Trying out Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1
I just wanted to jot down a couple of first impressions about Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1, as that seems to be sort of the en vogue thing to do these days.
A brief summary of my configuration:
Lenovo Thinkpad T500
Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 @ 2.53GHz
8GB 1066MHz DDR SDRAM
Intel 5100AGN Wireless
Intel GMA x4500 video (ATI graphics disabled for battery life issues)
WD 160G 5400RPM drive, with dm-crypt /home partition
To start with, I upgraded my 10.10 installation by letting update-manager -d do its thing. The process was mostly painless (a couple of customized config files needed manual intervention but that’s to be expected) and took a little over an hour to complete. Upon reboot the system was up and running without any issues which is a testament to the continued work of the Ubuntu developer community. It continues to astound me how trouble-free the various betas have been at least from the dist-upgrade front.
I’ve been using the new Unity interface for a day or two now and while I’m happy that I don’t hate it as much as I did in the alphas.
The Good:
It is fast and stable at the moment. I think compiz is a little more power-hungry on my laptop than metacity was, but not enough that it is setting my lap on fire. At least from an upgrade perspective I have not found anything that doesn’t work that used to (I maintain a local apt repository of various changes and customizations for my systems, nothing that I had working in 10.10 broke in 11.04 beta). The work on the indicators has been very good for the most part, the Network Manager applet is quite a bit better than the previous versions.
The Bad:
Compared to the new Gnome 3 interface Unity seems a little clunky, probably due to the netbook heratige of the design though I am glad that I still have the minimize buttons. The launcher/dock/whatever thing doesn’t always hide, so it sits there taking up space on screen for no good reason and you can’t move it from the left hand side which is not where I’d put it if I had the option. The Apple-like menu bar is a little irritating, but really only because I think it is highly derivative and I am sad that we couldn’t come up with something better from a design standpoint. I also find the dash to be annoying to use but I don’t really know why. Finally I’m not sure why the new date/time indicator had to lose the weather. I travel a lot and had many different locations defined in the previous applet and having an at-a-glance view of the weather was a nice feature to have.
Conclusion:
I was really worried that I’d either have to skip this release or continue using the Gnome 2 panel interface after looking at the first couple of alphas but overall am pretty happy. I will try Gnome 3 when (if?) it comes to Ubuntu and see how it stacks up. I think it’s a prettier and cleaner interface but only time will tell which I like more. The amount of work that the Ubuntu community put into this release is pretty amazing and the fact that it landed in as good of shape as it did is a really huge accomplishment.
Obligatory screenshot:
Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1
Update, 18/April/2011 It would be really nice if they would fix this bug before shipping 11.04.