Tom's Hardware Dissects Ubuntu 11.4's Interface and Performance

An anonymous reader links to an exhaustive look at the latest Ubuntu, running at Tom's Hardware. "The new Unity interface is broken down into its individual elements and explained ad nauseam. Overall the article is objectively balanced, the author does a good job of pointing out specific design flaws and shortcomings instead of complaining about how Unity doesn't work for him specifically. The walkthrough of the uTouch gesture language is exciting (wish I had multi-touch), though a full listing of keyboard and mouse shortcuts come in handy, too. Towards the end of the article there are benchmarks between Lucid, Natty with Unity, and Natty with the Classic interface. The performance of the Unity interface isn't bad at all, but that kernel power issue does rear its ugly head."

Broken By Design.

[w0mprat]

Any developer of an operating system, regardless of proprietary or open licence, would do well to pay attention to what power users do to tweak the OS immediately after installing, and what tools developers create to make it easy to tweak. Consider the nice little app Ubuntu Tweak - it's a worry when a third party add-on gives superior fast access to common things you need to fix, it demonstrates how broken-by-design the original OS is.

Interesting, Linux Mint, Pinguy and other Ubuntu derived have not embraced Unity, and as always their versions of 11.04 fix quite a list of broken things.

Microsoft paid a lot of attention with Windows 7, after Vista. A lot of the defaults, such as services, were similar to what power users would do to tweak some speed out of Vista.

Canoncial are you listening?

Re:This is a review of a review...

[theolein]

Jesus, you Americans are a bunch of insular, retarded fucks on occasion and that goes for the reviewer as well. Using the google search in any browser would have shown you the use of the word Natty [slashdot.org]. It means neat, as in cool or elegant. Mark Shuttleworth is South African, and fortunately, American beer is not available there.

Re:Polish

[cynyr]

1) gnome do, with the key bound to "meta", works in xfce and gnome as well.
2) Set the window list to include all programs, again works just fine in XFCE and gnome.
3) Right, maybe you'd need to be running compiz to do that, but how is that helpful?
4) Shell script + .desktop file and away you go, works everywhere. yes this can be done quickly once you have done it once.

It would be nice if you could come up with a unique feature that is useful...