Ubuntu's Oneiric Ocelot: Nice, but necessary?
Oneiric Ocelot, or Ubuntu 11.10 as it is known, has been delivered and refines the core of the Unity environment Canonical built at the expense of GNOME. If you made the leap to Canonical's signature Unity Desktop when it arrived in Spring's Natty Narwhal edition of Ubuntu, version number 11.04, then October's update will be …
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Upvote for the sentiment (if not the Anglo-Saxon) ;-)
My Eee 701SD is running Arch Linux with Fluxbox, and I've never been happier with a Linux distro. If it weren't for the rest of my family wanting to use our Ubuntu PC, I'd have swapped it for Arch by now - the Ocelot had better be good, to erase the memories of Naff Narwhal...
This was supposed to be a reply to the "fluxbox" post earlier - must've hit the wrong button (grumble grumble)...
This had better save me from "Ubuntu Cracked Compositor"...
All I can say is: if OO fixes the atrocious bugs in whatever Natty used to composite the desktop, which caused the desktop to "scramble" for ten seconds at a time, every time I did something daft like... oooh, I dunno, open a drop-down list in a dialogue box...
...then I'll upgrade our Natty-running PC as fast as our length-of-wet-string broadband can pull it down. In fact, I think I'll do it anyway - honestly, almost anything the Canonical crew did here, would be an improvement on Natty for me.
If that's not a "hostage-to-fortune" sentence, I don't know what is...
I stand corrected...
Now downloading the upgrade files - will be interesting to see if the machine in question (a Foxconn NT-330i "nettop") will perform any better with The Ocelot. With regard to the display, I find it hard to imagine how it could be worse... (yup, I'm REALLY laying down a challenge to the universe there ;-) )
Hmmm...never had that bg and I have been using OO and now LO on Ubuntu as main desktop since 10.04. Still do not have this error on 11.04 or 11.10 now.
Do a clean install and do not modify any default configurations?
Bad drivers and fault finding
"That's a graphics card/driver issue, not Ubuntu."
Well Ubuntu put the dist together so arguably it is their fault to some extent. For example the open source ATI / AMD Radeon turn the display to mush for a few seconds during startup, and occasionally when the desktop is getting going. It just looks ugly.
Have they fixed the nVidia issue
Tried NN and reverted back because the support for high end nVidia cards and the fact that the drivers and modules had incompatible builds. Until they fix this, I won;t be updating!
Onanistic Ocelot surely...
...coat... the one that smells of cat.
I've already named it ...
I've been calling them even more silly names ever since I installed it last year.
Lurid Limpet
Molested Marmoset
Nauseous Newt
and now its Obese Otter
Next one I'll probably be calling Pervy Pigeon
Sigh :(
Once upon a time (8.10 to be precise) I tried Ubuntu and liked it, it was Linux that was easy to set up and use, and most things worked fairly intuitively. Friends & family used to XP would have no problems I thought, and indeed they did not.
And what happened?
They spent a lot of time dicking around with the GUI for no real benefit, while failing to fix packages that were important, such a Nagios (still broken for 10.04 LTS on daylight saving change, a YEAR after it was reported and was already fixed by the developers), Rhythmbox (stopped syncing to MusicBrainz even though the changes were known about and discussed since 2 YEARS ago), automounter broken with NIS due to unpredictable start-up sequence with Plymouth, etc.
Is the world so full of short attention-span people that an ever-changing desktop (and thus demanding help/training to all non-geek users) is more important than making the damned thing work?
Why do Unity? Indeed, why did they waste time on GNOME 3? No one is shipping a tablet with Ubuntu on it, and realistically no one will (Andriod is the choice for all who are not Apple or MS fans).
In my view it has simply pissed off a lot of users and serves to illustrate at least one reason why it never will be the year of the Linux desktop. Work put in to stuff that is simply visual fluff, and not in to making things 'just work'.
They probably should have kept Ubuntu Netbook Remix separate and left it there.
Yep, trying to do an Android all device system has just screwed it for everybody.
