Flavor 8

TLDR: Ubuntu 11.04 is a significant release for desktop Linux at large. It makes giant strides in usability, and given a bit of bug fixing will meet the “just works” target fair and square.

First of all, a warning: this release is not quite ready for anybody who doesn’t know what “fsck” or “man” does. The most significant bug I found was that the installer doesn’t let you assign custom partition names to your partitions (only offering you the list of “standards” to choose from, or “none”), and then somehow manages to screw up the filesystem headers of some partitions for which you choose “none” (in certain circumstances). This appears to be easily fixed with fsck, although I haven’t yet finished doing a comparison from my backups to see if any data was corrupted on the two partitions that this happened to on my system.

The second, again installer related, bug of note was that I couldn’t boot the machine after install; instead I got the dreaded “GRUB error 17″. I booted back into the live CD, and used grub-install to install the bootloader to the first disk in the boot order specified in the BIOS. Hardly user friendly, and potentially enough to cause a confused consumer to drop off their computer at the Geek Squad to have windows reinstalled on it.

I also found a few other small glitches. (See The Mediocre, below.)

If you have been around Linux for more than a couple years, my bet is that you’ll be fine, right now. If you’re new, wait for a few months for the more serious bugs to be fixed, or wait for 11.10.

My first action after install was to try out a couple pieces of hardware which had stopped working seamlessly somewhere around 10.04: my camera (connecting via USB had stopped working – I’d been having to plug the card into the card reader), and my sandisk music player (again over USB). Both fixed.

So far, flash playback seems to be much better than it was on 10.10 (periodically I’d run into issues with audio and video getting out of sync, and various playback jitters). IIRC this is due to a kernel fix. I haven’t watched enough video yet to 100% guarantee this, but I will update this review if I run into glitches.

The installer has a checkbox allowing you to install “3rd party media plugins”. The upshot is that flash and mp3 work the first time you log into the system. This is probably the first distribution install I’ve done where that is the case.

My (NVIDIA) video card was detected by the 3rd party hardware applet shortly after I logged in, and it popped up the usual dialog that allows installation of proprietary drivers. Easy, painless.

The software center is coming on by leaps and bounds. I still need to keep synaptic installed (and it does indeed come installed by default), but browsing the repositories is a far better experience via the software center than via the apt command line or synaptic.

Boot is fast. My 10.10 system (which in fairness had been through several distro upgrades, rather than fresh installs) took easily 50 seconds after the BIOS (I always attributed this to my many disks, but never bothered to find out the cause.) 11.04 takes around 25 seconds after BIOS.

Banshee is well integrated. The photo management software (Shotwell) is nice. The scanning package (Simple Scan) is excellent. LibreOffice is preinstalled, and is fine.

I’ve long hated the gnome panel, and the gnome application menu. In my ideal world, KDE 3.X would still be an active project. Having switched to gnome after the KDE 4 release, I quickly realized the need for gnome-do, and launched all of my applications either from gnome-do or from a terminal: unless I am browsing my applications (to see what is installed), I know exactly what I want to launch – clicking through menus and submenus is a terrible UI paradigm for kicking off an application. I would typically get rid of the bottom gnome panel to free up screen real estate (the vertical dimension on monitors, after all, is smaller than the horizontal on almost all monitors), and would use alt tab / expose rather than the application tray, given that I’ll typically have a dozen or so apps open (including multiple terminals) at any given time. In the KDE3 world, I used to have the KDE bar on the left or right of the screen, with icon shortcuts to my most used apps.

Canonical have made very similar design decisions:

The application menu has gone (great!), replaced by a type-the-name and click (or press enter) based launcher (which also searches for file names); you can drive this from the keyboard using the meta key (although see The Mediocre section below for details on remapping this key). You can still _browse_ applications if you must, but the UI focus is on search.

The gnome panel has gone (awesome), replaced by a sidebar containing application icons. You can drag and drop icons from the launcher to the sidebar, making them available in future to a single click. You can navigate the sidebar by keyboard, also; meta + number will launch the app on the sidebar in the numbered position (hold down meta for a number overlay). The trash can appears at the bottom left.

Application menus by default appear in the bar along the top of the screen. I like this, as it again reduces clutter and adds consistency. If you find it uncomfortable to use, give it some time before you look for the tweak to turn it off.

There will be (and have been) a vocal nerd contingent who don’t like these design decisions. I guess Shuttleworth’s philosophy is: fuck them, they can use a nerd distro. I think he’s largely right.

Linux has long tried to copy Windows, the rationale being that transition is easier if the UI is identical. Ubuntu has taken ideas from Windows (and most definitely from OSX), but have made novel (and well integrated) design decisions that work very well in practice. Ubuntu thus no longer looks like a geeky knockoff of Windows (or OSX).

I’ve run across a few (relatively) trivial issues:

I have two monitors, and use the “twinview” NVIDIA setting to span them. This causes a couple of issues: the top bar spans both monitors (and the ubuntu menus are available on both monitors; however. application menus appear only on the monitor on which the application is focused, which makes sense); also, the hover-on-screen-edge to have a window take up half of the monitor now only works on the left of the left monitor, and right of the right monitor.

Chrome (actually, Chromium) seems to grab the meta key, making keyboard navigation to the Ubuntu launcher impossible if Chrome has focus (in fairness, Ubuntu’s default is Firefox, which does not have the same problem – however this may well be the case in other applications too.) You can remap the shortcut by installing Compiz settings manager (via synaptic or the software center), and modifying the key mapping in the Ubuntu Unity plugin settings (shift meta works fine in Chrome).

Fonts are also terrible in Chromium (but are lovely in gnome-terminal and in Firefox.) I guess this is because of a different UI toolkit, and the fix is probably out there (I have yet to google for it.)

There are also a few graphical glitches: wallpaper cannot be different on each of the two screens (again, using NVIDIA Twinview at least); my left wallpaper is a little mangled when I first login (but resolves itself if I click the desktop); and I ran into an issue where the title (and window decorations) of a window was somehow rendered over the top of the ubuntu icon in the top menubar, and stuck around.

During the transition from Plymouth (the graphical boot overlay) and X, I get some of the old-style boot messages scrolling on the screen. These don’t screw up the on screen graphics, so it’s not incredibly jarring, but it still, I guess, is unintended.

The live cd did not give me a preview of the new design; it instead booted into plain ol’ gnome. This is likely due to driver issues (I believe that it falls back to gnome if compiz can’t be loaded) but is not at all newbie friendly – somebody new to Linux might conceivably find gnome ugly, and not proceed to installation, or might instead be surprised by the different UI after install.

Finally, some of the icons chosen for the sidebar (in particular the software center icon) are just plain ugly (mustard yellow?!) Most are fine. Bring on sidebar theming.

I consider these all relatively minor, and expect that they’ll be resolved within the next few months.

This is not a disaster like the KDE 4 release was. Ubuntu 11.04 is really the culmination of what Canonical have been doing for the past 6 (or so) years: it’s generally slick, it makes bold and well thought out choices, and it doesn’t get in your way.

I’ve been using OSX at work for the past several months (having initially been given a Windows 7 box, and not being offered Linux as a choice of IT supported desktops). Based on the hype I’d heard, I’d expected OSX to be a revelatory experience, and to be tempted to switch at home; it wasn’t (and I won’t). Apple do undoubtedly spend a lot of time polishing their UI, but OSX is annoying in many small ways that Ubuntu (and desktop Linux) simply is not. I consider Ubuntu 11.04′s UI to have the potential to be better than OSX’s: fix the glitches, and it’s a winner. (It almost need not be said that more games, and ports of mainstream applications are still key to wider adoption.)