10 seems to have made it much more difficult to add or remove entries from the Grub boot menu. In previous versions of Ubuntu it was a simple matter of editing the GRUB.CFG file in "/boot/grub/". Now that same file has comments stating "Do not modify this file". When I'm installing Ubuntu on a less technical family member's computer which has two hard drives, both formatted with NTFS, I don't need two Windows boot entries showing up in the Grub boot menu. When installing official Ubuntu kernel updates, I also don't need multiple Ubuntu entries in the Grub boot menu either. The average person would be horribly confused by this.

The sound preferences have been overly simplified. I can no longer get stereo sound from the coax miniplug output on the back of my Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi like I could in previous Ubuntu versions of Ubuntu with the older proprietary Creative Labs driver. I have to use craptacular analog audio.

As for the ext4 filesystem, I do find it odd that so many people are apparently having data corruption issues considering the filesystem is just as stable as NTFS or FAT.

The Ubuntu forums seem to have plenty of posts mentioning ATI drivers. For all the good hardware, ATI can't write good drivers on Windows and they're even worse on Linux. nVidia drivers seem okay, though.

The thing about the GRUB menu and all the kernel versions bugged me. It wasn't easy to track down either. You just need to go to the Synaptic Package Manager, search on "linux-" (I forget the exact search parameter) and you can remove them from there.

Do you happen to know how to make the digital audio output on the back of the Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card work for stereo sound?

You must be joking?

You forgot to mention Kubuntu 9.10, another Linux distro

Well, if that's the case, he forgot to mention about 19000 of them. But since this was an Ubuntu review, I suppose we can let it slide, eh?

You didn't mention Xubuntu or Edubuntu or NetBook Remix Ubuntu.

I found this linkde at osnews, it is interesting to read.

http://www.fewt.com/2009...orth-canonical-and.html

I found another parody site worth looking into:

http://ubuntard.com

Make sure to read the buglist before installing this version:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+bugs

LOL that ubuntard one is great. i do haveto agree the login screen is nothing special. i actually prefer 9.04's login screen over that, but ah well

Hmm.. 164 bugs to date... guess this should have been an RC2.... Well we'll see how many of the bugs actually effect my system.. Still got Win 7 running in case my linux takes a dump!

Yet another typically rushed out release. YET AGAIN, something which worked previously is now broken. For me, it is my Huawei 169G 3G dongle. It worked in previous versions as PnP and now doesn't at all. Ubuntu 9.04 broke previously perfectly working Intel graphics, Ubuntu 8.04 broke previously working out of the box Windows network browsing.

Talking about windows network browsing, YET AGAIN I'm having to go edit smb.conf to get it to work. COME ON CANONICAL, it has been a bug for EIGHTEEN MONTHS that has had a simple solution posted in the forums.

It is a real shame. I was real excited about it and it looked and worked great otherwise. But I'm sorry that I have to say this'll probably be my last time with Linux. I am sick to g**d***ed death of new distros fixing stuff but breaking others and having bugs (that've been resolved in the forums) which have 10,000's of threads about them, but apparently aren't important in a world with a 90% Windows market share, still being in the release nearly two years later for the simple want of editing one line of a .conf file.

Problem with Linux is the folk who use it, ask a question of them, and you'll be bored out of your mind by their reply, they rarely go out, have few friends,and no interests other than Linux. I myself use Windows 7, it is installed on a super new laptop which was delivered to me yesterday. Who needs Linux, who needs to upgrade, not me, why? Because I bought new, that's why, and when another excellent O/S is introduced by Bills workers, I'll buy new again, and that's as it should be.

I think this is very nice, I like Ubuntu in general.

... but I really don't see any major motive for switching from Win7. Maybe if I didn't so so much heavy graphics/video work (and games), I would use it, but... there is no killer app.

And I think it is the same for many. We have Linux builds installed alongside Windows, but rarely use them. I think Microsoft's monopoly with DirectX has as much to do with people using Win as anything else.

