Version 12.04 a personal view

[NickStone]

I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 for about 2 years and was going to continue with that version until 2013, however, due to an issue I had with the printer driver under that version I decided to upgrade to Xubuntu 11.10 then discovering that the same issue of the printer driver is present within 11.10.

The other day I bought a copy of Linux Format magazine as it had a cover DVD containing 12.04. Having run the live version on my laptop and running all three variants of 12.04 (Ubuntu; Kubuntu and Xubuntu but not Lubuntu as they had not put it on the disk) I did not feel overly impressed with 12.04 compared to 11.10 (or even 10.04). I cannot see that I would be benefiting much should I replace 11.10 with 12.04 except for the fact that they are all LTS's. Unity was nice but as I hadn't used it before I didn't feel comfortable with it. KDE 4.8 didn't feel that much different to 4.7 as found in 11.10 and Xubuntu 12.04 still used version 4.8 of XFCE.

They way I am thinking at the moment, if I still used 10.04 I do not think I would be upgrading to 12.04 yet (if at all). I am thinking of skipping 12.04 and upgrading to Xubuntu 12.10 because that should have XFCE 4.10 and according to their own website has some nice features in it.

[vw72]

It's your system to do with as you like, but it seems inconsistent to want to go to Xubuntu 12.10 to get XFCE 4.10 because it has "nice features" but you aren't willing to go to kubuntu 12.04 to get kde 4.8.2 which also has nice features. OTOH, if you use firefox, it definitely works better with 11.10 than 12.04, but just about everything else works better or faster with kubuntu 12.04, especially if upgraded to kde 4.8.3.

EDIT: But, by design, LTS releases usually do not make huge jumps with new things because their goal is to increase stability versus add a lot of new features

[SteveRiley]

If you're feeling especially adventuresome:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.10
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-meta

[NickStone]

As I'm using 11.10 the following message appears....


W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-dev...source/Sources 404 Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-dev...-i386/Packages 404 Not Found

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

So the way I see it, I got two options,
1. Upgrade to 12.04
2. Wait until 12.10 is released

or I could ditch Xubuntu and replace it with Kubuntu 12.04 or Mageia 2 (KDE)