Comments on The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

First of all, thank you for your great (as usual) tutorial.

Desktop could be even more improved by adding the following packages typically useful for average user:

• FreeMind - mind mapping sofware
• Dia - diagram drawing 
• OpenProj - project management software (alternatively - Planner could be used)

Regards,

Sergei

Another vote for Dia here.

While we're at it, F-Spot and Picassa are both quite toxic and best avoided. The former uses bad quality and Mono, the latter has no linux version available (WINE only) and, worst of all, spreads DX to undermine OpenGL. Keeping either of them kind of undermines the point of moving beyond Microsoft products, which both are in their own way, and the low Quality. Both undermine better Free and Open Source Software and Open Standards, both help extend Microsoft's lock-in. One of the most important installation steps for Ubuntu lately has become cleanup.

Fedora has Shotwell and it is available in Ubuntu. The new Digikam rocks, too, and should not be missed.

I come to this article every time I need to set up a box.  It is a perfect checklist for a newby.  Thanks for taking the time to put this out there.  I would be interested to see you add a section on security software and encryption.  Thanks.

This is great and complete review about this newest version of Ubuntu. Two tumbs up for Ubuntu 10.04 that more user friendly so we can use it easier than the older.

Picassa DOES have a linux version--see the later pages of this HowTo.  No WINE or lock-in required.  No DX spread--WINE simply maps DX calls to OpenGL equivalents, not undermine it.  Check your info more carefully.

"For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa

Check YOUR info more carefully.

I like PCLINUXOS 2010 much better thank you.

It is a lot easier than Ubuntu.

Ehh, that is debatable. I agree in that PCLinuxOS 2010 is user friendly. A new user though is nearly forced to use the KDE  version w/o supported hardware. In my case, I couldn't use any other environment even with ndiswrapper. The environments are great...but w/o internet not so much.

Lucid is it for me at the moment. This is the first version of Ubuntu that worked with my current system. It is novice friendly, easy to navigate, offers more software/support than one really needs. It just works...and then some. 

Aside from finding a way to mess up my system so I had to reinstall 2 times, it (lucid) is nearly idiot proof  (granting the learning curve as a windows convert). Navigation is easy. For me converting was just trying to teach myself the file system structures/names, and having to once in a while open a terminal :) Other than that, I've only a couple of times experienced maybe 3 application hang ups, and had to reboot.

Ubuntu has come a long way, especially with regard to addressing hardware compatibility!

Wine seems to be working quite well with a few caveats. I have WINE/Office 2003 working fine, but I am not a power user. I PREFER OpenOffice anyhow. Its worth trying any windows app under WINE - I have had older 3D FPS games work FASTER in WINE that natively on Windows. On older Ubuntu (9.10), I have WINE/Cisco Network Assistant working great, but cannot seem to get it working on 10.04 however that is very specialized app, not generic desktop. just my waste of bits.... regards Ken

Lucid looks great. I hear it works great too. But far from being "perfect", it broke a lot of what had worked for years for me (and plenty of others). I was looking forward to settling in to the next LTS release, but serious video problems (i.e. incompatible with a number of video chips) is not going to allow that.

Ron made an advise to me, because Ubuntu 9.10 already lost compability capability with video and audio cards in many computers I tried, and with an old Wi-Fi notebook ACER card, never had.

Thanks Falco. It is fine you're doing this everything. I use it everytime. Thanks.

i just installed it , so fancy it is

I have to agree it's a pretty good setup, easy to understand with pretty much everything you want on a clean install. Like some posts say, it's true that some stuff could be added, like Dia, but anyway, this setup is already pretty good as it is and nothing will ever be perfect! It's up to the user to play with it and complete it like he wants!

| Jeff |

I've done a fresh install onto a new 500GB WD HDD after having used other Ubuntu versions this past year dual booting. Since I only use Windows XP for about 1% of the time (because of proprietary programs that won't run properly in WINE) I decided to disconnect my XP HDD. The previous Ubuntu 9.10 was more stable than this one is right now. My desktop has crashed several times in the past couple weeks,then it reloads the desktop to the login.

Brasero  will burn a data cd,but not audio. In the previous Ubuntu it had no problem.

The file browser buttons on the upper left-hand corner can be easily moved to the "normal?" right-hand side.

I removed the "Switch-User" option because it caused a crash also.

I'm not going to try now, but I believe that Ctrl + Alt + Backspace restarts the desktop also.

The login screen back round is an improvement over the dark one that 9.10 has. Now I can login without having to turn up the lighting in my room.

When switching from 9.10 to 10.04 systems I had to adjust my desktop position on my monitor,which is something I didn't have to do with the previous versions of the past year.

 I know the developers are working on some, if not all of these problems and thank them for every improvement they make with each version.

Hopefully, people who are just "getting their feet wet" so to speak, regarding Ubuntu (Linux) perhaps having it pre-installed on brand new computers...don't become discouraged by these issues. 

Why dual boot when you can have it as a window? Have you consider using Virtual Box?

Has anyone tested virtual box on Ubuntu 10? please share your experience because I believe it is a better option if it work well :-)

I am very happy with Virtual Box on Window platform not sure how stable it is on Ubuntu.

Thanks and have a great day.

I work with VirtualBox in Lucid.

It works fine. I have a virtual XP-device, SP3.

Even the Windows updates go well.

 So give it a try!

Many (most?) desires to have Windows as an option, even after ten years using Linux as main OS.Mainly because of video editing applications.

So that you must choose the manual partition way.

What about having two HDs, one for Ubuntu, one for Windows?

I received 10.04 LTS Desktop Edition from u....I want to thanks lot for it.But I can't believe it.Thanks thanks lot...my friends also can't believe it..Ubuntu is very help full for me to study (I'm learning now programing C) in my university..It's very beautiful now ..keep going..we wish u all the best.                                

Still using, this was or is the perfect ubuntu version (desktop/server).