Solid Blog of Ise I think my toes are jealous of my fingers because they get to point at things

So, a while back I upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the current 11.04, codename Natty Narwhal. This also meant upgrading the desktop away from my beloved Gnome 2.x to the new choice that Ubuntu introduced with some controversy – Unity. It’s mostly based on GTK but has a lot of differences.

It has yet to blow me away, although I’ve gotten somewhat used to it. The main problems with Unity if you ask me is that it’s fairly unstable and removes a lot of usability that I was used to in proper Gnome. I’m not quite certain why Unity is a good choice on a proper desktop – I can see some advantages on a netbook but as a proper desktop environment it has a long way to go.

Primarily I find it annoying because it interferes with how I use my computer. It’s quite obvious that Mark (Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and leader of the Ubuntu-project) really likes MacOS X, and Unity takes a lot of inspiration from MacOS X. My biggest niggle is that it dumbs things down unnecessarily, and removes and confuses a lot of things.

Such as the Unity-launcher. I don’t know if it wants to be a dock or a menu or whatever. There is no way of customizing it, it tends to get in the way a lot, and even though it autohides it still feels very clumsy and not particularly though-through. Adding items to it is confusing since there’s no integration with most of the rest of the OS. You can’t just drag anything on there. Using Nautilus to manage files has become a pain since the launcher only shows one icon for each application, which has multiplied the amount of clicking and dragging before finding the proper Nautilus-window. I usually have about five-six windows of Nautilus, handling files. Previously this was easy since each window had it’s own entry. Now, each window shares the same icon. Very annoying.

Also, there’s no way of adding quick launchers. I used to have a set of launchers back on Gnome for various often-used folders. This is no more. Now I have to open my home folder and then open a bunch of windows out of it instead of quickly and effortlessly going to my commonly used folders.

One thing I do like though is that Unity provides a somewhat decent application launcher. Previously I used Gnome Do, which was replaced by Synapse and now the Unity launcher has made Synapse obsolete. I like how I can get a similar experience simply by hitting the Super-button on my keyboard. However, it’s not nearly as powerful as it should be. For example, I can type in the name of a folder, but it only displays a few files inside that folder – not the folder itself. I want to be able to open folders quickly, and had this worked fine then my previous complaint about the launcher clustering application windows under one name would’ve been nullified.

But like I said, Unity removes a lot of functionality. For example, we now have a pseudo-Mac like menubar at the top of the screen. This mostly wastes screen real estate and is occasionally the home for application menus, again in a pseudo-Mac like fashion. I’m not a fan. Most of the time it just wastes space and currently there’s hardly anything that can be put there. Gone is the possibility to have system-meters to quickly gauge the system load and memory use, something I really liked under Gnome. A third-party weather app can be added, but it tends to disappear every so often.

And yes, there are lots of bugs. I’m one of the many people who suffer the jerky window-movements. Basically everything flies along, but whenever I try to move around a window, that movement is jerkier than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid. This is most likely a bug in Compiz. I have and ATI/AMD graphics-card, but have read about people with Nvidia-cards who suffer it as well. Numerous other minor bugs abound, such as Compiz using a lot of CPU when it shouldn’t, various visual defects occuring when you least want them and just generally weird behavior.

Unity could be great. But from a usability as well as technological standpoint it can’t be considered more than a rough beta, and it shouldn’t have been put into production this soon. Canonical and the devs behind Unity need to put a lot of work into it, and add back functionality that was removed.

After post-poning this for a while I took the plunge earlier today and upgraded to the new Ubuntu, aka Natty Narwhal. Version number 11.04. I’ve been bitching about the changes that are being made to this quite a lot, and you can find some of it in the older posts here in this blog.

So anyway. I upgraded and let it simmer while I watched Tron: Legacy.

So, some first impressions.

Pros: Upgrade went without a hitch. Had to answer two questions then click restart. Nice.

Cons: Unity is BUGGY AS FUCK. Essentially, if you stare at your monitor just slightly too hard it will bork in some fashion. It’s essentially alpha-stage software that was rushed into production. Annoyingly as well it feels like a lot of actual functionality has been removed and/or hidden from the user. Being a power-user I liked having various information about my computer. Now, my computer feels more like some retarded consumer-appliance than an actual computer. I feel as if power has been removed from me in some silly quest for “user-friendliness”. This is annoying, and dumbing down a great operating system like this helps no one, especially not lusers who should learn stuff rather than expecting power-users to stoop to their level.

