The good and bad of Ubuntu 12.04 beta 2

1. Installation Almost everything worked fine, but there was a white unbalanced line on left side of the installation window on top left, that was not aligned and it was caught in the eye all the time installation happened.

2. The animation that shows different information while the installation runs flickred.

3. PySDM does not install. Things like Vim.GTK, chromimum did not install due to incompatibality between older and newer libraries. E.g ffmpeg would not convert from ogg to mp3 and the library needed for that would not install.

4. When I first opened media file in totem or in rhythmbox the installation packages showed problemed red links as before (beta 1) and it showed packages i386 even on x64 (that was fine if it did not scared me). I later installed it using software center (searching for gstreamer packages myself)

5. As usual ati cards made my gpu fan go wild and as all the time I had to shutdown radeon and set vgaswitch off using /etc/rc.local file (hope if they provide binary ati drivers it actually works or they just give an option to shut down the propriotiory drivers until amd releases some good solution in case of dual cards). I think most sandy bridge processors with ati drivers have this problem.

6. Default installation of vim in terminal (previously always) used to show wired characters, in this release it does not show such characters but gets stuck when pressing backspace at those positions, however delete key works great.

7. I can't say its a bug but at dash, tab key no longer takes you to next dash (e.g from search to applications, where you could actually install those applications). This has been replaces by ctrl + tab key. Tab key now switches you to catagories on the same dash. It is certainly a change on how you interact, makes a lot of sense, but constant change of things makes it look always unstable for production system. I hope this is the final move on this thing.

8. There is still no equalizer on rhythmbox, which makes it lag behind everyone's favorite clementine. In clementine you can actually copy files from playlist and paste it inside your music device, which is a lot smarter way to do things than every music player I have seen.

9. Even a failure installation of software gets an icon attached to the launcher. E.g Chromium did not install and it still had icon on the launcher.

10. It would be nice to get downloaded percentage of apps while it shows the progress bar on launcher (but that is just my wish, if many people don't like it I have no problem with it).

11. Vlc has not been upgraded to latest release version of 2.0

12. I really like the fs_icon (because I wanted at least directory icons to look a lot nicer than its current implementation), there was a talk about fresh icons for ubuntu 12.04, I don't know if they will implement any new icons, given the time left for the final release. I don't know if it is unwiseful to talk about icons after whatever freeze. It took me lots of releases to actually accept the orange icons, and still I would like to have it something other than orange (that's just a wish).

Things that works or are better

1. I though image viewer of beta 1 did not care about color profile of photos (specially icc ones, may be it was my illusion), now it seems it is starting to get to its default (11.10) when it used to work excellently. You just can't profile everything to srgb just to make it brighter when the intention was to make an image darker by using other color profiles. Image viewer was a good reference tester for my color profiles (attached using ImageMagick), so I hope good work comes back.

2. Animations for task switch is simple and lot better, other animations like that of HUD, draggin windows to side are really showing up very nicely and intutive. The window bar's behaviour has been a lot better. Window colors have been fixed. Even the handles at bottom right don't show those wired three lines anymore, it looks a lot better now. I now understand why people talk so much about interfaces. Why a good interface is always the key towards a great software (at least now). We all know since 3.2 linux kernel can handle all kind of graphics nuisances we previously had in Linux. Now its time to build great interfaces for software that run on this kernel.

3. It was said ubuntu would boot a flicker less boot, hope they have done it. I can not test it, because I rarely reboot my computer after I have started it, so I can't test it guys, sorry for that.

4. HUD is very good, but to switch from one textbox to another (i.e dash search to hud search confuses the purpose of each other and we forget to use other as much). I hope there is a better way to integrate both without alieniating folks who don't like HUD. I know, the decision to make is completely optional has created this dualness, which will be fixed over time. I would certainly like to have these options for my everyday software eclipse.

I will not include other things that has improved a lot in this post, because there will be lots of places people will get those things. There are many great things to say about this release than these small nuisances I had on my computer. I hope this release turns out to be the best release ever, better than my experience with ubuntu 8.04 which was an absolute delight on servers and a good experience on my home computer. There have been many people who have started to use ubuntu, because I use it and solve their small nuisances. This time I want to releax and just watch a good show myself. So guys don't break anything from now on for this and any future releases of ubuntu, just to put some fancy stuffs, which people care less than having a truely workable system. A stable system only can evolve to be a better developer system, where people can build services, software, apis that don't break for very long time.

Good Luck ubuntu team. Cheers!!!