Wed 30 Jul 2008
What’s your “wow” Ubuntu feature ? or video ?
Posted by magicfab under Advocacy, Affaires, Canonical, Conferences, Development, English, Libre, Linux, Support, Tech, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, Video
I’ll be at Linux World Expo 2008 next week in San Francisco with Canonical, and as such I am putting the final touches to several demos including one about what is different / new / “better” in Ubuntu 8.04 (specifically) on the desktop. I am talking about technical features, so I thought I’d ask around in case we missed the usual suspects. Here are some that made it into my short list for now, but I’d love to hear other ideas:
- Easy and fast to try, install, use and upgrade: Wubi, LiveCD
- Free and commercial options for desktop virtualization
- Recovery options (at boot time in Grub, using bulletproof X…)
- Launchpad integration in apps (translation, bug reporting…)
- Desktop effects
I am also looking for any videos or screencasts of interesting uses of desktop effects. Who knows, your video may end up showing off Ubuntu at our booth 
I started putting together a list of video resources on the wiki, feel free to add individual links to any you find interesting right there - or simply post a comment here.
July 30th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
2,3 definitely don’t work for me.
Add/Remove would be a good one
July 30th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I am just discovering Launchpad but it seems to be promising a lot, so let’s hope.
Though, right now the wow-feature of Ubuntu must be Workspaces and the very close open-source community with blogs, mailing lists, irc channels, forums, etc. Really nice when you like to code.
July 30th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
@Christoffer: Workspaces are common to most distributions, so it’s something I won’t focus on - no matter how badly i want to rotate cubes around!
We hope to make the point about the great community, in fact this post is part of that bit.
@Vadim, “Add/Remove..”, yes, thanks. Duh! about your issues, post on the forums and I’ll gladly try & help you. Feel free to put URLs here or by email/IM, I’ll remove the comment later.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Oh no, I didn’t mean that I had issues with them - I just don’t consider them as something that should be touted.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Wubi gets broken for a lot of people with regular updates. Probably don’t want to demo that…
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/236307
July 30th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I’d have to say my “wow” feature is that I’ve installed Ubuntu on a few machines and nothing else is required, it just works without tons of works/tweaks. I haven’t found many Linux distros that can do that.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Well.. everything gets broken. But Wubi is very revolutionary, definitely something that should be touted
July 30th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
For me there are two big factors:
1) my hardware all works out-of-the-box when I use Ubuntu
2) the community is awesome
July 31st, 2008 at 6:26 am
Apart from Wubi and Launchpad (and they are rather limited in scope. Launchpad integration is a non-issue if you can’t/don’t want to contribute, wubi is for installation only), those features are exclusive to Ubuntu how?
Maybe I misunderstood, but if you are trying to demo why Ubuntu is a better distro than say Fedora or Suse then you should demo what is unique about Ubuntu. Not things you can get in any of the big distros (maybe not implemented in the same way but there).
If you want to showcase how Hardy is better than Gutsy though, your list is good. Although I would really push the community aspect.
July 31st, 2008 at 9:56 am
Sorry I wasn’t clear, but yes, the intent is to show improvements or new things in 8.04 compared to previous versions. Begin first or different at implementing some of them is also part of the demos, and we have some other ideas - I’ll share them as the week unfolds.
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
If youre comparing 8.04 with previous versions, remember that Launchpad integration was introduced in Ubuntu 5.10, not 8.04.
https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/launchpad-integration/+publishinghistory
And Desktop Effects was introduced in Ubuntu 7.04, not 8.04.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/7.04Tour#head-72e463e7c61a66c61b567f361d2ad3fe38af39f8
August 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
mpt, thanks, I didn’t know the specific dates and that will help.
Regarding Desktop effects I believe 8.04 was the first version we had a good settings interface and Compiz (as opposed to Beryl + etc. before) in a nice package. I’ll take a look a bit deeper there too.
I expect many questions during the week so our focuse may change as we go.