For those of you ignorant of REAL life excitement: Ubuntu 11.04 Beta is
OUT!!!
Oh, boy... :)
The part that I hate about this frequent releases, is that they are
consistently so much better, that I *HAVE* to upgrade.
The part that I love about this frequent releases, is that they are
consistently so much better, that I *WANT* to upgrade (or do I?).
My first Ubuntu installation ever (I believe to recall) was 5.04 (Yes, I am
*THAT* old!)
I remember that it blew my socks off, when all I had to compare it to was
the Red Hat of the time. It was orders of magnitude better than the best
Red Hat, Suse, Slackware or (fill in your distro of choice) of the time.
And it was, in short and above all: USABLE!
From then on, it became a love/hate relationship. At the beginning I tried
both, flat Ubuntu (Gnome) and Kubuntu (KDE).
At the end I settled for KDE mostly because I could not put up with the
(unavoidable and depressible ugly!) brown Ubuntu motif.
KDE was not only blue and soothing, it also behaved more like the M$ stuff
that I was used to play with at the time.
And so I tugged my happy KDE life for few years, testing and ditching the
ugly Gnome every so often and finding specific uses for low power machines
running XFCE and lately LXDE.
Until one day...
One day I found that KDE was getting "so helpful", that it was constantly
busy being "helpful" while constantly ignoring the attention I craved. They
(KDE) installed all this indexes and daemons and hidden processes that
rendered the performance of the machine borderline unusable (sounds
familiar?) unless you're were running your "Desktop" on a Craig's
supercomputer.
Beyond my budget and beyond my patience...
So one day some year-and-a-half ago I took another hard look at Ubuntu...
And I pleasantly found out that they had diluted the horrible brown and I
could easily manage the interface (look at a recent Mac ? ).
I am not sure if I got smarter (highly unlikely) or they dumbed down the
interface (entirely possible), but I could actually work with it intuitively
(or, as I do mostly everything: without needing to THINK!)
And then I was fat, dumb and happy again (mostly dumb and fat)
And I installed Ubuntu to all my friends and family that I help with
computers, and they too were fat, dumb and happy (mostly happy, some fat)
And life went on...
For a geek that ignores many of the "creature comforts" of a GUI in favor of
doing "things" on terminals (like REAL men do! ;-), I regularly become
inconvenienced when the GUI makes decisions for me. For instance, just try
to install an IP address on a network adapter without the GUI in Ubuntu!
So the "new" Ubuntu is (almost) out.
And as always, I think of upgrading, but in this instance I am not that
sure...
You see, now Ubuntu is using "Unity" as the "Desktop" environment.
It's GOT to be important, because even PCWorld and Znet *ARE* talking about
it.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/223843/four_new_features_comin
g_to_ubuntu_1104_natty_narwhal.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-new-ubuntu-desktop-unity/8584?pg=2
&tag=mantle_skin;content
Remember the days when you found "Linux" in PCWorld only as a dirty joke?
Obviously times (and appreciations) are changing...
But anyway, back to the question: Do I *WANT* to upgrade?
Has anybody used Unity before?
Is it an step forward in usability and "coolness", or will it become another
intrusive and hyperactive KDE?
Have you use it?
Did you like it?
Is Ubuntu getting better or worse with this Unity thingy?
Stay tuned, I'll fire up a virtual this weekend and will take Unity for a
spin.
ET
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