[ubuntu-uk] 11.10 So far mixed fortunes

[Barry Titterton]

The recent, very extensive, discussion for and against Unity/11.10 has
prompted me to give my experience.

Four weeks ago I upgraded my spare laptop to 11.10 and the experience
has been mixed.

The machine is an elderly Toshiba Satellite Pro A120 with 1 Gig Ram. It
had been running 10.04 without problems for several months. the initial
upgrade did not go smoothly as I had the issue, previously reported on
this list, where it kept asking me to put an 11.10 CD in the drive to
enable the upgrade to continue. After the upgrade the machine crashed
back to a text only display three times in two days. The line on the
screen full of text that seemed most interesting was:
"Bug: unable to handle kernel paging request at 42de0014".

I assumed that the issues with the upgrade had caused a problem so did a
full install. The machine crashed again two days later. Also Firefox was
crashing to the desktop several times a day. I have now downgraded to
Unity 2D and everything is stable.

My non-techie test subject (the wife) has two things that she dislikes
about Unity:
1. The small vertical scroll device is fiddly, especially when using a
touch pad.
2. The launcher is too quick to jump out when you go to select things in
the top left hand corner of an application, for example the 'Back Arrow'
on Firefox. This, again, is a particular problem when using a touch pad
as it is generally less accurate and over shoots are more likely. There
needs to be a buffer zone between the left hand edge of a 'full screen'
application window and the left hand edge of the display screen.

Barry T