The Point?
I don't necessarily *hate* Unity, but I don't see what its purpose is in the marketplace. A touch-friendly shell doesn't make your applications automatically touch-friendly. And if your applications aren't touch-friendly, then you don't have a touch-friendly platform.
If Canonical is trying to position themselves as an alternative to Android for tablets, I'm not sure how they succeed with the same applications having GUIs that are awkward to use on desktops, and doubly-so on a tablet form-factor.
A couple of things they can do to get me on board:
1) Get rid of the stupid scroll line in Dash. If you don't aim your mouse and click exactly within the few pixels they give you, you either don't get a scroll or the Dash window appears altogether. Either use "normal" scroll bars or use the thumb scroll.
2) I like how Gnome brings up its launcher by moving the mouse to the top left without having to click. Not sure if Unity has something similar, but it would be cool. Again, too much concern for the tablet crowd.
3) Allow me to set up different program bars for different workspaces. If I'm in my first workspace, I could set up my bar with "everyday" stuff - browser, email, etc. Second workspace, development tools and shortcuts to my project folders. Third workspace, office productivity applications. Etc. Etc. ad Nauseum. You can still bring up Dash from any workspace and get to any program you want.
I like that Canonical is trying something different. I even like that Microsoft is trying different stuff (albeit the green metro screen looks like vomit). But you gotta show love to your entrenched base or else they don't stay entrenched.
Touch screen?
There's an interesting point here, if the dock is supposed to be touch screen friendly then why when it hides does it need the mouse to go to the left hand side of the screen and stay there when a window/ application is maximised? (and I couldn't find a way to turn off that behaviour). Touch screens don't have mice, so there's no pointer to bring the panel back which seems like a large usability issue.
Nothing wrong with trying something new
I applaud Canonical for trying something new. And, if it is not to your liking there are loads of alternatives, unlike certain other OS suppliers.
That said, I'm not too convinced yet, and find the idea of searching by programme name faintly laughable in an environment where silly names seem de rigeur!
But lets not stick in the mud, eh? This is an industry that started with teletypes.
Funnily enough
A TTY33 would still work fine if you found one with an RS232 interface, (current-loop support is probably a bit esoteric for Linux, but no doubt someone supports a driver and hardware somewhere).
Shame you can't say the same for Gnome 2.3.
Odd
Lots of people with problems on 11.04, but I've never had any problems with it or that version of Unity - rough edges yes, but no bugs and no odd slowdowns or screen issues.
I quite like it....
i love my meerkat
i don't see the urgency to upgrade later let alone sooner. call me dumb, but i still can't make use of that blooming scrollbar..
What's the problem?
I have never had any problems with Unity. It works and is stable unlike another operating system I could mention.
Well, that was a depressing review.
Nothing I have read here has convinced me to give ocelot a try, after the fiasco that was the first Unity attempt.
It's something that's really peeved me about Linux for years: as soon as something is working half-way well, there's this terrible urge to pee into it and stir it all around. It's as if it's illegal or immoral somehow to take the time out to do the job properly.
It seems to me that it's fundamental that a user interface should *not* get in the way of the user, but it seems that Unity is designed to offer me things I don't want in ways different from those I'm used to, requiring more clicks or non-intuitive operations (the disappearing scroll bars are a classic example).
I don't want much. I just want to let my applications use - but share - the desktops, without getting obscured by pointless and irritating video effects; without being offered opportunities to download; without having to learn a new metaphor.
Let's keep the clever effects for CSI, and let us get on with some work, huh?
I don't get it...
Ok, ok, so most of us have tried and pretty much hated Unity ... and this is where I just don't get the whole concept...
So, Unity is obviously going to be *improved* over time, great, it definitely needs it, but...
Why release it as a default desktop in a state guaranteed to cause massive frustration and rejection?
From this pretty decent review, quote: "and more like something that might be useful one day."
See, that's it in a nutshell!
The default Ubuntu desktop *prior* to Unity was already useful! It worked!
Gnome 2x was a mature, stable and downright *usable* desktop solution.
