Ubuntu is back with Saucy Salamander!

Ubuntu, no longer partaking in the suckfest. We have a long, enthusiastic review of Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander 64-bit edition, tested on a laptop with Nvidia graphics card in a dual-boot configuration, covering live session, look & feel, Wireless, Bluetooth, Samba sharing, Dash improvements and new options, partitioning, Ubuntu One login during installation, applications, multimedia playback - Flash and MP3, Nvidia driver setup, resource usage, performance, stability, printing, tiny niggles, and more. Enjoy.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-salamander.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

Gee, I sort of miss your usual scathing Ubuntu release reviews, Mrk. No fire and brimstone this time? No getting mad and seething for a few days for me? I'm pleasantly surprised.

Yes, I liked Saucy Salamander (64 bit...nvidia), as well. Very smooth. But, back to Precise for now. I'm waiting for the next LTS coming in April 2014.

Nice review, as usual, Mrk. .

Later...

 

Ugh! After reading this review I'm super tempted to run it fulltime. I'm so tempted to drop Windows like a bad habit. I just can't seem to pull the trigger. I'm afraid that I'll need something that won't run in Wine. Of course I could just have Win 8 in a VM snapshot.

 

You just have to pull the trigger. 13.10 is a fine windows replacement and setting up VM for that one odd application is not that hard.
But unity might be hard to start with especially if you have only usef Windows before. Its important to keep an open mind. What I love about Ubuntu is that it maximizes my screen real estate. The title bar disappears into the top tray and the bottom bar is moved to the left. And the side bar location is superior to the traditonal windows likw bottom because of the so popular widescreen displays. It maximizes the vertical viewing space.

 

I was ready to make the switch myself and installed Ubuntu 12.04.3, but the next day, and from then on, I was getting this error at boot as described in the link below. Any of you guys seeing this? After some Googling, it seems that it's fairly common with many people experiencing it at various times....

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2110952

 

I never had it. You may try asking here at the unix section by creating a fresg topic and at http://askubuntu.com.
It sometimes takes initial persistence to get linux to work. Took me 2 weeks to get my trackpoint working correctly in my thinkpad. But after that everything is very smooth. This is what I think keeps most people out of linux. There is no way in the world that average Joe would search the internet or post for help to get their computer working.

 

What would you recommend as a first distro? I have used a few before but never has my stand alone OS. I've played around mostly with ubuntu, mint and PClinux.

 

I am back in Win 7 for now, but when I install Ubuntu again, if it's still an issue, I may look into it further. Aside from that, Ubuntu was great. It had the best video performance on my machine on a 24" monitor of all that I've ever used.

 

Those that you mentioned are probably the easiest for anyone just starting. It's mostly a trial and error experimenting thing with linux. You try different ones till you get what you're looking for. But I'd say anything in the Distrowatch top 10 is probably going to be pretty good in general...

Edit: I just noticed Arch is in the top 10, so maybe not...

 

I started using linux 3-4 months ago. So I have a little noob perspective on this so you can take me with a grain of salt.
Here is what I would recommand:
#1 Get yourself 4x8gb USBs (should be cheap)
a)- get universal usb installer (google it and download it)
b)- burn on them linux mint the three flavors KDE, Xfce and Cinammon
c)- see which desktop lay out you like more. More than likely you will be playing with all of them for a month or mote until you settle down
d) get ubuntu 13.10 and see if you like this one. It has unity desktop but a very good release as Mrk mentioned.

If you have a problem with Ubuntu and cant solve it or dont feel like solving it then try a completely different distro. For example I would try linux mint debian edition and see if the sane problem persists. Chances are that it wont but if it does then you can post it in two very good forums, the askubuntu forum and linux mint forum. Eventually you will find someone who ran into the same problem. Also there is a lot of knowledgable ppl in here who helped me turn off EFI (i think thats what it was) in Bios. I couldnt install a single linux distro because of some microsoft/intel/whatever secure boot nonsense.

 

@mattdocs12345

starting from ubuntu 13.10 x64, dual boot with windows 8/8.1 with secure boot and UEFI is working. Both OS have to be x64.

 

Yep, thanks mattdocs12345, I know.. I have been at this linux stuff for probably 7 or 8 years now. The forums are a great place to find solutions, as you say, chances are good someone else has had the same issue. At this point in time, I'm just too lazy to research it much. Sometimes I teeter on the fence and think I'd like to switch to linux, but then these little quirks and issues invariably surface, no matter which distro, and I end up back in Win 7 because it's a bit more polished, familiar, and reliable. But linux is definitely fun...

 

Just tried the Live session on my Lenovo G780 i5 Nvidia. Couldn't find single click. And after playing for 10 minutes my system became unresponsive. Oh yeah couldn't play an .avi ootb.

So for now I'll stick with my old/new love PCLinuxOS 64-bit.

 

See as for me, I couldn't get to increase sensitivity of my trackpoin on PCLinux. So Im pretty much stuck to Ubuntu flavors and distributions.

 

Massive. 9.8/10

hard to believe

but pretty convincing to give a shot to 13.10 soon


thanks for review looks pretty impressive in term of stability which we missing in ubuntu so far