Posted on Tuesday 24th of October 2006 at 07:51 in Linux

Is It Worth Upgrading to Edgy Eft?

A question I've been asked a couple of times - whether it's actually worth upgrading from Dapper (LTS) to Edgy Eft which is out very shortly (or already depending on when this is published). While it's always up to the individual whether they upgrade or not (and this is a special case as the user would be upgrading from an LTS release), there are some good reasons for doing so:

New themes
A tenuous start, but a good one all the same. The login screen has been updated for the first time since Ubuntu 4.10, as well as wallpapers, splash screens etcs. A sexy start for EE.

Rounded Window Borders
Yes, the borders are rounded! The O/S is starting to look increasingly polished and attractive for first time users (as well as easing the eyes of the experienced ones). Rounded corners are good.

New GNOME
More importantly GNOME 2.16 was shipped with the Beta and will obviously be out with the full version. It's harder, better, faster, stronger, more secure and more stable.

AIGLX
Is on by default (but you'll still need Beryl or Compiz to get it looking delicious. AIGLX = Vista-ish effects with far less resource usage (incase you're unsure have a look at it in action here. Although, the stable nVidia and ATi drivers don't support this (as far as I'm aware) so you'll need Beta drivers (or the mesa ones).

Updated software
New versions of many applications are being rolled out too (Evolution, Firefox, OpenOffice, GAIM, Orca... to name a few).

However, the downside for some is that you will be upgrading from a LTS distribution so you need to bare in mind whether this is a concern for you or not.

However, there are some downsides to consider:
There's still no way to configure a dual monitor setup without stumbling into the xorg.conf file, which is clearly a problem for non-savvy users. I appreciate there are numerous tutorials around offering a step-by-step guide to this process but it must be my key area for improvement.

Some find problems with the networking that Ubuntu offers but I've not had a problem with it thus far, but then my networking requirements are fairly standard.

Finally, I'm sure it'll still manage to bork up my desktop in one way or another, it just wouldn't be Ubuntu if it took a specific dislike to MY machine alone. No one else?s, just mine.

 

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