So, what are we users to Ubuntu? Alpha testers?
This massive paradigm shift, which changes the workflow methodology of the standard desktop a great deal, is to all intents and purposes, an experiment.
It's an all or nothing approach - there's no slow change, it's just a sudden leap - and now the process of trying to make it more usable begins.
That's so arse-about-face, it's staggering. Where's the slow change process? You know, introduce a realistic, long-term shift? You simply *have* to take this approach with users, you cannot just throw everything out and start again. Microsoft get it, Apple get it, evidentally, Canonical don't have a bloody clue. Then again, with a user base so small it pales into insignificance, perhaps they figured it didn't matter. Well, it does. The small user base of the default Ubuntu distribution have now fragmented - to distributions with default desktops that actually *work* in a familiar way!
But hey, perhaps one day, Unity will actually *unify* Linux desktop users across the board, but I'll be damned if I'm going along for the ride, I've got work to do, I don't want to be mucking about with half realised, incomplete solutions!
"But hey, perhaps one day, Unity will actually *unify* Linux desktop users across the board"
You have to get with the doublespeak: Unity actually divides the free desktop space further (not that there's anything wrong with a bit of competition, though), and Harmony is the Canonical-sponsored way of upsetting Free Software contributors across the board by telling them that they should sign over their work to a corporation for potential relicensing or, more accurately, subsequent "proprietising".
I left W for U 10.04 , delightful.
I gave 10.10 a miss.
I took 11.04 , awful. The Admin drop down has gone so I have to learn the Linux commands, Firefox is cut back with no tab history drop down and the launcher strip down the side is dreadful with dancing ikons that all look the same. Location is more important than appearance, suppose at breakfast you pick up the marmalade and everything shifts round one place.
I think emigration is the only option.
One thing El Reg fails to mention...
With all the fuss about the desktop you failed to mention that the kernel is version 3.0.
What a great milestone :)
Take a look
at http://www.ubuntu.com/tour !
Very smooth looking and what a great website intro to the thing!
The point of what everyone has being saying here is that you shouldn't need a tutorial to figure out how to launch an application. The desktop should just get of of your way!
And no-one give a damn about how slick your tutorial is.
It's a dog. Upgrade from 11.04 broke my desktop, the dual core is stuck at maximum rpm, installing fall-back did not put things back the way I wanted, tried the new Kubuntu but that is still crack-headed, downloading Mint DE.
The first thing unity does wrong...
Is that it moves things from place to place, a big no-no in interface design.
I will stop here.
I'm on debian & mint-debian, not looking back, I encourage everybody to check mint debian, it is debian for the masses.
Ignorance
That and "too big, too massive".
Projects starting out very cool; I used to love KDE and really like Gnome. KDE was more 'end user' like whereas Gnome was more business like (heck; Sun didn't 'adopt' Gnome on Solaris for no reason).
But today I like neither of them. I've been using XFCE4 way before it became 'hip' (I used it because at that time it most closely resembled Sun's CDE desktop manager) and IMVHO even that has become way bloated (in comparison with what it was).
I think a lot of those projects are growing too big. People get into it not because of what the project stands for but because they can say "I'm working on that cool project". I don't blame them, but I do blame the people calling the shots here. Many projects which have a large share of followers (KDE, Gnome) seem to be totally focused these days into turning the project into something its not. Take for example KDE and its sudden "double-sized" start menu as if were Vista or Win7. Total bullsh*t if you ask me; its KDE not fscking Windows.
THAT is the main problem IMO; in the beginning KDE closely resembled Windows and people started to grow a liking to it. But at that very point its no longer "a desktop manager resembling Windows". No, then and there it became "KDE". Same applies to Gnome, only reason I'm focusing on KDE is because I've experienced this head on.
Instead of seeing stuff for what it is (your project has now become a milestone; people like it for what it is) these dumbos (very personal opinion) /continue/ to try and turn the product into something its not and never will be. That is IMO the main problem here. Same issue of Mozilla trying to turn Firefox into some Chrome spinoff. I really liked Firefox 3, I tried 4 and ditched at 5 because it was turning into something I didn't want to use in the first place; the main reason I stuck with Firefox at that time.