Until something changes, Linux will be something I run on older computers and laptops as semi-thin clients.

Installed it inside Windows. Everything went ok until I tried and couldn't access my windows partition/files. Looked for help on this issue and found none. That was the show stopper for me. Uninstalled it immediately.

Seriously... one would have to be severely unconvinced by Windows ME (let alone Windows 7) to consider a full-time switch to any Linux distribution.

If given the choice, I'd have to break out the Amiga 500 again.

I think one look at Windows Messy Edition would convince anyone to run to any Linux or BSD distribution but Windows 7 is barely similar to that version of Windows, thankfully.

Okay, I may have gone too far on that one. =)

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

why you hatin'? LOL I think it's hilarious to read actually!

Man, that is one hilarious read. That dude has some serious hate for Linux (...and rightfully so).

I have downloaded ubuntu 9.10 from a local server.

9.10 is actually very solid and very decent in terms of performance... I dual booted it on my HP Mini 1000 and was really impressed with the speed, performance, and SoftwareCenter...

HOWEVER... the wireless driver problems are back (yet again). Because the HP Mini uses a Broadcom 4312 chipset, the drivers are considered proprietary. To get them installed without a network connection is a nightmare. What makes me really scratch my head is that the live CD DOES enable (and use) the driver, but when you install the OS, the drivers are gone and you have to install 3 packages to get them to work.

It is this sort of thing that will forever keep people away from Linux and it is a real shame as once you get past the driver issues, the system is amazing! Fast, responsive, and very little in terms of confusion. Customization in 9.10 is a breeze (well, thanks to Gnome 2.28 at least).

That's odd. When I upgraded to 9.04, it selected the Broadcom and nVidia restricted drivers automatically. I suppose it has to do with the netbook not yet being in the regular 9.10 hardware list since they have the netbook remix version that works better on the Atom processors?

Annoying, yes... Show stopper, no. Plug in Cat 5e cable. Run Update, select hardware drivers, enable broadcom wireless...

Not too bad considering I've done fresh installs of Windows on Dell and had to download drivers from the dreaded, slow, and un-intuitive Dell website numerous times to get Network, Wireless, Bluetooth, Video, Sound, etc, etc, etc working..... In fact, to get Windows 7 working with newer Optiplexes and my Lattitude E6500, I even had to flash the BIOS...

Your point is well taken, but it's not that bad relative my experiences. Unfortunately proprietary drivers are a reality. I will say that even with this annoyance, it's much better than it was even a couple years ago when we had to manually install ndiswrapper and when we had to compile drivers for ATI and nVidia drivers.

"In fact, to get Windows 7 working with newer Optiplexes and my Lattitude E6500, I even had to flash the BIOS..."

Have several Optiplexes and e6400's here. Yes, and update exists, but it was hardly necessary to use it in order to run WIn7...don't really think the 65/64 are that different, though we have not gotten any 6500's in yet.

A friend of mine who owns the same laptop i do dealt with the same thing, we both have the BCM94312. Wouldn't download at first, rebooted and tried the B43 didn't work, so we selected the STA which did work. A little annoying but the same thing happened with 9.04.

In my case the upgrade automatically selected the broadcom STA driver and all was good. besides a few weird crashes: FF crashed on 1st start, system stalled on resume, and then an odd 'crash' occurred when it booted up. Since then it's been stable and running.

Was waiting for the final release to update all the computers at home and for friends to Ubuntu 9.10. As for the title, there might be people "Unconvinced by Windows 7". I am rather among those who "don't need Windows anymore".

Great! Waiting for Linux Mint 8. Ubuntu written in gold letters.

I think the titled is better served simply as "Ubuntu 9.10 The Koala has Emerged!" I'm running the upgrade right now from my 9.04 (which is downloading 1 GB of 9.10 packages for installing) This..... could take a while (about 5 hours according to Ubuntu)