I skipped Ubuntu 12.10 almost entirely.  In VirtualBox, with the Guest Additions installed, mousing was completely broken due to a bug in the X Server.  While I understand it was an issue affecting an upstream project, I felt it was unfortunate that it shipped that way, and it appears that it may never be fixed.  (This bug affects many more distributions than just Ubuntu — Debian Wheezy appears to be shipping with it as well, which is preventing me from doing any kind of testing with it or with distributions built on its foundation, like Crunchbang)

I’m always interested in what the Canonical folks are up to, especially now that the spotlight is shining on them to deliver a solid gaming desktop in a potentially post-Windows world.  I grabbed today’s daily image of what will become Ubuntu 13.04, “Raring Ringtail”.  Mostly, I wanted to know if the above issue had been worked out.  It has.

But I was also interested to see first hand what all the hubbub was about.  If you’re not aware, Canonical’s Dash (a launcher/desktop search feature, similar to that found in the Windows Start Menu) sends your queries to one of their servers, and feeds back Amazon results below those from your local computer.  Early demonstrations were not so good, but quickly whipped into presentable shape.  Linux users being Linux users (which largely seems to feed off of hatred of anyone making more money than they are), ravaged Canonical for the decision, finally resulting in the ‘hubbub’; Richard Stallman, Linux’s cranky granddad, labeling the entire distribution “spyware”.  Hmm.  I try not to pick up troll bait too often, so it seemed imperative to take a look for myself.

My initial reaction was that it was really not so bad.  The Amazon search results are clearly labeled “suggestions”, they appear below the other search results, and because they are live queries, it takes a few moments for them to appear — I can usually find what I’m looking for on my local system before the results even appear.

One change I noticed from Ubuntu 12.10 was that the online results were not returned on certain queries.  For example, I banged the letters ‘term’ into the Dash, and waited several seconds.  The Dash’s animated icon communicated to me that it had finished searching, and no Amazon search results ever appeared.  I added a ‘p’ to the end of my query (now ‘termp’), and the Dash responded by searching online and returning a book.  I’m assuming this is a new optimization of common or well-known program titles to reduce quibbling amongst power users.  It seems to be based on executable name rather than shortcut description, as searching “libre” (LibreOffice), “ged” (gedit) and “fire” (Firefox) produced searches with no Amazon results, while “write” (LibreOffice Writer), “text” (Text Editor) and “browse” (Firefox Web Browser) did.

Ubuntu 13.04 doesn’t ship for many months, and things here may improve, or still take a turn for the worse.  But if you’re already a user of just about any popular website, you’ve long ago handed over your interests, online activities, and search queries to data miners.  I’m not excusing it, I’m saying that we as people have allowed it, and Canonical are not the first (or last) people to implement it.  Did Android get this kind of backlash?  Google’s use of data mining are much more well known, well integrated, and potentially more devious.

Another complaint regarding Ubuntu 12.10 was Canonical’s decision to remove Unity 2D (a version of their Unity shell that didn’t depend on compositing).  Previously, Ubuntu would ‘fall back’ on Unity 2D if hardware acceleration was not available.  But this meant there were two branches of Unity in development at all times, which is pretty stupid.  This change brought the entire shell together under one code base.  Rendering of the full shell is now offloaded on the CPU, meaning a severe performance hit for low-end users.  Ubuntu has never been considered a minimalist’s distro, and hardware accelerated desktops have been with us for half a decade, so I’m not really sure why people are complaining here.

That was until I was able to see this first-hand.  VirtualBox’s Guest Additions are clearly installed and working, and therefore should accelerate Unity (I’ve used it with GNOME and Unity in the past), Unity’s fade animations on menus and other elements clearly suffered.  The performance was admittedly poor, despite my hefty host machine which had little to no difficulty with Ubuntu 12.04.

I’m not sure what else I should be looking for.  We’ve been told that the majority of upcoming changes in Ubuntu will be related to power management and optimization (to improve mobile experiences), but running in a Virtual Machine, these changes will be transparent to irrelevant.  But it’s nice to know that I’ll at least be able to track its development.

Just a quick post to mention that Ubuntu 12.04 was released yesterday.  I decided to dump Windows 7 and moved in this evening.