If I want to use Windows 7 I'll frickin' use Windows 7 (its what I'm doing right now). But if I think of a Linux desktop manager I no more think of something "Windows alike" or maybe "OS X" alike. I liked it for what it was. BUT.. no more...
When it comes to desktop managers I fell back to my very first love; WindowMaker. It gets as bloated as you want it to be (by actually adding extras yourself; the core is still very slim) and better yet: all my old themes which I created back then still WORK (8 years old; I kept them onto a CDR which surprisingly enough is still accessible).
As sad as it is but at this point I cannot help but laugh. It took Linux hardly as much time as Microsoft yet when it comes to GUI's its now falling into the same mudhole.
OW
My face met the keyboard so hard, it now looks like a spreadsheet.
They DO NOT need to make everything look like a touchy-feely fondleslab interface.
I hate badmouthing Linux, but when it comes to the last two ubuntu releases it's inevitable.
Unity in 11.10 still has absolutely no idea what to do with two monitors. That in itself is a complete joke. Why such a massive regression from 10.10?
I'm experiencing more bugs and a slower load time in 11.10 and so I added Gnome shell which is an improvement but still a badly thought out DE experiment albeit slightly faster. Started fiddling with system files to get the icons smaller and then added extra add on software to configure settings that should be available in system settings anyway. So I tried the Gnome classic fallback, which is an utter bastardisation of what was the great gnome2 desktop.
Suddenly thought what am I doing?! Why am I wasting time with this crap when 10.04 and 10.10 are both far superior DE's.
I never thought I would actually get to the point where I would give up with ubuntu, I always though that in the end they would figure it out and change things after 11.04 struck an iceberg, but no. 11.10 just moves the deckchairs around a bit. So I'm off to either Mint or Debian squeeze. Or you know what, I might just bite the bullet and shell out for an iMac.
I like Unity
No, truly, I do. I do not rummage through apps and whatnot, but actually use the desktop. I have dual monitors and 4 desktops.
Unity is clean, kind of funky...and non-intrusive. It is not a presence in my daily use, ie. I do not care. Nothing truly meaningful has changed when it comes to interaction with the PC so I do not really understand why the angst, except if it fails to work/render correctly on some systems, or if it makes some systems lag.
I did not notice Unity lag even on an ancient Athlon XP3000+ desktop that was running 11.04.
V.
Upgrade or downgrade ?
I upgraded last night and was surprised that it completed the upgrade without glitches. So.. on reboot I was expecting Unity and that's what I got. I've been using Gnome 2 "Classic" mode but as this is the "chosen path" I figured I might as well give it a fair suck of the sauce bottle.
So, after reboot what did I find ?
No graphic drivers activated. Not a biggy but on activation.... Where's the restart option in the cog (me menu ?) .. Seriously, there's only Shutdown.
Next... I nipped round corner T'shop for some Doritos and when I got back I discovered the screen locked, s'funny, I had that set to 45 mins. Oh well... I'll have to reset it again... except.... Where is it ? It was in screensavers but that's gone... I used that "Dash" effort to search... I clicked around clicking on likely candidates.. Nope.. I give in ... Give me a clue !!
I'll give this a month and if still not happy I'm gonna change over to Peppermint.
Tried to use Unity with 11.04 for a few days and couldn't handle it.
I use Ubuntu on my work PC with two 24inch monitors and just trying to get work done juggling between these two was a nightmare.
I don't want to be searching for file names or program names as the main way of opening things that I don't want to make a shortcut to.
I use the desktop regularly to place things in and for easy access. Why deny me this space that my monitors provide to lock me into a laptop friendly interface?
I've since changed to Debian Squeeze and am loving it.
A shame really as Ubuntu was the distie that got me off Windows forever and down the path of linux enlightenment.
Thanks for showing me the way Canonical, but the path ahead has no room for you now...
