Forum Thread: General Ubuntu 11.04 impressions

The upgrade went fine here on my box.     ...BUT...

I'm conflicted about whether to move back to Debian.  I dislike Unity intensely but I also don't have a favorable thing to say about GNOME-shell.  If I wanted an Ipad I'd have bought one.  The Unity interface, which the UBU Powers-That-Be seem to think is the be all and end all of interfaces, just looks toy-like to me.  I've tried it for weeks (likewise GNOME-shell) and I just can't see the advantages.  Maybe the advantage is for those whose reading and comprehension skills are small and who need giant icons (I regularly remove all icons from the desktop.  Everything is in the menu, why do I need icons?) in order to make up for that lack.

I also have a bone to pick with Ubuntu about their apparent abandonment of the 'little people,' the third-world folks (and the poorer than you and I in the rest of the world) with yesterday's hardware that will not even run the new UBU Unity.  I thought Ubuntu was all about that "ubuntu" humanity bit.  I guess profits matter more that wide usage.  I still have one installation of 10.10 Maverick and one installation of the new 11.04 Natty.  I know I could stick with UBU and use LXDE or XFCE4 or even KDE (spit, spit)  (maybe just a window manager again such as IceWM or Openbox) but I do believe I'm headed back to Debian before too much longer.

I installed 11.04 about two weeks ago. Didn't encouter too many issues thus far, except for some occasional thing with the terminal that doesn't scroll to the next line.

The Unity interface is something to get used to. It works totally different in almost every aspect. I have to waste several hours each day trying to figure out how to do seemingly normal tasks that took me seconds with my older version. Who in his right mind have decided on taking away right-click functionality. That's maybe something you don't need on a tablet, but on a PC I would say you more than definitely need it.

You can off course remove unity. I haven't done so yet (not too sure why not, maybe I'm trying to challenge myself or something), but I guess if you do so, you could go on as normal. I'm just starting to dislike the way that Ubuntu (and most modern Linux distro's, or any modern OS for that matter) makes you dependant on the internet. For me internet usage is still quite expensive and the amount of data transfer I can do is limited. I have enough to browse and research etc, but not enough to download each and every app I need, or even just to keep my system updated.

I keep Unity around for the same reason I have rat poison installed; I like messing around with different interfaces.  that is not to say that I find many of them usable, just interesting.  Of course, with the new Ubu 11.04 (Natty) you may choose to use what they like to call 'classical' Ubuntu, but you still get the ugly and inefficient scroll bars.  I've decided to, at least for the nonce, keep Ubuntu but use the LXDE interface which is still 'classical' and very low in resource consumption.

I feel your pain about data transfer limits.  I only recently moved from dial-up to DSL and still don't have full throughput.  Even so, it is /so much better/!

That said, I would never trust my data (/ANY/ data)  to the 'cloud'.  There are just too many instances of hacking trough to users' financial digits for me, not to mention the fact that ISPs are rolling over for government inquiries instead of making them prove their cases in court first.

Besides, drive space is astonishingly cheap these days.  I just bought a USB terabyte drive.  DANG!  That's big!

Oops, sorry about not snipping the quote.