Oneiric Ocelot

Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot is out! I have used Ubuntu on my laptop since the 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release and every release would get me excited like a kid would on seeing new toys. I would try to do a dist-upgrade or download the ISO image to install it using my USB drive. Ubuntu repositories would be under heavy load and I would egging my package manager to download all the packages faster and faster and it would be well past midnight by the time when I go to bod after I am done with the installation and setup.

This time things are way better. I already have Ubuntu Oneiric installed on my laptop! 🙂 I am spared of the downloads and the midnight tussles that I had to go through so that my laptop will have a spanking new Ubuntu to use the next day. But all this luxury didn’t come without pain.

When I installed Oneiric Ocelot beta 1 release, the Unity port to Gnome 3 was totally broken and unusable. Most actions done on the desktop would cause Unity, Compiz or some GNOME 3 component to crash. There was also a serious issue of focus change between open windows and the desktop wherein switching between windows was not possible at all.  All I could do with the desktop was to report bugs. There started a marathon of non-stop bug reports and daily updates which were often more than 50 MB in size. I cursed Ubuntu like anything on social networks and had lengthy arguments with my friends over there. I reported more than 50 bugs most of which were centered on Unity and Compiz. There was a provision to install a Classic GNOME fallback mode, but it was more of an emulation layer on top of GNOME 3.x and not a full-fledge GNOME 2.x environment. When I decided to try GNOME shell, I found that it had too many rough edges and wasn’t integrated properly with Ubuntu.

All this led to a stage where I almost decided to quit Ubuntu for good. But wait, did I have an alternative distro that I could switch to? Nope. Debian and Fedora were the only candidates that I was considering. Being used to the Debian world for so long, Fedora didn’t excite me enough. Debian? Debian would be good, but a lot of effort would be required to get it working with my nVidia graphics card by installing the proprietary drivers. Nouveau is a promising project that aims to provide libre drivers for nVidia, but isn’t fully mature yet and has its share of issues. Also with Debian stable, I would be lagging behind the latest releases of most of the software. I could install “testing” or “sid” if I wanted to live on the bleeding edge, but the experience with Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot beta left me hesitant to proceed in that direction though Debian would be way more stable. So I just decided to wait a bit for the bugs to get fixed and things to improve. Things did improve gradually with the daily updates which some times introduced new bugs. That the Ubuntu team was working in full swing towards a release free of critical and usability bugs was obviously visible while observing the bug transitions and updates. About 2-3 days back, the updates stopped as expected and Oneiric Ocelot was ready to gallop towards today’s grand release. And with today’s release, Ubuntu has succeeded in bringing a very good release that sets an exciting road-map for the upcoming LTS release aptly named “Precise Pangolin” due for release next April. My hearty congratulations to all those who made awesome release possible, contributing in myriad ways.

Will I try Precise Pangolin in its beta stage? Of course I will 🙂