Slashdot Mirror
Tom's Hardware Dissects Ubuntu 11.4's Interface and Performance
An anonymous reader links to an exhaustive look at the latest Ubuntu, running at Tom's Hardware. "The new Unity interface is broken down into its individual elements and explained ad nauseam. Overall the article is objectively balanced, the author does a good job of pointing out specific design flaws and shortcomings instead of complaining about how Unity doesn't work for him specifically. The walkthrough of the uTouch gesture language is exciting (wish I had multi-touch), though a full listing of keyboard and mouse shortcuts come in handy, too. Towards the end of the article there are benchmarks between Lucid, Natty with Unity, and Natty with the Classic interface. The performance of the Unity interface isn't bad at all, but that kernel power issue does rear its ugly head."
Any developer of an operating system, regardless of proprietary or open licence, would do well to pay attention to what power users do to tweak the OS immediately after installing, and what tools developers create to make it easy to tweak. Consider the nice little app Ubuntu Tweak - it's a worry when a third party add-on gives superior fast access to common things you need to fix, it demonstrates how broken-by-design the original OS is.
Interesting, Linux Mint, Pinguy and other Ubuntu derived have not embraced Unity, and as always their versions of 11.04 fix quite a list of broken things.
Microsoft paid a lot of attention with Windows 7, after Vista. A lot of the defaults, such as services, were similar to what power users would do to tweak some speed out of Vista.
Canoncial are you listening?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.