My Thoughts On Unity: 1 Month On

Well…almost

Since my last post, I have kept up-to-date with the latest development news on 11.04 via both the forums and Planet Ubuntu. I’ve been doing this, not just because I genuinely think Unity is a good idea, and I think that for me at least it will be a big step forward in productivity/usability, but also because I’m interested in seeing what the next version of Ubuntu will be like. I have some sort of irresistible pull to start installing and trying out Ubuntu+1 about 2 (or sometimes, 3) months before the release.  It’s been this way since Intrepid

The install process was fine, and once again – as mentioned previously – it crashed far too frequently upon login. Then I managed to install the nvidia drivers, which helped…a little. After I’d ran update-manager, and installed all the latest updates, things seemed to settle down a little, and the crashes were less often, but still present. This did, however, allow me an opportunity to try things out properly, and for the last 5 days or so, I’ve effectively been running Natty as my main OS (having 2 hard drives is handy…).

I love it, I didn’t think unity would be in a very functional state, reading about it the last few months…but having seen some of the improvements, and finally getting to test it properly on my desktop, I do love it. Admittedly, there’s still quite a few things to be fixed, and compiz likes to randomly crash, but it’s shaping up nicely, and just in time, too!

Unfortunately, however, I tried to boot into Natty yesterday evening, and it just wouldn’t boot. It would get to the splash screen, and just stop. I can’t figure out what caused it to do this (obviously an update of some kind, but which remains a puzzle), nor can I figure out how to resolve this without going for a fresh install.

With that in mind I think I’ll wait until Beta 1, scheduled for March 31st, before trying again. Though knowing me as I do, it’s quite likely I’ll be drawn into it again before then. One thing’s for sure though, and that’s that Natty will definitely be getting installed on my Desktop as soon as I get the chance post-release.