A Christmas Gift For Yourself: Update to Precise Now!
As the UWN team, sabfl, other members of our community and even Chuck, I am now shutting down operations here until after Christmas and thus will be mostly away from the computer from tomorrow until next week. Christmas in Germany is up for me this year 🙂
Today I decided to follow the advice from Martin Albisetti (aka Beuno) calling on Ubuntu power users to upgrade to Precise Pangolin. So, please, do yourself a favor: I have used Ubuntu 11.10 (aka Oneiric Ocelot) and it has been painful. The experience so far with Precise has been precisely the opposite 🙂 Really:
- My working laptop has had 64-Bit Oneiric installed since Beta1 was released. It has sluggish. It has managed my docking station and a two external monitor setup pretty bad. I did not feel I have a Lenovo X200, Dual Core with 4GB RAM anymore. So I decided to move to 12.04. The update itself was pretty quick and the experience right after has been smooth so far:
- It feels that the overall boot and login experience is faster
- Spotify does not randomly hang
- Chromium, Firefox and Opera are now pretty stable
- Usage of two external screens does not put the computer down for no special reason (kernel panic and reboot)
- Unity 3D and 2D are more solid. And faster
- Evince is not sluggish anymore. Yay!
- The Software Center starts up faster. When it does not crash, of course, it is quite slow. I recommend to use the terminal and fall back in love with apt for the time being 🙂
- Recommendation: Make Gedit rock with Seif’s Dashboard plugin!
- Next up is my girlfriend’s Asus netbook, which has become close to unusable after putting 11.10 into it. And the mic still does not work with skype and gtalk (it never did), although it works when using gnome-sound-recorder. It works perfectly nuder Windows 7… Go figure.
I will keep you updated regarding the Precise update and will fill out bugs as I find them. Expect more feedback and one screenshot, or more, later.
Happy holiday everyone!
huayra's blog 
I have been running Precise since before Alpha and I have not noticed too many differences and honestly I don’t expect many. I think all we are going to see if some major bug fixes and the upgraded kernel with some trivial enhancements.
I’m almost certain that Unity itself will continue to be uncustomizeable and glitchy 😉 I think 12.10 is going to be the big moment for Unity and Ubuntu.
[…] and old colleagues I thought I would tell you more about my experience with precise. You can read more on that here and the first update […]