Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Makes a First Appearance

srimadman writes "The Alpha 1 Release of Ubuntu 11.04, often known as 'Natty Narwhal,' is intended as a developer snapshot of the next major Ubuntu version, which is due in April." So, if you want to try Unity and Wayland before your neighbors do, this is the time.

I'm sorry

[knightsbore]

But at least in the current setup unity is garbage. They say it was initially designed for netbooks,yet the ui is really laggy on a low end processor and the menu bar takes up around 10% of the left side, on a machine with an already small real estate. Gnome however runs smoothly and takes up almost no real estate. They also chose for some reason to make the settings and properties menus completely disappear. This is linux, not iOS! Oh and this is typed from an eee pc with ubuntu 10.10 on it, with unity, but currently using gnome.

Re:Ah man...

[rawler]

Seriously, who comes up with those naming schemes?

The guy who pays for it.

Re:Link to Ubuntu's actual Alpha 1 page..

[mspohr]

Get over it. It's a multi-cultural, multi-language world and not everyone is a white male American native speaker. The grammar is not perfect but I can understand it perfectly. (BTW, you do sound like a chauvinist.)

Eh no, this is Ubuntu. Not linux

[SmallFurryCreature]

Linux does not exist as an OS, what you are talking about here is a distro which uses Linux for its kernel that is making some choices.

Are they the right choices? That is irrelevant. It is their choice. There are already plenty of Linux distro's including ones based on Ubuntu, that any choice you don't like, you can easily switch.

Any choice is bad in somebodies eyes. I can make X work, so to replace it is to me unneeded because it only means I have to learn something new. But others can't make X do what they want, what ever that is. Are they wrong? No, it is a different choice.

The software culture that is "Linux" thrives on anyone being able to take the existing code and packages and making his own product of it. This is its strength but it also means it will never have the finesse of an OSX or even a Windows. You can't have an open system AND thight control.

Yes, I don't like the new Unity interface either. Or the plasma desktop of KDE. Both seem simply not to get that a desktop should be both flexible AND out of the way. Especially on the small screen of a netbook, the desktop as such should be to the edges. Unity tries this but KDE completly fails at this. That is party because there are TWO netbooks. The social one and the working machine. KDE Plasma Desktop goes the meego route and tries to make the desktop the application.

Unity tries to give you max space for running regular apps and it does it remarkably well. BUT it takes the gnome style to extreme and removes ANY control over it from the user. You can't even add any applets. But people have used these to make their desktop give them information they feel is necessary. Unity is therefor NOT regonized for its excellent use of the small screen but for stopping you from using long established applets.

The left dock is just horrible, but again its horridness comes less from the things it does right but from its complete failure to follow basic known dock designs that work. There are a dozen docks for linux. Why re-invent the wheel? Why the horrid icons, color choices and lack of clear division?

Frankly, Ubuntu has a goal and its goal is going further and further away from hard core linux users. It remains to be seen if this is good enough to instead attract the newbies. But newbies can't be handed what is essentially beta code in constant development. You need a finished product. Ubuntu might simply not have the resources to target the market its want.

But this is no problem. Other distro's exist. Just as Ubuntu arose on the ashes of Red Hat Desktop, another will arise to take over from Ubuntu. PCLinuxOS, Mint and others. Even perhaps some of the oldies, Mandrive or Suse or Fedora.