Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Timo Jyrinki]

2011/4/8 Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com>:
> 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.

Just reflecting on the more recent posts, I'm using Unity on my work
machine, but I do have only 1280x1024 (or 1400x900, depending on if I
use internal or external display) resolution. I mostly run everything
full screen, and most of the time I don't use Unity to switch between
windows at least yet - I use either alt-tab (somewhat annoyingly slow)
or compiz's scale plugin which I have bound to lower right corner of
the screen (works pretty nicely for me).

As for "what I say to others" factor, I (and Ubuntu Finland website as
decided by us already around 10.10 time) continue recommending Ubuntu
10.04.2 LTS for everyone. I don't believe users should generally
install a non-LTS Ubuntu, even with the caveat of not the newest
hardware support. 18 months of security support and therefore need to
upgrade N number of times to get to the next LTS is too much for many,
since the upgrade is still something of a hassle at times, regressions
appear et cetera. Unity being still maturing is just one factor that
contributes to this, but I wouldn't have any problem recommending
12.04 LTS with Unity to everyone, since it's going to be "ok" already
in 11.04 (and fabulous effort / re-write since 10.10) it's a piece of
cake to believe it keeps improving. Not that I would have any problem
with gnome-shell either, it's becoming great nowadays as well.

I know that as a power user I'm from the more "adjusts to the
environment" part of scale. I don't need to keep doing the way I've
been doing before, and I usually stick to quite near the shipping
defaults. I did have focus follows mouse though, which I disabled
since it worked so poorly with Unity :P Of course I wouldn't keep
using Unity if it hadn't improved in the last month like it has, but
the application launching via Super key or Alt-F2 really starts to
work now, better than ever in GNOME 2. Still too laggy and does not
always "just work", but most of the time it's neat.

-Timo