to Ubuntu 10.10. I give up. Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) was a disappointment and so was Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot).
Not that I didn't like the new simpler desktop management tools they offered through Unity - It's just not stable. I cannot afford 2 days every fortnight to figure out how to make it work again. If it's a one time thing - I am proud enough to suck it up and do it. If it happens again and again - I am not sysad enough to handle it. And oh the other issues! It eats up about 40W all the time! My battery life drops to a quarter of what windows gives me. My productivity(in terms of time I spend working and not hobby-ishly trying to defend Ubuntu) drops by half.
I have spent enough time trying to defend Unity to my friends - I can't anymore. It's undefendable. It's so extremely buggy that I would consider popularizing it and making it a default only if I was actually working for, say, Microsoft. Sweet Lord! They removed proxy settings' Ignore-Proxy option! I also couldn't figure out a way to increase workspaces. Want more? Well, if you want to make some changes to how the Unity behaves - install Compiz-Settings-Manager. And when you do it - it will result in gnome being fubar.
Only good thing about it all: I am using Wubi, and I keep all my code - all my files, outside the Ubuntu installation. Best decision I have made in this respect. Now I can simply remove Ubuntu from Windows and move back to Ubuntu 10.10.
Probably I am not good enough for Ubuntu 11.10, say "Aye!" if you aren't as well.
Gnome Shell has a nice fresh look; and even though it may not yet be completely glitch-free, it's a much smoother experience than Unity. Still, the more relevant performance of recent Ubuntu releases remains a concern.
ReplyDeleteI actually don't care much about the smoothness. I will adapt, it's not that hard/unproductive. What's frustration is the lack of reliability that 11.* releases have offered. I appreciate the effort of making things more user friendly, but the changes should be pushed to release only after there is significant confidence that it works.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all the arguments and confess that all of them bugged me too. What I feel is, as I mentioned to Prashant the other day, we have quite a bit of inertia towards change so frustrations are inevitable. There are solutions to all the problems you mentioned through gnome-tweak-tool and dconf-editors - of course you would know that and I agree with your view that a user should not have to do such things to obtain basic functionality. But I think we should give it some time. BTW +1 to Prashant, Gnome shell wins hands-down against unity. You should try it out sometime.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I had a weird problem and you'll laugh at this - my comp could handle 4 flash videos and 7 HD movies while on battery but while on charge, a single flash video or any cpu sucking process would shoot up the temperature to ~100 and my comp would give way and shut down. Also it couldn't handle the spikes in temperature when you pull out a charger cable from your laptop. Didn't know how to google that so was planning on buying a new laptop. Thanks to my subscriptions on Google reader, came to know that it is in fact a bug of the linux kernel 2.6+ series onwards, some incorrectly coded switching behavior of the ASPM module -
1. http://askubuntu.com/questions/79321/when-is-a-kernel-update-due-for-11-10
2. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement
3. http://askubuntu.com/questions/78991/kernel-patch-that-solves-battery-issues-when-for-ubuntu
Oh I know! ASPM is incredibly buggy.
ReplyDeleteAnd dconf/gconf editors have their own issues. For example, there are at least 3 places where proxy can be specified. Some applications pick the settings from one place, some others use some other way. Some have their own UI. Now, the earlier gnome-settings exposed one UI for changing all values. It works for most cases (expect that it overrides username:password in /etc/apt/apt.conf). Now, one would expect that the new configuration manager would behave *better*. Unfortunately, I think, it now has *another* place to have settings and UI to expose it - it's incomplete as well as buggy.
About not liking changes: I loved the most parts of the feature set that Unity provided. Incredibly responsive launcher (and on the right - better for Widescreen monitors), Zero wastage because of title bars etc! Unfortunately, it PMSes, every other week - twice as much as a girl friend would. Now, I wouldn't know how painful maintaining the later is, but Unity is definitely high maintenance.