Crap
The only good thing about Unity and Ubuntu is that they apparently haven't had the time to screw up KDE,
When synaptic disappears altogether, then you know what real crap is. The Muon Package manager in KDE is crap reminiscent of the openSUSE days when they discarded Yast and gave all the faithful the Zipper - the equivalent of "the finger".
Of course, Ubuntu is now Windows - and less - thus the IPO can't be too far in the future.
There are yet a few Linux distributions remaining. But, Windowizing and Jobsian eye-candy - as in crap - rules. Smoke and mirrors.
As everyone knows, security is always increased by offering only binaries in a package manager that offers the user only a moronic icon without details of the contents.
Author is confused
Either the author is confused, or is inadvertently confusing readers.
Unity replaces "Gnome Shell". It does not replace "Gnome". Unity does a good job of providing access to the five apps that we typically run. Unity does a bad job at pretty much everything else. The only other exception is that it allows you to use Compiz, which GShell currently does not.
So Ubuntu users have the choice of a really-bad 2003-esque desktop shell, or a really bad 2009-esque desktop shell. There's really not a lot of other options. KDE has big issues with PIM currently, and is off the table. Perhaps we should give Bodhi a test-drive and see if Enlightenment provides a viable contemporary desktop shell.
Just upgraded
My computer told me a distribution upgrade was available for my Kubuntuised Ubuntu.
Waiting until Friday, did some cleaning up, backed up the essentials.
Dist upgrade, rebooted, logged in, logged back out again when I saw it was Unity, logged back out and then back into my KDE desktop. I haven't tried Unity. I think I'll wait for maturity before I bother trying it.
Hello from Xubuntu 11.10
The 3.0 kernel is a lot faster, it's had some cosmetic improvements and the "greybird-compat" WM theme means that the titlebar no longer has to be colossal. It picked up all my 11.04 settings and media pretty seamlessly and everything ran just as I like it.
So overall a big win.
That said, however, the new look Ubuntu Software Centre absolutely blows goats.
Thumbs down on 11.10
I run Xubuntu 11.04 which uses XFCE for a desktop. Yesterday the Upgrade Manager offered to upgrade my system to 11.10. I thought, "What the heck and accepted the upgrade." Thank God it told me what it was going to do before it started the actual upgrade. It was intending to remove several things I rely on frequently, though not necessarily on a daily basis. Further, it was going to foist a lot of Gnome 3 stuff on me even though I use XFCE. I quickly clicked on the "Don't Upgrade" button and adjusted the Upgrade Manager to never offer a distribution upgrade to me again. Have to do that on my other computer too, but I haven't used it for a while so it could use some security and functional updates, but no distribution upgrade!
If Canonical keeps up this shit I'm going to say good bye to Linux and go back to one of the BSD's. Which are stable, just as fast on MY hardware and an offshoot of the One True Unix rather than being a work-alike.
Which distro is the best for XFce if Xubuntu is not??
Contrary to what lots of folks have said, I don't find Unity so bad... it needs some maturing, what do you expect it's quite new and on a netbook it's functional. It's just Canonical has made a fatal mistake in their branding and they should have never touched their main distro. Unity belongs in something called Netbuntu or Smartbuntu, whereas Ubuntu should offer full Gnome 2.x and 3 implementations. They can rebrand it to Gbuntu. Now, I like the fact that besides Unity, Ubuntu is great, and 11.10 with a new kernel, their software manager that I like and that great community and so on... it's not something to dismiss just like that in my opinion just because of a DE. Whether it's MS with W8 or Canonical and others, they've all lost their freakin minds with their tablet/phone centric vision of the OS. This mindf... has now plagued Ubuntu. A real shame.
