Unity is kind of nice, actually; the layout feels more optimized for my laptop's widescreen, I'm getting used to the launcher bar, and I haven't had the performance issues that some people have discussed.
It fixed the odd sound hardware problem I'd been having, where Ubuntu would discover a generic audio card on boot, and then around 60 seconds after startup, discover the "right" audio card.
Meh:
It boots even faster than it used to before. I have the suspicion, though, that it's doing the Windows thing where it brings up a login screen super-fast, but that's because it started all your system daemons in background/fork mode and they're still loading, so it actually takes forever to load your desktop. So it's not really a net gain.
Learning new keyboard shortcuts for Unity, some of which are now fairly obligatory since there's no 'Main menu' anymore.
Things I don't like:
It hasn't fixed my wireless card problem – clearly this is a driver issue and not Ubuntu's fault, but I count on the biannual kernel version bump to also include new drivers, and apparently there hasn't been any progress.
Unity is still in beta, really; in particular, fullscreen apps and LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice) play weirdly with the external monitor port, and a lot of old gnome apps (like xchat) don't play nicely with the way that Unity wants to show the menubar and notification icons.
I miss my gnome-panel applets. I found a pretty awesome replacement, but why can't I have gnome-system-monitor in my panel anymore?
I really love having a music server attached to the house stereo that I can control remotely.
Now, if only I could figure out why the damn thing locks up at random time periods; it's an old Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu Linux 10.04. It did it a lot when I was installing packages (i.e. running apt/dpkg) so I wonder if that has something to do with it. But at this point it shouldn't be running apt unless I do it manually, and it's still locking up sometimes. No other rhyme or reason that I've been able to figure out.
Of course, my brand-new Toshiba laptop running the same operating system also has a habit of totally freezing up occasionally, but it happens much less often. Haven't figured that one out either, although turning off Compiz made it happen MUCH less often.
so i stimulated the economy with my tax refund and bought a new laptop. this presents me with two difficult questions, one of which i need your help with:
My naming scheme is scientists and/or people involved in the computing industry. Previously used names have included maxwell (Maxwell's equations), fourier (the Fourier Transform), newton, gauss (number theory, statistics), patterson (wrote the standard Computer Architecture textbook), heisenberg (quantum mechanics)...
Charles Babbage was the inventor of the first mechanical computer; Herb Simon was a CMU professor who worked in, amongst other fields, cognitive science and artificial intelligence; Alan Turing, well, was Alan Turing; Randy Pausch was the recently-deceased CMU professor who became famous for his Last Lecture.
meh. i seem to have come down with Teh Sick – up puking until 5am last night, aches and pains and lack of temperature regulation today.
so, instead of doing real work that i can't concentrate on, i'm researching ways to spend my tax refund. to wit, i'm looking for a new laptop, and soliciting suggestions.
non-negotiable: max price $750-800. i'm going to run Linux on it, so no Apple hardware. (though if you can find me a piece of Apple hardware in my price range, i might consider it.)
negotiable / nice to have: something that doesn't come with a Windows license, or maybe comes with a license for XP so i can install a virtualized version. larger than 800 pixels in the vertical direction (this seems to be a non-starter).
things i'm currently looking at: the Lenovo SL510 (around $700), the Dell Inspiron 15 (around $750).
i seem to be addicted to making significant changes to my OS/system software right before giving lectures.
last week, i ran a software upgrade 45 minutes before class. it horked the installation of OpenOffice, which is what i use to present slides. fortunately a reboot fixed it.
tonight i ran another software upgrade (figuring, hey, at least i have all night). without thinking about it i okayed the upgrade of the graphics card driver (proprietary ATI driver, not open-source). naturally it horked my video card.
turns out that the latest and greatest ATI driver no longer supports my card.
but, i didn't panic, i just went and read up on the open-source driver that does support my card... and it turns out that it's come a long way in the couple of years since i first got this laptop. it now does accelerated 3D as well as 2D, fully supports GL, and (wonder of wonders) runs Compiz beautifully. it also integrates with Gnome much better – no shock there, but it means that the external monitor port on my laptop is now configurable through Gnome. that means far less mucking around and more "it just works", which is one of those things i figured i'd never get when it came to my display drivers.
and OpenOffice works great :)
the one thing i have noticed is that OpenGL apps tend to cause background corruption when played under Compiz. that's not the end of the world but it's a little disconcerting at first. at least they work at all, which is more than i could say for ATI's proprietary drivers.
all in all this is a huge step forward for my happiness with this system. i don't have to muck around with proprietary drivers any more and it's actually advanced the effectiveness of the hardware. bonus!
)
exhausted