A Place for my head

Newest version of operating system for human beings is out. Kicking ass and users. Yes users, you heard it right.
I am not very happy with this release. In fact, I regret that I upgraded to this version. Why?

• Today every upcoming Linux distro is bundling Firefox3 beta 5 as default browser so ubuntu is not alone there. But in my opinion this is a bad decision. Firefox3 beta5 is not stable. Most of the extensions aren’t supported yet. You are being hard on users by bundling a software thats still 2 months from final release. My main gripes with Firefox3 beta 5 is,
  • Its a CPU hog. Even with only one tab open, it consumes considerable CPU cycles. Bad for laptop users. Now before you jump the gun, in my tests, I have a simple page open (no fancy gmail with lots of background processing) and I am not interacting with firefox window
  • It hangs and freezes now and then. I have experienced this kinda behavior often, while downloading a page firefox will freeze momentarily and then suddenly it will come back.
  • Extensions, extensions. Many of my favorite extensions are not available for firefox3.
  • Also, I am using fully updated version of Hardy and have disabled Security->Tell Me, thingies. and have deleted urlclassifier3.sqlite without much success.
• I guess all Linux users have seen occasional freezes and they have no other go than to hard reboot the machine. With Hardy and Compiz fusion, I just saw too many of freezes on my notebook. Also, did anyone notice metacity compositioning is buggy? I tried using metacity compositioning in place of compiz and had to press alt-ctrl-backspace couple of times. One sure way is, try enabling compositioning and then disabling it. I experienced X freeze when doing that.
• Many Emacs users i think swap ctrl and caps keys. I am one of them. After upgrading to hardy swapping them through Gnome keyboard settings works, but whenever I press caps ( now its ctrl ), it still turns on caps LED display on my notebook. A bit annoying. This issue was not there in Guts.
• Shipped Xorg is a CPU hog, even if you are not interacting with your machine, Xorg cpu usage stays around 10-30%. I have Nvidia graphics card and I have tried using <code>”UseEvents” “on”</code>. It doesn’t seem to have any effect.
• Oh boy, I don’t even know, why they shipped this half hearted PulseAudio integration? For getting sound back on my laptop, I had to manually choose ALSA as Sound Playback device.

Being a LTS edition, I was expecting something solid, but I can confirm with some certainity that Hardy release is certainly inferior than Gutsy. Thank you Ubuntu for scrweing it up.