With the official release of 11.04 days away, I dusted off my old thumb drive to try to familiarize myself with Natty. The install was a breeze as usual, and took less time than Maverick to complete. The first thing I noticed, was that my boot-time was considerably slower. 11.04 | Login screen -> launch of Google Chrome = 37s 10.10 | Login screen -> launch of Google Chrome = 11s Seeing how Ubuntu Classic had nothing new, I decided to give Unity try. Visually, Unity has changed very little since it's introduction. And what others see as a time-saver, or a power user's dream, I see as an unnecessary hassle. As I've mentioned before in earlier posts, I'm not a fan of Unity, and quickly became irritated with the new dashboard menu. What I found to be most irritating is how many more clicks or mouse movements it takes to launch an application, or find a file, as opposed to Maverick. Here are two examples: 11.04 | Clicks to launch the Transmission BitTorrent Client = 4 10.10 | Clicks to launch the Transmission BitTorrent Client = 2 11.04 | Clicks to open Documents = 3 10.10 | Clicks to open Documents = 2 My last gripe, is the inability to customize special effects like in 10.10. My ATI card is very slow in Natty, and I can't customize the effects to my liking. - But my first impressions aside, what are yours?
I'm still hanging tough with my vow to stick with lucid. The whole unity thing is very tempting, but I am hearing mixed feedback. Together with reports of low battery life, I am going to sit back and monitor this (and other) threads. So, basically, this is just a long-winded bump.
Either they'll get it ready by the time Ubuntu 11.04 makes its official debut Thursday or it will be the biggest flop in Canonical's history. We'll see.
I mentioned in a post not long ago that I was giving my friend's Windows Vista a tune-up since he was getting low battery life. I managed to get top it out at 3:00, but he wanted to give Ubuntu a spin. I gave him the Natty USB, as giving him 10.10 when the user interface is about to undergo a drastic change wouldn't have made sense, and he only gets 1:35 on it. Jupiter helps though. I REALLY hope they can get it all ironed out. I didn't mention it in my post, but the update manager, and synaptic package manager all failed to run. And when I went to report the crash, the crash reporter crashed... Windows Deja Vu! I'm going to stick with 10.10 for as long as I can. Or at least use Ubuntu Classic, and see if I can slap Compiz on there to manage the special effects myself, since they removed that ability.
Fortunately, I didn't come across this thread before. It might have dissuaded me from installing 11.04.