Also, despite everything being newer there’s a distinct lack of spit and polish when you look at the edges of things. Alpha-blurring of windows, which worked fine on 10.10 is missing in action, and a lot of the neat Compiz-plugins (such as Put, one of my favorites) have been lobotomized since Unity handles the desktop differently. Firefox 4 has some funky integration (read: lack thereof) in the desktop, and displays some bogus toolbars/whatever that I cannot remove. Very annoying.

Add to this that my computer now has some weird symptom where moving windows around is jerkier than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid. This is apparently a wide-spread problem and people are experiencing it regardless of computer configuration. I’m running a Phenom and a ATI/AMD 5870 but during the last hour I’ve read threads on various forum where people have it running all kinds of Intel, AMD, Nvidia type rigs.

I could’ve lived with all this at launch, but it’s been well over two weeks since launch and these minor niggles should’ve been priority and been ironed out within a few days after launch.

The next version of Ubuntu is being released on the 28th. I’ve been bitching a lot about how Ubuntu is switching to Unity and away from Gnome. I still don’t think this is a great decision, but I’ve mellowed during these last few months.

I went from “I’m going to switch from Ubuntu to whatever else!” to “I’m going to switch from Gnome to KDE!” and now I’m just thinking “meh” about the whole thing.

You see, I just got tired of it all. Sure, Unity is a new fit for me, but I’ll go with it. Sure, it’s immature software but it will hopefully get better. I’ve been playing a bit with the 11.04 beta on my laptop and I kind of just accepted the inevitable. Gnome 2.x is history. Even if Ubuntu had stuck with pure Gnome I’d still have to relearn everything for the new Gnome 3 that has replaced the venerable 2.x line. This would’ve been double so if I’d gone for KDE since then I’d have to relearn every new application for that environment as well.

Perhaps some change will be good. I’m hoping that Unity will keep evolving into something good. It’s time to face the future.

A while back I blogged about my deep frustration and irritation with Ubuntu deciding to replace Gnome with Unity as the default interface on the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04. I pondered switching distros and other alternatives, and most of them came up pretty short.

I’ve tested some other distros, most notably Debian and Fedora. Debian seemed the most logical choice since Ubuntu is Debian-derived, and I’ve used Debian before. The problem with Debian though is the almost glacial pace of development and the general beardy attitude behind it. The problem with Fedora was that it was Fedora, and while nice it didn’t feel quite right.

So right now I’m kicking around the idea to not jump ship, but rather jump environment and switch to Kubuntu. Kubuntu is based on KDE, and while I’ve loathed KDE in the past, I will admit that the latest 4.x is looking very, very slick.

Sure, re-learning a new environment will be an annoyance, but it seems to me a lesser annoyance than learning a completely new distro. Plus, most likely I can convert my current install to Kubuntu without having to reinstall, which would save me a lot of work.

But there’s still plenty of time to decide…

Ubuntu has been a very good friend of mine for going on four years. Back in early 2007, I picked it up and I didn’t look back. Sure, we had our differences, and it’s still far from perfect. But it was perfect for me, and I felt comfortable with it. I liked it.

But now those days are over, and I will be looking for a new friend to run my desktop.

Why? Because of the completely retarded decision to replace the default Gnome environment with Ubuntus own “Unity” shell. Unity was the default shell on the Ubuntu “Netbook Edition” and not too long ago Mark Shuttleworth declared that Gnome would no longer be the default environment for Ubuntu. Instead, Unity would replace it.

And just like that, Ubuntu lost me (and most likely a whole lot of other users) on the desktop. Because I hate Unity.

I think Unity is a decent choice on a very small screen, which was what it was designed for. But as a desktop environment it blows chunks. It’s wasteful with screen real-estate, and unnecessarily dumbs things down for users. I always liked the streamlined and minimalistic elegance of Gnome, and while Unity tries to emulate this minimalism it does it like a retarded kid imitating Batman. In the words of Tyler Durden: sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Of course Gnome will still be in the repos, and you will still be able to install it and run it. But as far as I’ve gathered, it will not officially be supported by Canonical (the corporate entity who sponsors Ubuntu) and thus it will be a hack.

Thus, I will be devoting this spring before 11.04 ships to finding another distro. I very much don’t like having to do this, because there are a lot of things I really like about Ubuntu. Admittedly though, a lot of these things come from Debian, and making the jump to Debian would be easy. However, I’m not sure I’d like Debian as a desktop distro.

Somewhere in my heart I hope this is simply Mark Shuttleworth rattling his Ubuntu-labeled sword in order to get his ducks in line with Gnome (the project has been very critical of Ubuntu for the last year) and that in the end he’ll cave in and go back to Gnome. But it doesn’t seem very likely.

