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Ubuntu 11.04, Slackware 13.37
Approximately one billion Slashdot readers wrote in to tell us today that one of two distributions had releases:
the new Ubuntu sports the Unity interface, marking a 'radical departure' from its UI of old. Now the more ancient and bearded amongst you might be interested in Patrick announcing the latest Slackware release which clearly has the most 1337 version number to date.
Doesn't both news deserve a separate note?
La culpa no es del chancho...
Most of what it does is Compiz, it has a menu bar and a dock. You still log in through gdm and it still pops up on the wrong monitor when I have 'em both active.
On the other hand, it is awfully more mac-like, what with Unity stealing menu bars left and right, but not always.
Still the same theme from Maverick with the gadgets on the wrong side but now it makes sense because it makes sense for the gadgets to be on that side when they get snarfed into the top bar.
I'm just glad that they managed to get the dock pop-up/click behavior ironed out before the release, I noticed they finally fixed this in the last day or two. And the Applications place seems to actually have stuff in it every time I click it now. For a few days there I had to type to see anything the first time I used it.
All in all if you're not married to a particular interface it's not an unpleasant change, and it does look nice. Amusingly, to me it is reminiscent of the Zune Desktop Theme for Windows XP. That's nice for me because I'm a dual-boot user again, and that's my XP theme of choice :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I really don't care for either Gnome Shell or Unity, so I'm going to give xfce a whirl for the next 6 months.
I tried using Unity while Natty was in beta and it caused me to jump to Fedora 15. Unity has always struck me as a train wreck of usability. Global menus that are always present... unless they're not, because it depends on the application. A dock that is always there on the left, unless it isn't in order to get out of the way. It's a little too busy, a little to buggy, and a little too inconsistent with itself. I know I'm in a minority right now but I think Gnome-Shell is a better approach. I'm not starting a flame war here, I know GS isn't readily configurable, has issues with network manager, and has countless other things that need to mature. I can't help but think Canonicals reach has exceeded their grasp.
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IMHO there's no very strong reason to have separate swap and boot partitions and so on.
There's at least one good reason to have separate / and /home partitions: Linux really, really hates bad blocks on the / partition, so if you use the entire disk for / then one bad block can stop you booting until you manually perform a long fsck to fix it.
Um, Unity is just another move toward cloning the Mac interface:
1. Global menu? Mac has had that forever
2. Monochrome notifications on the top right? Check
3. Dock? Check (except its on the *side*!)
The only differences I see so far are annoying ones:
1. The global menu is not always active, so it is non obvious how to access it ... not sure I want to attempt it on my main system
2. On mouseover the global menu obscures the window title
3. The maximize behavior with the close/minimize/restore buttons in the panel is just ugly and unweidly
4. The dock hides and appears in a nonsensical, semi-random fashion. It should be always on or auto-hide -- "dodge windows" is just weird
5. It has the dash, which is completely useless once you get the apps you use pinned to the dock
6. It crashed like crazy when testing in VirtualBox
I got an upgrade notice this morning and for the first time in 3 years I declined.
I care, but mostly because the new unity interface is goddamn retarded. I installed the beta a couple weeks back. Gave it a couple hours to try and get used to it, and just couldn't. I could see it working well for a tablet, but for my laptop it's completely useless.
The only good thing is that they give you the option to switch back to gnome, but metacity seems to be completely broken for me, and hardware acceleration no longer works. As far as I'm concerned, Ubuntu 11.04 is a step backwards. Now I'm looking at either switching to XFCE for the interface, or maybe ditching Ubuntu entirely and going with a different flavor.