So far:

• Really wish I had an SSD.
• Social media, email and instant messaging integration is good.  Not great, but good.  Of course, Win7′s is non-existent, so this is a plus.
• Multi-monitor experience is a bit underwhelming, and very jarring when you add workspaces.  Things not lining up when you engage the Workspace Switcher is one ugly papercut.
• Wish there was a hotkey to activate the Workspace Switcher.  There is one.  It’s Super+S.  Rad.
• Getting VirtualBox running and re-adding my existing machines was a bit of a hassle, and getting USB pass-through up was another, but everything seems happy now, so I’ll chalk it up to learning curve.
• Shoved my work VM onto the second monitor in the fourth workspace.  Now, when I need it, I know exactly where it is, and when I don’t, it’s far away.
• Video tearing feels like vsync is off, need to figure out where to check this.  I can tolerate it for now but this will irritate me beyond belief the next time I try to play back a movie.  Found it buried in ATI Catalyst Control Center.  Video playback is perfect now.
• Very disappointed that the GNOME 3.4 virtualization and remote administration application, Boxes, did not make it into the official repositories.  It looks like a beautiful application with excellent integration.  I actually spent a few hours under Arch, Fedora 17 Beta, and looking into unofficial Ubuntu PPAs; as of this writing, you cannot get it without compiling from source, which isn’t an acceptable solution when using a package-based distribution.  I’ll keep an eye out.

I’m not sure if I will eventually abandon Unity and go back to GNOME 3, which I have fallen in love with.   I realize that Unity is really maturing at this point, and I want to seriously give it a chance, but some nagging issues (that I’m only just now identifying after running my everyday applications natively on real hardware) may make me want to jump:

• It eats the Super key.  I can’t trigger the Start button in my Windows 7 VM from the keyboard; Unity insists on catching the keypress and opening the dash.
• It eats the Alt key.  I can’t trigger many keyboard shortcuts.  Most annoyingly, Firefox’s “Remember Password” button is Alt+R, but simply pressing the Alt key now opens the dash and dismisses the bubble where the “Remember Password” button lives!  To workaround, I have to dismiss the dash and quickly press whatever “login” button triggered the dialog before the next page loads to get the Remember Password button to re-appear.  Nasty.
• Ubuntu’s notifications are really dreadful compared to GNOME 3′s beautiful notification handling.

I may install them side-by-side and test my uses out on each, but for now, I will stick with Unity for a week or two and see how things pan out.

In the event that something goes really wrong, I’ve also got a Windows 7 installation that can service my needs (currently a platform for running games) on disk.  But after moving in, I think I’m hooked.  It’s sad that it has taken so long, but desktop Linux really is shaping up, and if you’re even the least bit reserved about the future of Windows, I think you should take a look.

I gave up on Ubuntu during the 11.10 alphas.  Look, I know what to expect; the dev environment isn’t supposed to be reliable, and I’ve had to rebuild my system from scratch.  It happens.  But not four times.  And not during the RC cycle.  And certainly not after the actual release.  But that’s how it went.  That kind of frequency screams “amateur hour” and nearly drove me away entirely.

When it wasn’t failing to boot, it was suffering from wicked caching problems whenever I left it alone for a few hours.  After I returned, the disk thrashing was so rampant that even the host struggled to keep up; rebooting the system was actually faster than waiting for Ubuntu to sort itself out.

So, I migrated over to Arch Linux and spent some quality time with GNOME 3.  I quickly fell in love with GNOME 3.  I love the workspace managment.  I love the minimization of the user interface.  I love the ‘Activities’ overview.  Most of all, I love how many Linux users hate it.  If you’re upsetting hardcore Linux people, you must be doing something right.

Arch, on the other hand, is not a good match for me.  Maybe ten years ago when my free time was less valuable, I would appreciate its sleek core.  But it’s 2012, and I’m married with a career, and why doesn’t wireless just work?

So, my desire to tinker with Linux has tapered off a bit, but I decided to give the daily build of Ubuntu a spin.  It’s pre-beta, but so far things have been solid.  No disk trashing if I leave it alone, and absolutely no updates bringing the entire system down.  I even installed it on what I expected to be quirky hardware; an HP tablet.  From the Bluetooth and WiFi, to the screen digitizer and extended multimedia keys, almost everything worked out of the box.  The only thing that didn’t work was the Smartcard reader.

Meanwhile, I am also testing 12.04′s Server Edition.  Specifically, I am writing a guide to building your own home media server.  I’m hoping to have it ready to coincide with the release, so keep an eye out for that!