Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Timo Jyrinki]

2011/4/8 Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com>:
> I couldn't have believed it even two months ago still, but today I
> feel the same. When I switch back to classic GNOME it feels inferior
> now; I'm particularly missing the super-fast keyboard
> shortcuts/search/navigation and bigger screen real estate.

I have started to like Unity a lot, at least on a though level and
also seeing in practice that it's really improving. The biggest issues
have been that unity has been crashing for me all the time. Today is
actually the first day that unity/compiz didn't crash within a minute
of logging in when alt-tabbing or something similar (then it usually
took longer time before it crashed the next time). Fingers crossed
that unity 3.8.4 is now actually more stable in real use - same was
said about 3.8.2. If it stays for a day of work without crashing,
that's a really good accomplishment compared to before.

Besides fixing crashers I really would see need for more accessibility
support and help. I don't know how to access eg. indicators or system
menu from keyboard, which is quite essential for me even without
disabilities, but for people with disabilities I believe the
accessibility in general is relatively poor at the moment. gnome-shell
already has a lot of a11y stuff integrated in 3.0 (considering it's
the first stable release), and Ubuntu with accessibility as one of the
core Ubuntu philosophy items should have as well. Of course, by 12.04
LTS at least.

There are a lot of bugs and lack of features (and many have been fixed
already as well) and the performance is quite bad in parts, but those
are not as serious as a) crashers and potentially b) accessibility and
lack of any help.

For 11.10, probably something should be done about the logging in
time, with is terrible at least with a traditional spinning, encrypted
disk, compared to normal Gnome. Weirdly sometimes I saw a pretty fast
logging in even after reboot, but normally it's 30s+ from gdm to
desktop. Something is seriously churning the hard disk with seeks,
possibly something that only occurs with specific conditions.

-Timo