Ubuntu 8.10 beta review
As promised a while back, I’m doing a review on 8.10.
Ubuntu 8.04.1 is a great OS, but I had a few problems.
The ATI drivers in the repo weren’t performing like they should, the bootup time was over 1 minute, …
All of those problems are fixed now.
The new ATI drivers are great (haven’t tested any OpenGL apps yet)(it seemed to be installed without me having to do anything, which is great).
Flash player 10 now performs better than Flash player 9 did on my Windows machine.
My cpu’s don’t go through the roof anymore when viewing fullscreen videos.
This make for a far nicer overall experience.
This release comes with gnome 2.24. It’s a good improvement over 2.22.
One of the best things about gnome 2.24 is tabbed browsing in nautilus.
I think it will do for file browsing like tabs did for web browsing.
Another improvement is how the drives are presented.
Ubuntu also added a nice little app to the default installation.
It’s a crap remover. It removes unnecessary packages from your pc (old kernels, …).
Also, the applications in the repositories are upgraded to their newest version.
Ubuntu 8.10 integration of PulseAudio has improved a lot for me. No more of the little problems it had in 8.04.
The beta has been as stable as Hardy for me, no issues at all.
Ubuntu 8.10 is more polished, faster and even more user friendly release compared to the previous releases.
If you are using a ATI card and you aren’t using a production machine, upgrade now.
Note: a in depth review on Ubuntu 8.10 will be done when the final version is out.
Linux Owns 
Have you tried watching movies in 8.10.
Although Envy NG wasn’t needed to get my ATI card going, I still have a lot of problems with Compiz enabled and watching films with totem.
I’m still having trouble with Skype under 8.10. Has anyone got it to work properly yet? Although 8.4.1 shows processing power utilization at 95%, Skype works fine and the installation process set the alsamixer defaults automatically. No such luck with 8.10… at least not yet.
I’ve tried running 8.10 the last week or so and I’ve had nothing but problems with it. Maybe it’s just not liking my system… Every time I’ve tried to install the Nvidia restricted drivers, it boots up without the GUI and trying to do a recovery won’t help it any. The updater hangs too and leaves old kernels in the Grub boot loader.
I did like a handful of things in there, but as right now [and for a while at least], 8.04 will be staying put.
Keep filing bug reports guys.
@ Mat
Watching movies is smoother than ever.
What happened to the long promised new theme??????????
The theme is there, just go to appearance and enable it
Before the updates a few days ago the theme was called NewHuman.
But when I checked now that seems to have been replaced by the theme DarkRoom.
What ever happened to Mark Shuttleworths Plans to Make Ubuntu “Prettier” “in his own words”
Than Mac Osx/Leopard???
In my Opinion this long awaited new ubuntu theme, ‘which isn’t even set to default’
gets a BIG Thumbs Down from me.
Thank Fark For Kde
@Kaddy,
He wants it to be more pretty than OSX when 9.10 or 9.04 comes out (forgot exactly).
Not that I find OSX pretty, so that doesn’t mean much to me.
you may be right… but this new theme has been 1 year in the making…. it didn’t make hardy, so it was delayed for ibex, 1 whole year of excitement hoping that ubuntu will get a whole new interface makeover, and all they manage to do is slap together a crappy theme that isn’t even as good as half the dark themes out there that i’ve seen. arghh. disappointed.
For me, Intrepid is the best. It actually feels like the finished product, I’ve had no problems whatsoever.
Kaddy:
I understand what you mean and feel the same.
There are extra themes you can download from the repository, (the name slips my mind atm) but those are community themes.
I don’t understand how a professional, paid theme can’t make a decent theme.
Human is a finished, polished theme but you can hardly call it an very attractive theme.
—
Scouser73:
I feel the same. The only problem I have is my digital camera, that worked perfectly under hardy, won’t mount.
The bug report is sent and people are looking into it, so I believe that will be finished before the final release.
Well Upgrading right now, let’s see how it goes, but 8.0.4.1 is doing fine so far for me, just a bit slow and resource heavy, eats about 1 GB of RAM, let’s see how 8.10 goes…
You might have better performance with a clean install.
I can’t really recommend upgrading.
THis was very insteresting I doing term paper on this OS system So any more information would be appreciate.
@ Margret
Ask the question in the Ubuntuforums.org, lots of people will be more than happy to help you.