11.04 Beta Experiance

[Pongo A. Pan]

On Sat, 2011-03-19 at 18:53 -0500, Chris wrote:
> I downloaded the more recent Beta (?) release of Naty a few days back
> and last night opted to install.
> 
Still in alpha (3); beta 1 is supposed to be released on 31 March.
Final is due on 28 April, 6 weeks or so from now.  It was pretty well
unusable 3 weeks ago, almost good enough for prime time today.  I'm
thinking of just leaving it up on this still-experimental machine for
good.

> Seemed long compared to a fresh install but still. Anyways, after first
> boot I was seeing the Unity desktop. Not something I prefer (tried to
> live with it but after 24 hours I knew I wasn't going to like it) but I
> tried to give it a fair shake.


I've been using Unity for a week now; it grows on you.  I have never
used a dock or a launcher before so it takes some adjustment.
Fortunately, you can just install gnome-do or synapse and just launch
things that way if Unity doesn't lead you right to them.  It does seem
to require more mouse clicks to find and launch stuff than working with
a menu or with desktop icons. (You *can* have desktop icons).  I kind
of like the default full screen launch of things and the application
menu in the top bar.  The fact that this doesn't appear until you mouse
there is going to confuse people. There doesn't seem to be any way to
do things without heavy mousing. I'm working on configurations now;
maybe I'll get it working my way, Paradigm shifts are hard on the (old
unix-head) geezers.

I'm still getting some crash notifications when I start, but they don't
seem to be fatal.     

What happened to winindicators?  That was supposed to be the reason for
moving the close, minimize and maximize controls to the left.  No sign
of them yet after 1 and 3/4 new releases.  

I use the rotating cube (polyhedron?) in Mint; you can't have that with
Unity, so I've made a 16 desktop wall and enabled the expo plug-in since
I don't like the desktop picker on the dock.  Much of a muchness.  The
cube is good for the wow factor when showing off to Windows people and
really not for much else. When I was a squirt we were taught not to
waste cpu cycles on show-off stuff; I guess cpu cycles are so cheap and
plentiful now it doesn't matter. 

> During the Unity trial, I did google what I needed to do to "go back" to
> my beloved Gnome.
> 
Unity *is* GNOME; just another display mode.  The tried and true will be
there.  In fact, the millions with graphics cards that can't do compiz
will be there by default and wonder what all the fuss was about.  


> I'm not a big fan of Evo but I wanted to give it a chance from a few
> years ago.

Evolution 3.32 is a *big* advance.  Ubuntu has been slow with evo
versions, but you can get the latest for the last three releases and
derivatives like Mint from ppas, and the latest is in the 11.04 alpha.
The mapi plug-in works very well with the exchange 2007 server I need to
access, and my clunky caldev calender on Yahoo imported just fine.  I'm
very happy with it; the PIM features make up for some of the
deficiencies of the mail client IMHO.

The how do I do stuff with Unity and why don't I have Unity questions
will dominate this list until mid-summer at least.


-- 
pongo pan
Seneca up 7:21, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor, Mem: 8190448 kB, Free: 5674112 kB
Linux 2.6.38-7-generic Ubuntu natty (development branch), Gnome 2.32.1