Ubuntu Lucid: The good, the bad and the ugly

Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is now out in beta and after using it for almost a week it it’s worth looking at some of its highlights and lowlights. Bear in mind that this is a beta release so the final release could be a lot different to what we have here.

The new theme

The most obvious change in Lucid Lynx is the desktop overhaul. Lucid sports a new dark theme with “aubergine” accents. And it is horrible. After all the discussion and promises that a new theme was coming to replace the brown Human theme – it has been more than a year now – the new look is dark and unappealing. Perhaps it is just me who is graphically challenged but the lack of colour differentiation between window border, menu bars and panels makes for a mess of dark all over my screen. And the light theme is no better, except that it makes for a mess of light on the screen.

The new theme aside, there is much about Lucid to like:

MeMenu and Gwibber

Now Ubuntu users can be all social right from their desktop, thanks to the new MeMenu and the greatly improved Gwibber microblogging app. It’s not something I would have imagined to be an important addition to the desktop but having seen it in action it makes a lot of sense. Briefly put, the Social from the Start blueprint outlines Ubuntu’s plan to integrate a broad range of social networks into the desktop. It’s a big ask but with the work done by Ryan Paul on Gwibber it is starting to take shape. Gwibber now supports most popular social networking platforms including Facebook, IRC, Twitter, Identi.ca and Flickr. Together with Empathy, which supports instant messaging protocols such as xmpp, IRC, ICQ and QQ and so on, the Ubuntu desktop now supports almost all social networking platforms directly from the desktop. Tying the whole lot together is the MeMenu which sits in the top right hand of the screen and gives you an overview of all your social networks. It’s a work-in-progress but the intention is great and there is the sense that when bugs are ironed out and all features of the blueprint are enabled the social desktop is going to be a powerful part of Ubuntu.

Sound control

Managing sound on Linux has always been a problem. With a choice of sub-par tools to manage sound users simply had to live with the iffy sound on Linux. The switchover to PulseAudio a couple of years ago promised to fix the problems with a single, integrated tool. But that too didn’t work. At least not until now. The new PulseAudio sound controls in Lucid are finally up to the task of managing a wide array of sound hardware as well being able to manage multiple input/output streams. Being able to manage and control the sound for each individual application radically transforms Ubuntu sound management into something worth using.

Software Center

I’ve been an Ubuntu user from its very first release and before that I used a number of other distributions. As a result I am completely comfortable adding and removing software using the command line and have had little or no time for various incarnations of the Ubuntu Software Center. In most cases they just seemed like a bad front-end to a perfectly good back-end process: apt/deb. But with Lucid this stream of sub-par software management tools has been broken. For the first time it actually feels that the Ubuntu Software Center is a truly useful tool. I still jump to a command line for reconfiguring packages and the like, but increasingly I am finding myself using the Software Centre for basic installation needs.

The new Software Center interface is neat and attractive and with only a couple of options is simple to use. The link between the Software Center and the Software Sources tool feels like a bad hack but at least there is an attempt to integrate that into the Software Center. The Software Center, after all, feels like a natural home for the Software Sources rather than having it lumped in with the many other orphans in the System-Administration menu. Perhaps soon it will be removed for good from the System menu.

Bluetooth support

No, not just Bluetooth support, but intelligent Bluetooth support. If you have Bluetooth enabled, opening the Downloads folder pops up a dialog informing you that you can receive files via Bluetooth into that folder. I confess that I have no idea whether this is new only to Lucid, but I haven’t seen it before. Nevertheless, it is a valuable addition and makes it much easier to shift documents from a phone to a desktop, for example. The preference dialog gives options to share the directory over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and controls how files are managed. As smartphones become increasingly common, a plain-language approach to sharing files over a range of protocols is becoming increasingly important. It’s a potentially killer feature.

Speed, Ubuntu One Music Store, those buttons

A fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is fast; just seconds to get to a usable desktop. I’ve noticed some slowdown if the driver for Nvidia devices is installed but as a whole Lucid is pretty nimble on its feet. Switching applications is fast and slick which makes using Lucid a pleasure. And the desktop as a whole feels a lot more polished.

The Ubuntu One Music Store has had tons written about it and now it is finally here. The only problem is that it doesn’t work at the moment if you’re outside of the US or Europe and there do still seem to be bugs in the overall system. It’s a great idea and is well integrated into Rhythmbox but without testing actual downloads it’s hard to form a verdict on its usefulness.

So much has been written about the decision by Ubuntu to move the minimise/maximise/close buttons to the left of the window bar (60+ pages of discussions on the forum alone)  that there isn’t much worth adding. Except that it’s a decision I can get used to. Mark Shuttleworth has said that the decision paves the way for new features to be added to the right-hand side. I have no idea what those could be but I’m willing to wait.

The Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Beta 1 release can be downloaded from the Ubuntu site. The final release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is planned for April 29.

Have you tried the beta release? Let me know what you think.