First Look: Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Beta 1

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/first-look-ubuntu-1104-natty-narwhal-beta-1/12155

by Garbage • 15 years ago

51 25 15 years ago

zbanks• 15 years ago

I tried unity in 10.10 and found it to be cumbersome. I was shocked when they announced they were moving to it for 11.04.

But, it looks like it's undergone a few improvements.

(Strangely, I know,) I trust the people working on Ubuntu to make rational decisions. It looks like unity pulled through.

nrbafna3• 15 years ago

I tried Unity in 10.10 too. But, it seems much more polished and usable now.

One real plus in 11.04, is the installer. Really convenient.

fingerprinter2• 15 years ago

Unity in 11.04 is a different beast than the thing in 10.10 netbook. Unity11.04 is rewritten as a Compiz plugin for performance reasons. Unity10.10 was based on Mutter/Clutter and suffered poor performance b/c of that (among other reasons).

Anyone who used Unity in 10.10 should give 11.04 a new and fair shot since they are 100% different things.

sambe2• 15 years ago

I have to say that both Unit and Windows 7's desktop bar look absolutely horrendous to me. I haven't used either, so I can't tell if this leads to some surprising productivity boost but there's something about the space-consuming giant-kiddy-icons that make me think it will only work against me.

I don't have any problem right now with the size of the icons, but screen estate is always an issue. Window organisation, as it has been for the last 15 years, seems like it has much better room for optimisation.

Other choice have also seemed a bit arbitrary - like moving the power options to the status bar, whilst also moving the window controls away from the status bar. Mouse movement has increased in my experience.

whatusername• 15 years ago

The key thing with any system is to make sure you move the bar to the left/right of the screen. Almost every screen has stacks of horizontal real estate but never enough vertical.

And by doing that -- the win7 icons don't bother me in the slightest.

emilis_info• 15 years ago

Unity looks promising. Maybe I'll switch back to default Ubuntu desktop again :-)

I didn't know about Unity before this, even though I've been using Ubuntu for the last 7 years.

I used Tint2 on Openbox to get a vertical taskbar. Combined with Tree Style Tabs for Firefox it creates a consistent UI hierarchy going from left to right.

RuadhanMc• 15 years ago

Two things annoy me about Unity:

1. The menu bar at the top is now wasted space. 2. The task bar is on the side.

Shortcuts to spreadsheet, worth authoring, etc, should be hidden away in the menu. Honestly how many new spreadsheets do you create every day? Not many. What you might do is double-click on a spreadsheet and have it open, but that doesn't require a big shiny shortcut being in the taskbar.

These are just defaults and can be changed, but still, I feel as if they are poorly considered defaults.

nrbafna3• 15 years ago

The menu bar at top is not a wasted space. It serves as a Global Menu for applications.

natesm• 15 years ago

While I agree with your second point (although I put my taskbar/dock on the side, I have it autohide) and following paragraph, I'm not sure about the first one.

The topbar in Unity contains the menu for the currently focused window (and, in the future, hopefully the currently focused application). This vertical space had to be used anyways - the clock and some sort of notification area are essentially mandatory.

As a person who primarily uses Mac OS X, I think that the menus are the best use for the vertical space that those items provide. I can use Cmd+tab or Exposé for switching applications, so a list of the currently open windows isn't particularly relevant. By moving the menubar to a single spot, if anything we save space.

That sidebar is truly awful though.

StudyAnimal• 15 years ago

I have been playing with it since alpha 3.

When it is properly released I will do a reinstall, and I will be using gnome with it. Unity is crap.

Nate75Sanders• 15 years ago

Unity!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toAEQTsidvg

I guess I'll try out Unity, but I may have an itchy trigger finger ready for a switch back to something more familiar.

pepijndevos• 15 years ago

Does this beta contain anything of Wayland? I know they said a year is probably more realistic, but I'm just curious if the Unity in this release is running on X11 or Wayland. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

fingerprinter2• 15 years ago

X11. Wayland is supposed to be there for 11.10 at the earliest. Wayland is available in a PPA right now, though.

parbo• 15 years ago

Maybe Unity will finally drive me to start using a tiling window manager, like XMonad.

nrbafna3• 15 years ago

Dash, with its shortcuts, is useful. Now, you can search for new applications without opening Software Center.

semerda• 15 years ago

Forget the UI. That can be tweaked and altered to just about anything you like. I'm really keen to see whether 11.xx has major performance improvements that I've been hearing about.

lovskogen• 15 years ago

Good defaults are key to adoption. Alot of computer users don't know how to completely customize.

dhughes• 15 years ago

To me it feels faster if that means anything then again I didn't benchmark before and after.

Spyou• 15 years ago

I've been using the combo OpenBox and Tint2 for a long time now, just because Gnome2.x feels bloated and I could do anything I want by editing a simple shortcut file in my config. So yea I like lightweight systems, fast and blabla.

But the other day, after having bought a new computer, I did give a go to this beta Unity.

It's definitively not my taste, BUT I can see why this was made. It's clearly simpler than anything I've tried before on Linux. The "start key" open a sort of menu, type to search apps, all in the bar make sense, I'm not fond of the global menu, but well, people seems to like it.

We have to keep in mind that it's just the first release, and it'll evolve in the future, but after having tried it I went from a complete hater to a "well ok, it has it's place".

After 2 days I moved back to my simple and light openbox/tint2 combo, but well, this is only because I'm not the target market for Unity. Unity is for people not for hackers.

bfung• 15 years ago

No System Monitor applet; the current System Monitor Indicator just doesn't cut it. On my dev machine, I like watching the little graph of cpu%/ram/network/disk etc.

My netbook IS running unity w/o the System Monitor, but I rarely do heavy work there. If the thought is to switch over to Unity for more casual users, then it probably works out well.

glennsl• 15 years ago

There's an indicator available for this already, although it lacks the fancy graphs.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/indicator-sysmonitor-simp... (seems to be down atm) https://launchpad.net/indicator-sysmonitor/+download

rwmj• 15 years ago

Actual review here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/01/ubuntu1004_beta_revi...

First Look: Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Beta 1

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