Onderstekop

I have been using this new release since a couple of days before it was officially released, but I can't help but feel this wasn't much of an improvement.

ATI disasters

I own a IBM Thinkpad Z60M laptop with an ATI graphics card, and that's where my problems with this release started. In previous Ubuntu versions all necessary graphics and additional eye candy worked fine, however, after upgrading nothing seemed to work. I had to install the propriety fglrx drivers and change my old session files so I could see my desktop to start with, but when I did that I noticed I had absolutely no window decorations. The time had come to descend into the new appearances configuration menu and try every obvious option in there (after unsuccessful searches on Google) just to find out I only have window decorations when I use nothing of the Compiz Fusion eye candy.

Ubuntu 7.10 - Tacky Turtle?

OK, so I couldn't use my rotating desktop cube without losing my window decorations and still haven't found a solution to that, but so what? I don't need four desktops to get some work done; I do need a reasonable amount of resources though. And that's my second point of criticism: Ubuntu 7.10 boots slower than it's predecessor and seems to take up a lot more of CPU cycles (especially XGL) which causes the system to slow down. I'm not sure this is because of the new kernel or some other changes in the distribution, but I suspect the kernel has some role in it, because unfortunately I found out that it isn't perfect and that everything runs just as slow with GNOME or Compiz.

Suspend

After I accidentally put my laptop into suspend mode, it couldn't even boot into my GRUB anymore and just showed me a black screen after the huge Thinkpad startup screen. I know this sounds like a very specific problem, but after some googling I found out that this is a fairly common bug that still needs to be fixed, and that it's probably got something to do with my ATI card - again!

Right now you might be thinking: stop bitching about Ubuntu; 75% of your criticism is due to ATI not providing non-propriety drivers to the Linux world and that's a sound point because I've already seen tons of reviews praising the new release. ATI -and all other hardware manufacturers for that matter- should do more to provide good drivers, because I'm sure I won't include an ATI next time I buy a computer.

However, since there is a huge Linux user base which happen to have an ATI card, I feel like Ubuntu should have done more to help them out, because everything worked fine in 7.04; even with the lately deprecated Beryl manager.

Conclusion

These were some of my big annoyances with Ubuntu 7.10. I could have gone on about missing VMWare, the buggy new 'user switch' panel and waiting for updates, but I won't, because I think my point has come across. After I backup all my files I will once again look at some distributions and see if it's time to switch. I will keep you posted!

If you'd like to read more about my wacky interventions with Linux distributions, stay tuned and subscribe to my weblog! Thanks for reading and digging this article (if you did :P).