Why I upgraded my Hardy to Jaunty

l really tried to hold my upgrade mania and stick with the LTS releases of Ubuntu. I was convinced that LTS was the way to go for academic purposes, where one needs the stability of a non-chaning environment to work on his own projects, instead of working on his system, until I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu 8.04 installs to Ubuntu 9.04. A few reasons drove me to this decision, but I still think 8.04 was good enough for my purposes, and my petty problems were manageable.

I was constantly annoyed by a few usability bugs in evince, since viewing PDFs is a frequent thing in my daily routine. I managed to bypass completely any pseudo-need I had to upgrade to Intrepid 8.10 since my main motivation was a group of fixes for evince, and Perl 5.10.

Most of these needs were either not critical, or could be easily solved by a backport (which I used to scratch my poppler/evince itch). Other positive aspects of 9.04 that directly affect me were the new NetworkManager with improved wireless support as well as support to GSM modems, that makes a Huawei modem I borrowed work in a truly Plug n Play fashion.

But Perl 5.10, poppler/evince fixes, new NetworkManager were all the rationalizations I made to justify the hassle of a major, untested, undocumented dist-upgrade of this sort. Truth be told, I was mostly interested in checking out Notify-OSD Ayatana.

Mark Shuttleworth announced bold plans for a new notification system that could at the same time look great and clean up the clutter in the notification area. I gave some serious thought about why his original idea was a good thing, as well as a bad thing. I was not alone. Although I never expressed my opinions on the topic publicly, they are often partially mirrored by others, who can express in a better (clearer and more concise way) like Celeste Lyn Paul and Scott Kitterman.

Most important is the fact that the original proposal was revised and what I consider some of the most controversial sections were abandoned in the implementation that was released with 9.04 (notably the no history requisite).

The final version is good enough to provide a compelling case for an usability experiment - it's good enough to discuss about what's been around so far. I think everyone always thought about notifications in a basically equal way, as if there was a 'right' way to do it. Mark is trying to do it differently, and acks he may be wrong. I disagree with some points, but the major points are valid enough for a trial.

Not all is working, since the applications must be aware of this, and it appears that Canonical only developed the proper plugins for Evolution and Pidgin. I'd like to see similar integration for other applications, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, and hardware discovery notification (flash drives, camera, etc). I'm sure these will come soon, though. I also hope that a history GUI will be created in time. Hopefully something like the Log file Viewer app, that keeps logs separate by sources, and dates. The way it is now, it's very hard to even check out the log, since it's a dump of every notification from every application, including pidgin's messages, so it's growing very fast for me. Also, the notifications from Evolution are less than useful, since it only tells that I have new message, but doesn't point me to which account the new message is from, like pidgin does.

I've been using Jaunty for more than two months now (since beta), and I think I'm used to the new notification system by now. I switched my main IM app from amsn to pidgin, and get notifications of logins and messages. I get notifications of the bzr commits for my programming routine (which is not necessary, since I'm the only one developing it, but it's nice anyway), I get notification for hardware buttons, like sound volume, wifi connection and screen brightness. So far I like it, and I'm glad upgraded. It feels modern and cool.

Update: s/Notify-OSD/Ayatana/ and links.