Tag ubuntu

Ubuntu Mono — The Gamma Travesty

In one of the latest commits, Ubuntu Mono, the monospace variant of the Ubuntu font that has recently been included in the distribution, was added to the repositories. Ubuntu Mono is a relatively nice looking monospace font that borrows quite a lot from Consolas, but adds its own distinctive touches that make it fit better with the Ubuntu font family. I have been a member of the beta testing group and have seen it for a while now, but I never quite found the time to properly look into it. Capital Gamma in Ubuntu MonoSadly, while the roman script looks great already, the Greek script suffers from some poor design decisions. Chief among them is Gamma (the capital gamma) which was clearly designed by someone totally unfamiliar with the Greek language and script. Gamma in Ubuntu Mono features a bottom serif that is totally distorting the perception of the character. It is unlike any other modern font I've ever seen and I feel is doing Ubuntu Mono a disservice (it has certainly rendered the font unusable by me as long as it looks this bad). In an effort to remedy this, I have opened a bug in Launchpad, Ubuntu's bug reporting system. You can find the bug, #867577, here. If you have a Launchpad account, use Ubuntu (and/or the fonts) and would like to see Ubuntu Mono fixed for Greek please subscribe, add your comment and/or contact those responsible to help them realise how their effort is being ruined by a few badly designed characters.

Some thoughts on Ubuntu Unity

A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point […]

Ubuntu Unity: Just Bad.

Ubuntu Unity is Canonical's netbook UI, introduced in Ubuntu 10.10. It is, by far, the worst netbook graphical shell I've ever used: extremely slow on Atom-based netbooks, clumsy, inconsistent and of arguable 'retro' æsthetics reminiscent of 1990s NeXTSTEP and clones, only with half of the usability those had. Needless to say, vanilla GNOME with Docky as a launcher is --- in my opinion --- a vastly superior and usable solution for both netbook and desktop use, until something better (viz. GNOME 3.0) comes along. So, it seemed almost like a joke when Shuttleworth announced earlier today, as reported by the linked Ars Technica article that Ubuntu 11.04 won't feature the GNOME Shell, but Unity as the default shell, for both the netbook and desktop editions. Pathetic, really, no matter how you slice it.

Hellenic in the Ubuntu font

Ubuntu 10.10 is just around the corner. In this version some preliminary signs of Ubuntu’s design efforts are slowly showing, although there’s still a vast amount of work to do. One of the ‘new’ things in 10.10 as far as the user experience is concerned is the new Ubuntu font. I am very happy to […]

Upstart in Ubuntu 9.10

Upstart is the ‘new’ event-based sysvinit replacement by Canonical, that has been widely adopted in the linux world ever since it first appeared in late 2006. The idea is centred around causality, that is, defining relationships that are not loosely defined by some measure of time, but by the presence (at runtime that is) of […]

Forget me not!

Canonical announces its support for Moblin, just a year after Intel dropped Ubuntu as the basis for the project in favour of Fedora. A great move by Canonical, as Moblin seems to provide the best overall optimisations for netbooks --- and some really great æsthetics/usability --- for that class of devices.

Benchmarks

When OS X first made its appearance in 2001 and for many years afterwards, the performance of xnu, its kernel, and many of its subsystems was ridiculed as it was way slower than its competitors. Elitism, slower development cycle, closed source etc. aside, Apple has managed to make Mac OS X much faster than the leading linux distributions in the span of a couple of years, while at the same time the desktop linux projects and companies struggle with reinventing the wheel and fixing regressions. The situation on the desktop today for linux users is --- comparatively --- worse than it was a decade: traditional strongholds are gone [e.g. performance] while usability, stability and features are more or less unchanged for many years. Sad for Open Source, sad for competition.

Delusions.

Hmmm, what was Mark thinking when he wrote this? The warrior rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of the traditional big [software vendors]: Microsoft and […]

Did we really release 8.04?

The question serves as the subject of the eponymous thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. And it's quite valid. I'm really saddened to see the flawed argument put forward by several Ubuntu developers that 8.04 was a right decision. Even today, more than two months since 8.04 was released and some days after 8.04.1 came out, with hundreds of megabytes of updates the problems affecting 8.04 are numerous, major and extremely annoying. We still have a long way to go before reaching parity with the best (viz. OS X), let alone surpassing it. Judging by the responses on that thread, the first step would need to be the end of the state denial as a defence mechanism, acknowledging the fact that the 8.04 release (as well as 8.04.1) were full of show-stopper bugs and reminiscent of an era when desktop linux was infinitely more annoying than it is today and working towards quality (cf. punctuality). A 'release' should translate to 'usable, polished software', not 'alpha quality developer preview software'. 8.04 seemed more like the latter than the former and that needs to change.

How Hard could fixing 'Hardy' be?

Ubuntu 8.04 is coming on the 24th of April 2008. As is typically the case in the past few years, many millions of Ubuntu users across the globe are either waiting or, in some cases, trying out the pre-release software, reporting and fixing bugs. Beta 1 of the upcoming version of this popular linux distribution came out a few days ago and, sadly, despite the fact that 8.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, it seems that it's going to be --- by far --- one of the buggiest releases ever to come out bearing the name 'Ubuntu'. In my tests with 'Beta 1', there are hundreds of major bugs involving the brand new (and largely unstable) gvfs subsystem for GNOME, application compatibility with PulseAudio and general system behaviour, responsiveness and stability. Having said all that, Ubuntu 8.04, at least in its first Beta is significantly faster than its predecessor. Having less than a month before the 'final' comes out begs the question: is Ubuntu 8.04 going to be delayed so that it matches 7.10 in terms of stability (remember this is supposed to be a Long Term Support release), or is it going to be released on time with a x.xx.1 version coming later in the year? Why has Canonical abandoned the 'few things at a time, done properly' approach that it long had with Ubuntu since the beginning? While desktop linux is still sorely lacking the usability foundations that would enable it to compete with OS X, stability was never one of its problems; unless 'Beta 1' represented a codebase quite far from what Canonical is working on for release --- sadly this is not the case --- Ubuntu 8.04 is probably going to be a feature-rich update, but a huge disappointment in the areas where linux traditionally shines.