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Ubuntu 11.10 impressions

Desktop running Ubuntu 11.10

I updated my Linux machine to Ubuntu 11.10 a while back and after using it for some time, it seems to me that Canonical is going the right way on the Linux desktop. It’s fast, easy to use and very quick to get going. This is much better than 11.04, released earlier this year, but there are still a few rough edges.

Installation and setup

To start, the installation wasn’t a breeze. After upgrading 3 Macs from Snow Leopard to Lion a while back without a single problem, the distro upgrade for Ubuntu was a bit of a nightmare. It looked like it executed okay, but when the computer restarted, I just got a black screen. I could SSH into the machine from my iMac and get terminal access, but no luck with the login screen. I investigated it a bit and found out that X configurations where hosed. And since reconfiguring X is a PITA, I went for a clean install instead. So, updating procedures should be improved here — as a matter of fact, I never got a distro upgrade to work properly on Ubuntu.

Now, to make things fair for Canonical, they luckily have a cloud feature (Ubuntu One), so since my files were all there, I had no problems reinstalling from scratch. And after the rather fast clean install, things started to rock. To start, I spent 5 minutes entering account details on Thunderbird, Gwibber and Empathy, and I had an usable system. That’s Apple fast, and in this regard, they are the best. Then I activated Ubuntu One and in a few minutes later, everything was fine again. So, setting up the system is really easy.

Unity

I couldn’t go through an OS “review” without mentioning about the UI. In Ubuntu 11.10, it’s Unity now. No more fallback to GNOME if you don’t have a suitable 3D graphics card. Overall, it looks good, but unfinished. There are some basic interface problems in the global menu bar (title truncation is very stupid, for starter), design inconsistency in the scroll bars, animations are sometimes sluggish and so one. It’ll probably be ready in one or two more release cycles.

I also don’t like the colors. The shades of grey and orange used are just too ugly. Transparency masks the problem a bit in Unity 3D, but everywhere else, the high contrast makes it feel like it’s from the Geocities era.

Typography is still a problem. Although the font face looks okay, spacing is all wrong and there’s an overall abuse of bold fonts which is not very elegant.

Apps

The Nautilus file manager looks like an Apple Finder copycat, but that works and I’m fine with that. Network integration is easy and it just works (much better than Windows) — it can see all my other computers, Linux, Mac or Windows. System Settings is also a Mac OS carbon copy, but it works and it’s much better than Windows 7 horrible Control Panel. And the Software Center continues to be the smartest software management solution among all Linux distributions, simply due to the fact that it can be used by human beings.

On the internet side, Thunderbird is the default e-mail client now, which is good. No one in their right mind can think Evolution is a good idea. Gwibber is an okay social network client, but still has a lot of limitations and it doesn’t seem to get along with the native scrollbar.

Office tools continue to be the Achilles’ heel of Linux. Ubuntu uses LibreOffice, which is a bad product, period. It doesn’t have the functionality of Microsoft Office, nor the elegance of iWork. The UI is ugly, it looks like it came from 1995 and it doesn’t integrate well with the current Ubuntu’s look-and-feel.

Conclusion

Although not a huge upgrade from the previous version, Ubuntu 11.10 is very welcome, particularly because Unity is now usable and it looks and feels better than other GUIs. There are some rough edges to work on, particularly on performance and design inconsistency, but this is the best Linux distribution out there for the consumer market. Oh, and fix the damn distro upgrade, please!

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