Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

[pixel]

Ubuntu 11.04 is released!

Just a few words from my experience so far. If you are not fairly tech-savy and/or bold enough to go exploring, I wouldn't recommend an upgrade just yet. I've had repeated Unity freezes/lockups on my brand spanking-new netbook with 11.04 loaded from a clean install. I am suspecting with all the changes that there were things that slipped. I do expect that those things will be cleaned up as they are discovered and sorted out. There are a lot of people who did a ton of work on this without getting paid a cent, please do not think that I am not absolutely grateful for their hard work, I respect the fact that things are going in a new direction and with a fixed release schedule there is only so much time to do work, so something has to give.

Initial impression: I expected to be disappointed by Unity, having run the 10.10 version on my old netbook for the past six months, I am not disappointed, but I am not blown away either. This feels like a good interface for my netbook, I am just not convinced yet that this is what I want on my desktop.

Anyone else? Experiences? Thoughts?

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Upgraded my desktop already, it works ok but I intensely dislike the sidebar and icons. It's badly laid out and hard to switch between apps. Already switched to 'classic'.

unity also does something to the mouse pointer in some programs, throwing off the calibration so you have to aim under the buttons to select them.

meh, it's a new kernel, there's always bugs and tweaks at first.

[pixel]

I am finding I don't much like the sidebar either, I really need to figure out the keyboard shortcuts to get at all that. I do like the top bar and the global menu thing on my netbook. It looks nice and saves some space. I have gone through a lot of effort to de-clutter my desktop, and use the keyboard a lot, Gnome Do is my go-to app launcher, which is just a meta-space keystroke away. I find that the Unity just feels cluttered compared to my normal workspace.

I'm making myself take a week with Unity before I give up. (Partly because giving up means moving away from Ubuntu, the Classic option is going away next release I have heard.)