So if push comes to shove and he insists on staying the course with this Unity-inanity as the default desktop environment, then I am outta here. I’ll still be running and promoting Ubuntu as a server, but as far as the desktop is concerned I will look in other directions. Right now, Fedora seems the most promising alternative and I will research it and other things during the springtime season.

And that’s why I’m breaking up with you, Ubuntu. We had our good times but… It’s not me, it’s you. You’ve changed, and I don’t like it.

In my previous post i waxed a little nerdy about how the new Ubuntu 10.10 (aka Maverick Meerkat) was released. I mentioned that I would hold off on upgrading until the load on Canonicals servers lightened.

Well, I of course had very little patience, and later that same day I clicked the “upgrade”-button and watched a crappy Schwarzenegger-movie from the 80s while I waited. The upgrade went really smooth, and one reboot later I was back. No problems whatsoever, I’m really impressed. In the past, upgrades have been perfectly possible and usually go fine, but when you (like I do) have a very customized and tweaked setup some things are bound to break during an upgrade.

This time, no breakage. Just a little wait, reboot, and done. Nothing to need patching, and only new freshness where new freshness is expected. That’s nice.

There are of course changes, and I won’t go into much detail about it since there are plenty other blogs out there who do it far better than I do. But it’s nice. I still say after almost four years of being an Ubuntu-user that the best thing about Ubuntu was that it brought back my love for computers. With Windows owning a computer became a drag. It crushed the hacker-joy under a never-ending cascade of bullshit, and you grew tired of the constant fighting with your computer.

Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that Ubuntu isn’t perfect, and isn’t perfect for everyone. But the perfect operating system (much less the perfect operating system for EVERYONE!) doesn’t exist. There will be flaws everywhere and as a user you will make compromises. For me, Ubuntu is the least amount of compromises. Not only am I actually in control of my computer again (unlike with MacOS or Windows which gives you control up to a certain point) but also I like the fact that the amount of hogwash from the operating system as well as it’s creator is kept to a minimum.

Because that’s one thing that annoys me. With Apple or Microsoft everything revolves around the hyperbole. It revolves around how fancy a name or brand they can slap on something, and then sell it to the fanboys. In the world of Ubuntu there is of course some superlatives, but the hyperbole is thankfully gone. New things do not have very fancy names, but is presented as an evolutionary progress of the previous iteration. In the new Ubuntu there’s now integrated play/pause/next controls in the sound-applet that’s always visible. A nice little touch, even though I prefer controlling my mediaplayer through the hotkeys on my keyboard. It’s presented as such too, a nice little bonus.

But if Apple or Microsoft did the same thing in an update to their operating systems, it would be branded as their new Media Extender Technology or something equally inane.

If it came from Apple, it would be released not as a free upgrade to the operating system, but as a piece of software that you could buy from them and it would only work with iTunes, promoted by Steve in a black turtleneck talking about how revolutionary it is. Microsoft would give it away for free, claim that it works with any player out there, even though in reality it would only work with their own application and even then it would only actually function maybe a quarter of the time due to being a rushed piece of software filled with bugs.

Ubuntu restored my love for computers simply by not treating the users as a flock of retarded sheep easily impressed by shiny things. New things are new things, some of them are very good and advanced, other are nice little improvements. But they’re all there, and they’re not overhyped to death.

I upgraded my workstation on Sunday, and Monday evening saw the upgrade of my server. That was if possible even more streamlined than the workstation. Sure, because it’s a server it’s all done commandline, but it was smooth. One command, then wait and occasionally answer a few questions when configuration files had been handmade by myself. A reboot later and everything was up and running. Of course, the server continued to work and provide the services meanwhile, and only when that particular service (web, ftp, email, whatever) was upgraded it was briefly taken offline.

Today is October 10th, 2010. Not only is this a very cool date that we won’t be seeing for another one hundred years (then it’ll be 2110 instead), but also this is the release-date of new Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat.

I upgraded my laptop from 10.04 a few days back, and in another 2-3 days when most of the upgrading storm has blown over I will upgrade my workstation and my server to it as well. I’m expecting the upgrade to be mostly without troubles, although there’s usually a small bit of coddling needed to be done on my workstation. This is usually because I’ve tweaked it quite a bit. The laptop-upgrade went very smoothly and I believe that it actually managed to squeeze some more juice out of the old thing. It now actually runs Google Earth without being too jerky, and overall things seem a little nicer.

These regular release-cycles are one of the many nice things about Ubuntu. Every six months you get a brand-new version which generally keeps the good stuff from previous version yet adds improvements. Sure, there are some versions which are bit more lame than others, but the progress is measurable. Every six months, on the dot. New version with all the fresh goodies from the open-source community.