Ubuntu 11.04, Slackware 13.37 266
Approximately one billion Slashdot readers wrote in to tell us today that one of two distributions had releases:
the new Ubuntu sports the Unity interface, marking a 'radical departure' from its UI of old. Now the more ancient and bearded amongst you might be interested in Patrick announcing the latest Slackware release which clearly has the most 1337 version number to date.
A radical departure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of what it does is Compiz, it has a menu bar and a dock. You still log in through gdm and it still pops up on the wrong monitor when I have 'em both active.
On the other hand, it is awfully more mac-like, what with Unity stealing menu bars left and right, but not always.
Still the same theme from Maverick with the gadgets on the wrong side but now it makes sense because it makes sense for the gadgets to be on that side when they get snarfed into the top bar.
I'm just glad that they managed to get the dock pop-up/click behavior ironed out before the release, I noticed they finally fixed this in the last day or two. And the Applications place seems to actually have stuff in it every time I click it now. For a few days there I had to type to see anything the first time I used it.
All in all if you're not married to a particular interface it's not an unpleasant change, and it does look nice. Amusingly, to me it is reminiscent of the Zune Desktop Theme [cnet.com] for Windows XP. That's nice for me because I'm a dual-boot user again, and that's my XP theme of choice :)
Xubuntu for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I was online at midnight CDT (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, Unity is just another move toward cloning the Mac interface:
1. Global menu? Mac has had that forever
2. Monochrome notifications on the top right? Check
3. Dock? Check (except its on the *side*!)
The only differences I see so far are annoying ones:
1. The global menu is not always active, so it is non obvious how to access it ... not sure I want to attempt it on my main system
2. On mouseover the global menu obscures the window title
3. The maximize behavior with the close/minimize/restore buttons in the panel is just ugly and unweidly
4. The dock hides and appears in a nonsensical, semi-random fashion. It should be always on or auto-hide -- "dodge windows" is just weird
5. It has the dash, which is completely useless once you get the apps you use pinned to the dock
6. It crashed like crazy when testing in VirtualBox
I got an upgrade notice this morning and for the first time in 3 years I declined.
Re:It's Linsux (Score:4, Interesting)
I care, but mostly because the new unity interface is goddamn retarded. I installed the beta a couple weeks back. Gave it a couple hours to try and get used to it, and just couldn't. I could see it working well for a tablet, but for my laptop it's completely useless.
The only good thing is that they give you the option to switch back to gnome, but metacity seems to be completely broken for me, and hardware acceleration no longer works. As far as I'm concerned, Ubuntu 11.04 is a step backwards. Now I'm looking at either switching to XFCE for the interface, or maybe ditching Ubuntu entirely and going with a different flavor.