There is a nice little rant on OSWeekly by Matt Hartley about Ubuntu’s rabid rapid growth and how he thinks the balance has swayed toward too many half-finished and poorly tested new features and not enough polish.
Yes, we all know that with a community produced distro it is OUR job, the role of the USERS, to help test and polish .. yadda yadda … and I’m not denying that … the lack of polish in Feisty is as much MY fault for not helping test and filing bug reports as anyone elses … but the fact remains that there are lots of new features appears before the rough edges in old ones are smoothed over.
As a long-time user of Linux distros, and more recently Ubuntu, I really agree with many of Matt’s points. In most cases, Ubuntu works
great, but there is a real need to fix some of the flaky
utilities that can be real showstoppers for some users (both
experienced and newbies). My personal gripe, to add to the issues with
the Network Manager the author complains about, is that hibernation on
my laptop used to work in Dapper and stopped working for Feisty (searching the Interweb I can see I’m not the only one).
Upgrading shouldn’t *loose* you features or hardware support. Hopefully
there will be a real focus in the next Long Term Support (LTS) release
(Ubuntu 8.04) to not add any flashy new features but just fix and
polish the perfectly usable and snappy OS that we already have. I don’t care if it gets delayed to become Ubuntu 8.10 to do it … just give it polish !!
Wine-doors is a package managment tool for installing Windows apps under Linux, using Wine. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but I really should … it looks like it might do similar things to the excellent CrossOver Office Professional, which is probably bad for CodeWeavers as it’s encroaching on their turf … but good for the rest of us who need to run the occasionally ‘legacy’ Win32 application under Linux.
Just a quick note to highlight sk1, which on the surface looks like yet another vector graphics program for Linux, in the vein of Inkscape, skencil and a loosely like Scribus, but on closer inspection contains one very important feature the others have never done well: CorelDRAW format parsing and import (supporting CorelDRAW version 5 to version 13, according to the sk1 news page).
The same group of coders have also released UniConverter, a commandline vector graphics converter which has import filters for CDR, CMX, AI, CGM, WMF, XFIG, SVG, SK, SK1, AFF formats and export filters for AI, SVG, SK, SK1, CGM, WMF formats.
They haven’t released packages for major distros yet, but I had no trouble compiling UniConverter from source (was flawless on Ubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn). This is going to really useful for me, since many of my collegues still use CorelDRAW, and it is about the only file format left that I haven’t been able to view or edit properly on Linux.
Yippee ! Three cheers for the sk1 team !