Ubuntu 11.04

Warning: Long drawn out geeky randomness ahead.

I started off several months back learning a bit about Linux. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 into my computer. Later I upgraded the system over the internet to 10.10. All was well. The newest version, Ubuntu 11.04 Just came out of beta. I decided not to wait and to upgrade on line right away. I imagine a huge number of Ubuntu fans had the same thought as my upgrade took over 5 hours.

The upgrade did finally finish. The desktop looked very different, as one of their major changes was the introduction of the Unity shell instead of the gnome shell of older versions. I guess it looked alright, the noticeable change being a row of colored icons across the left side of the screen. I found Unity more difficult to maneuver through. Some of this, I'm sure was due to my lack of exposure to it. I figure it's just something that can get use to over time.

I noticed Banshee had replace Rythymbox as the default music player. They both seem good, though I've heard that Banshee has more features. I don't know, I'm still learning.

I did have a few issues, though. The first was I like to change the appearance of my windows. I'm fond of having the little blocks on the top right to close out, and manipulate my working window. 11.04 allowed me to do so, but if the window is maximized, the window reverts to its default of controls of the top left, and the default colors. I really prefer it to the right, as I most often jump on windows systems when on other computers, so the consistency helps me move faster.

Several times during my operation of 11.04, the computer totally froze up. Totally. Manual power down was my only option. Gee, I had ever seen Ubuntu freeze before this.

I also tried to download a program from the Linux Mint repository. I had done so with no issues in earlier Ubuntu. 11.04 show the program, but when I'd click onto it, nothing would happen.

The bad things that happened totally turned me off to Ubuntu 11.04. I don't want a computer seizing up on me. I called a knowledgeable friend and he said that it often takes a long time before the bugs are worked out of new versions with major revisions. I guess next time I will wait at least a short while. For all I know, they may already have the bugs that I encountered worked out.

On top of that, my computers CD drive is dying a slow death. It often works intermittently. Luckily it always seems to like my Ubuntu 10.04 CD. I'll stay on that rather than 10.10, as 10.4 is the LTS version. I guess I will stick to that for now, though I am still playing around with other distributions. My friend suggested I look at Crunch Bang. I'm rather wondering what future editions of Linux Mint will look like, since it's based on Ubuntu.