So I decided to give Linux Mint 11 a try. It's quite sweet and I love what they've done with gnome 2.x and that launch menu and that panel right after you install with a link to "install multimedia codecs" plus they install VLC by default, LibreOffice etc. (at last some people who seem to think like me a bit). It's all pretty clean and all, except I wish the app menu would be a bit more snappy on my netbook and I find their software manager pretty slow... so I installed XFce.. ok. Now XFce is the way I want to go now. It's final - I'm not coming back to Gnome/KDE ever - I don't want bells and whistles... I want something fast and clean and cute. So I was hoping Xubuntu was the way to go but after what you describe, I don't understand why they would push Gnome 3 stuff on that distro if it's all about XFce... they've lost their mind. Xubuntu can save Ubuntu and Canonical and retain their user base with ONE SIMPLE INSTALL OPTION : PURE XFCE WITH NO GNOME 2 or 3/KDE COMPONENT WHATSOEVER. Pretty please do it folks. If you don't, I believe there is a place for a new distro now which is Debian based + Ubuntu compatible + pure XFce.
What is the distro that's the closest to that now if Xubuntu is not? Anyone has any advice for me... I'm not power user... I just want something easy to install and use and lightning fast with XFce and the closest thing to Debian/Ubuntu which gives me right away my additional proprietary broadcam wifi driver without any playing around, and with Grub that respects my W7 install. Is it to take mint and remove all the gnome stuff, or is it to take Xubuntu 11.10 and remove all the gnome stuff? Is there something cleaner, built from the ground up with XFce in mind and easy for me? And by the way is there any performance diff between XFce on mint 11 or on Xubuntu 11.10?
About the only distro that will give you XFCE without GNOME out the box is Slackware and it's derivatives like Salix. Source-based distro's (Gentoo et al) (and I think rollling release (Arch et al)) can also be fairly easily configured to exclude unwanted dependencies.
Pure XFce...
I found this http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purexfce
Xubuntu for me now...
Just d/l and installed Xubuntu and made sure none of those things spelled out the the purexfce page were installed and none of them were and I'll stick with that and see...
Also... Bodhi Linux... wow!!
I also decided to reserve 5gb of my drive to install Bodhi next to Win7 and Xubuntu... and wow, how snappy that one is!!! And Enlightenment is an old pal of yonder!!! It's really lightning fast and offers tons of eye candy for pennies...
I take note of the fact that it's based on Ubuntu, just like Mint. It goes to show how Ubuntu is great, despite what people can say about Unity...
I use Ubuntu 10.04 on my netbook. It's the LTS version so it should be good for another 18 months, and the Netbook option is a good interface for the limited screen space.
10.10 wasn't so good. Is it even worth trying 11.10 on that sort of limited platform?
There's more to updates than desktop environments - kernel 3 for instance - but why change if you like what you have and it's stable and all? I installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook... Samsung N120 Atom 1st gen + 1gb ram and I just like it. I don't do much on my computer aside from browsing, watching xvid movies, playing a bit of music and light word processing. I just realized that XFce is what I want... I'm just tired of KDE and Gnome and Unity and their masquarade... I don't care for "mature" DE i.e. old-fashioned like so many ppl here - maybe if I had a box with a graphics card worth the price of my netbook I'd want some more candy but I ask myself why? I want a snappy up to date little linux and now I have it.
In answer to your question, which just happens to be the article's title--
No. But then again, neither is it "nice", nor was 11.04 "nice" or "necessary".
But thanks for asking.
I have to wonder...
Did Microsoft infiltrate Canonical, specifically to obliterate desktop Linux? Or, was it merely a coincidence that, in the middle of Microsoft's current three-fold attack on Linux (IP legal-assaults, Linux-organization infiltration and corruption, and bogus hardware/security competition lock-out)... that Ubuntu (the number one desktop Linux distro) just happened to adopt a wildly unpopular, disaster, of a desktop-UI ("Unity")... which just happens to ape (badly) Microsoft's newly-announced "Windows-8" tablet-interface paradigm.
And also, on a personal note, why did Canonical decide to abandon "Evolution" as the default e-mail client in Ubuntu (switching to "Thunderbird")? My, personal experience is that "Evolution" (aside from not mimicking "Outlook"... which I don't mind at all)... has proven itself to be vastly superior (to "Thunderbird") for all my needs.
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