Ubuntu 14.04

Been a while since I updated here, but I have not had the time to play around with my XPS to really come with some feedback. But once 14.04 I immediately updated and have been running it for a while. One thing I only recently noticed is that now the touch screen support is much much better. It now supports drag to scroll, like you do on a mobile device, which really saves you time. I have not really played too much around with the touch screen to tell of any other improvements (most importantly the freezing issues if you use it too much).
For other improvements, there seems to be less crash reports now. Before it used to appear a crash report every so often, which never really affected usability in any way, except it was annoying with all the constant crash reports. Recently they have appeared again, but this has been for Dropbox, and as this is a 3rd party package I will not complain too much about it. I also experienced some issues with a modpack of Minecraft, where the game would not really recognize all the buttons on my keyboard. I kept changing the keybinding, but the game only read is as “Nothing”. I managed to solve this by changing the keyboard layout from Norwegian to English UK, which seems to solve the problem immediately. This also propped up some interesting challenges in simply changing the layout. One would think you could do this from the Keyboard config in the control panel:

 

You would guess wrong, it is called text entry. I really wonder why they decided to name it that, and the only reason I figured it out was because there is a icon in the toolbar to change keyboard layout. I also wish they would unify the settings a bit, so you didn’t have to keep moving between applications to change settings on the keyboard.

Overall, I have no real complaints about 14.04, except my regular complaints about Ubuntu (the menu, the window management on toolbar etc etc), but for my XPS it was a definite improvement. There is still some way to go on the Synaptic (touchpad) support, no real multitouch support on it that I could get to work (did not really try outside trying some gestures out of the box), and since it is a solid pad, the difference between left and right clicking is a bit iffy, and will require you to be try a few times before you succeed.

 

 

EDIT:

It seems that the touch screen improvements in this version is built in to Chromium, not Ubuntu. Meaning I can swipe to scroll in Chromium, but not in Firefox. Too bad, as this was really the most exciting feature for me in 14.04. Other than that, the panel crashing has stopped in favour of Dropbox, which is starting to drive me insane. Also, I really do not understand why dropbox needs admin rights everytime it starts. It should updates be handled via the package manager, not via their own update manager as is the standard on Windows.