9.04 disappointing

[ntuple]

I upgraded recently from 8.04 to 9.04 and I'm really unhappy with the new version for the following reasons:

GUI
The UI is very nice and seems to be based on the Mac's minimalistic paradigm rather than 8.04, which looked more like Windows. This minimalistic approach though clean looking also obscures how things can be done and forces everyone to use one particular approach that the developers had in mind.

Unfortunately unlike Mac addicts who revel in the "correct" Mac way of doing anything, Unix aficionados have traditionally scorned the UI and seen the command line as the only acceptable way of interacting with an OS. So anyone knowledgeable tends to only offer solutions to everything through CLI making the UI superfluous.

My impression is that the only purpose of this beautiful GUI is to entice Windows people to come to Linux though once they get in, their only choice is to learn the CLI and ignore the UI. There appears to be a disconnect between the UI designers who are looking to create cutting edge GUIs and those working on the underlying OS itself who have no need for anything other than the command line.

This makes the GUI a not very usable though pretty curiosity.

An example is the very useful File Management options in 8.04 tucked away in the advanced tab of the System Settings which no longer exists in 9.04 anywhere that I can find. I could do the same thing in the command line but why should I have to ?

Also in 8.04 if you wanted to edit a file as root, Dolphin had a useful Action of "Edit as Root" which no longer exists in 9.04. As with all things I seem to have to do a "sudo ..." if I want to get this basic task done.

Stability
When I accepted the auto prompt upgrade to 9.04, the process completed but rebooted into a black screen. This type of issue keeps occurring in 9.04 but never happened in 8.04. Considering that stability is one of the hallmarks of Unix and one of the reasons why people would want to leave Windows to come here, issues like this make it difficult to recommend Kubuntu as a development platform.

Like others, I've been experiencing the periodic freezes on an old Dell with Intel video chipsets. Since one of the selling points of Linux has always been that you could reuse old machines and get better performance, this type of problem is a real issue.

Packages

The KPackage manager has a variety of problems unlike the old apt which was simpler but more useful. Also in general, the package approach means that you're limited to the version and modules that are available, making it impossible to take advantage of the amazing diversity of components available on the net to do almost anything.

This is a basic issue and I don't understand how it can be resolved but as a new user it's what I would need addressed to choose Ubuntu as a primary platform.

Ok those are my thoughts after using 9.04 for two weeks. I'm going back to 8.04 if I can ( had problems getting it to install as 9,04 file still seem to exist even after a clean install). To get work done now I'll rely on my XP box which sits by patiently.

[skywarp]

Re: 9.04 disappointing

It's all a matter of preference. Personally I like KDE 4.2, albeit it does still have it's fair share of bugs and little annoyances. It's more than usable on a daily basis though and I like the direction they are heading. You also have to keep in mind that feature X may be missing because they are still trying to integrate it into KDE 4.2. KDE4 is a complete rewrite of almost everything. I've been using 8.10 for awhile and there wasn't much of a transition from that to 9.04, but so far I love 9.04. Some of the quirks that plagued me in 8.10 are finally gone. Going from 8.04 to 9.04 is much more of a major change though. Maybe you should just give it a chance for a little bit? Personally I didn't like KDE4 at first and I went back to KDE 3.5, but KDE4 grew on me and now I love it. By the way, my experience with "upgrades" whether be a Linux distro or Windows has always sucked and taken a little bit of work to get working correctly. It's usually better to just do a fresh install. Good luck with whatever direction you decide to take.

[sithlord48]

Re: 9.04 disappointing



GUI
kde4 is still a wip although for the most part its stability issues have been resolved and a lot of features that were in kde3.5 are not yet written in to kde4(or its programs), please note there is a kde3.5 remix of JJ and you should be able to install kde3.5 from the repos(kde news post
the reason that you get mostly people telling people how to do things via the CLI is its much more explicit. and shorter to type either type this command or click here right click on this select this item from menu etc.

STABILITY
yes these things happen. i would look in to your video drivers... bringing me to my second comment on your older video card you may want to shut off desktop effects (if there on). i think this is again a kde4 thing that will be resolved soon.(plasma misbehaves on my machine too) try next time you get this black screen (if in kde) press alt+f2 (for a krunnerbox) and type in "plasma" if your desktop background and bars ,etc died this will start it back up

PACKAGES
yes sadly this is a kde move aparently the adept for kde 4 was not going very well (look at 8.10's version) and there replacing it with kpackagekit (kubuntu is just doing it first, i think the first kde version to ship w/ kpackagekit will be 4.3) for this i would recommend just installing "synaptic" from the repos, that being said i really miss adept from kde3.5 , but synaptic although you might have to get a bit used to it, it is the next best thing (imo)

OTHER NOTES

i am not sure if your are aware that you can install diffrent desktop enviroments on your machine, and switch between them using the sessions menu on your log in screen. so you can install other ones to try them out.

you can try the following (just a few)
GNOME (install the ubuntu-desktop package)
xfce (install the xubuntu-desktop package)
lxde (install the lxde package)
there are more i just don't know the names of there packages...

[kwokyinc]

Re: 9.04 disappointing

Thanks, sithlord48. The blackscreen thing happened to me last night. Next time I will try the "plasma" command as you've suggested.

[barbolani]

Re: 9.04 disappointing

My impression is that the only purpose of this beautiful GUI is to entice Windows people to come to Linux though once they get in, their only choice is to learn the CLI and ignore the UI. There appears to be a disconnect between the UI designers who are looking to create cutting edge GUIs and those working on the underlying OS itself who have no need for anything other than the command line.

This makes the GUI a not very usable though pretty curiosity.

Just curious, since when have you been using Linux? I was a heavy Windows user 12-11 years ago, and being a previous MSDOS developer the command line was not alien to me, in fact it was the only sane way of doing anything in that environment. I used Win3.1 with a command prompt almost always opened. Then came Windows as a popularization of the Mac GUI and somehow this settled down the idea into people's mind that you could completely ignore the CLI to manage complex things. Hence the "point and click" Windows server admins that are almost clueless as to what is going on and cannot fix any problem that cannot be solved by reinstalling or ticking some check box in a configuration dialog.

When I started to switch to Linux (still using Windows today for my RC Flight Sim) I can assure you that the system configuration GUI tools were in such a sorry state that dropping to the CLI was almost mandatory. And one of things that got me hooked into KDE was the amount of coverage they had in the control panel, which allowed me to use the system without really knowing what I was doing, sort of "point and click Linux admin " But it was great as I could at least use the system.

Over time I learned the CLI and a lot of commands and I'm still learning to this day. But certainly I'd say that one of the strengths of KDE has always been the ability to manage the system without resorting to the CLI. Of course, in extreme cases is still necessary. And nothing beats a short and concise command in a forum post over a textual description of some user interface actions.

And to this day, even if I know how to do it from the command line, I find much more comfortable and error free to use the graphical front end for a lot of tasks, specially those that I do once in a while.

In conclusion, I think that your complaint about having to use the CLI is at least partially valid, but not because the KDE (or GNOME) folks are devoted to create just eye candy, it's because Linux is so configurable that it is not easy to create GUI tools that can manage that flexibility without becoming usability problems in themselves at the same time.