Karma, n.

the effects of a person's actions that determine his destiny in his next incarnation

If so, then Jaunty did the right things in order to have an awesome destiny in its new incarnation: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Okay, I'm technically using the beta release, so this isn't a review of Karmic (which hasn't been released) so much as it is a preview. However, I used Hardy's beta (way back when), and that was hardly hardy, hardly working hard. Karmic, on the other hand, worked perfectly out of the box. (+1 point there)

So, some improvements that I noticed. Number one: boot time. When I started it up first, I was worried it didn't load everything, or had an error, it was that fast. I timed it from the point I pushed Enter in Grub, to the point where I can log in: 17 seconds. Amazing! Previously, it was somewhere upwards of 1.5 minutes. Plus, this fast boot time one-ups Windows 7, where the Vista->7 upgrade does have faster boot time as one of its main features.

This improvement is because of Ubuntu using a new startup method, written from scratch. It's also significantly prettier than all the startup screens in the past:

Unfortunately, you don't get to see it for too long, because it's so fast! The Launchpad Blueprint claims that the result using a solid state drive is 5 seconds. This isn't from standby, folks. This is a cold boot. And, I might mention, from standby it's just a few seconds both ways.

After it boots, it doesn't disappoint either. The login screen has the options more evident, and provides a more integrated experience going from the GDM login manager into the actual GNOME session. What I mean is, the background from the boot remains the same, and the Ubuntu text is instead replaced with a login widget box thing. You use that to sign in, and it vanishes, at which point the boot screen with its moving bar returns. When it's done loading, it neatly fades into your new session. No more jarring changes, long loading times for GNOME and wandering whether it froze on you or not. Woohoo!

It unfortunately does not give you a free cheerleader...

The Ubuntu devs seem to also have gotten the point that the whole orange-y look is not all that calming on the eyes, and a blue or grey is preferred. Hence, the default Human theme is sort of half-way to something that doesn't look like a juicy orange: the windows are grey, but the background still sort of jumps in and reminds of fresh-off-the-grove juice. However, while the only blue given is GNOME's default Clearlooks theme, which is... okay, but not wonderful, Ubuntu does provide some nice default themes other than Human. For example, my current theme is using only default-included things: the new Dust Sand theme, and one of their default wallpapers (yes, they included more than two!)

Full View

Other nice things. Firefox 3.5 by default - works fast and stable. OpenOffice.org 3.1. Out-of-the-box wifi, networking, Bluetooth (with adapter), and easy nVidia driver installation. Compiz works beautifully, and GNOME seems to be more efficient with its resources. The new Linux kernel does power management more efficiently, too: my fan is quieter, my computer is cooler, and my graphics lag less due to premature shutdown to save power.

But what about the bad things? Well, I got two complaints.

The first: Pidgin was shot down. I don't understand why, and I can't find a discussion or actual reasoning for this, but Pidgin was replaced by Empathy as the default chat client. I tried Empathy, but I had to get out almost immediately because of it not being able to log on to my GTalk account for some reason. A sudo apt-get install pidgin later, I had GTalk working.

If anyone reading this could please explain to me why Pidgin, a stable, old, open source, free chat client with a well-established cross-platform chat library (libpurple) was replaced with a GNOME brainchild? Especially when Empathy has no file transfer support over any protocol, sucks at IRC, and is really nowhere as powerful or as customizable as Pidgin because it is much younger? Because of its alleged video support? Which only works on Windows sometimes? Sigh...

Now, while that wasn't a bug, my next complaint is. It has to do with, as mightbe expected with everything apparently, 64-bit flash. Yeah, the OS I installed was the 64-bit beta. Not the wisest decision, but I like taking advantage of my computer's full power. And, while the bug on Launchpad appears to have vanished (I will probably create it again), my complaint goes thus: ndiswrapper + Adobe's libflashplayer.so works fine in all aspects except actually clicking on the Flash plugin. When I click on certain flash applications, such as Pandora or YouTube, it doesn't record a click, but that the mouse moved off the application - while the mouse is still clearly there, and clicked. The workaround is to click outside the app, then drag the mouse onto it, let go, and without moving it, click again. While this isn't all too inconvenient for occasionally clicking to listen to my Pandora or watch YouTube videos, I think it would kill Flash gaming, so I'm hoping it gets fixed before the actual release.

One of my friends linked me to a public inturwab survey that's about awareness about computers and Windows 7. So, head on over there and take it. I hope my blog has enough smart readers that they will offset the amount of stupid people normally dwelling on the interwob.