I'm back

[minthaka]

After having bad weeks trying to bring Mandriva 2009 into life, I found that my printer on the parallel Xubuntu 9.04 just started the work, due to long expected fix on its (*buntu) cups system. So the last obstacle has been removed. I've come to Xubuntu again, and I found in it a great and very stable system, I've never ever seen since Ubuntu 5.05! Great work, guys! I could even remove the Beast, (= the Pulse Audio).

[jmadero]

just wait for 9.10.....supposedly sub 10 second boot time....

[elija]

Xubuntu 9.04 is great when PulseAudio is gone

The sheer pace of development is the single biggest advantage in the long game against the proprietary operating systems. Windows 7 for example aimed to be better than Linux and in some respects it succeeded. But that was Linux from at least a year ago. When the next (*buntu) LTS releases arrive in April '10 who knows how outdated Windows 7 will look.

Of course MS will never match the 6 month release cycle of the Linux distros* purely because they would never get the return on investment required for their business model in such a short time scale.

All Linux needs is a marketing company as skilled as Microsoft** and a budget to match. I doubt this will happen for the very same return on investment reasoning as above.

* Not all of them follow this cycle. Debian anyone?
** Microsoft: OK software marketed brilliantly.

[minthaka]

I'm really interested in understanding what a hell PulseAudio ought to be. You can check any distribution to see: it only makes troubles. The 99% of audio issues is related to PA, whether be it Skype or movie. And I don't understand why are they (the distro packagers) are pushing that piece of garbage in first line so aggressively. Well, in Mandriva there is an elegant way to get rid of it, you just have to check out a box for it. Even if I honor developer's work, it is clear that most of the users would never see any use of PA.

About speed boot: it is a fact, or just a trick, to have the desktop running, and then to wait for services' wake? I doubt in those hokus-pokuses.

[bigtomrodney]

As I understand it minthaka, the move to upstart a few releases ago was to move towards a more Mac OS X Launchpad daemon system. Rather than launch all services at boot, some can be launched in parallel with others and some again can be launched only when the appropriate hardware or software requires it.

Essentially, rather than XP's horrible asynchronous booting that leaves your desktop unusable while services are still thrashing your CPU and hard disk, you can have something like CUPS start only when there is a printer attached and start non-essential services when disk and CPU i/o are low enough as to not hurt performance. It's already being used to some extent, certainly we've been on the upstart platform for a while but it'll be good to see it taken advantage of fully.

[minthaka]

As I understand it minthaka, the move to upstart a few releases ago was to move towards a more Mac OS X Launchpad daemon system. Rather than launch all services at boot, some can be launched in parallel with others and some again can be launched only when the appropriate hardware or software requires it.

Essentially, rather than XP's horrible asynchronous booting that leaves your desktop unusable while services are still thrashing your CPU and hard disk, you can have something like CUPS start only when there is a printer attached and start non-essential services when disk and CPU i/o are low enough as to not hurt performance. It's already being used to some extent, certainly we've been on the upstart platform for a while but it'll be good to see it taken advantage of fully.

Well, that sounds good!

What I like the best in the present release:
1. A proper collection of versions for each application (stable K3b, stable desktop ->Xorg...)
2. Even if aptoncd doesn't work, I can add the downloaded packages through Synaptic. I don't remember this option worked for me in the past.