Today Canonical released version 11.04 of its Ubuntu operating system codename Natty. Previously Ubuntu has shipped with Gnome desktop environment but design desisions were made by Canonical to ship Ubuntu with Unity desktop environment from version 11.04 onwards.
For myself I decided to give version 11.04 a go when it hit beta 2 and I regret to say I’m not a fan and I want my Gnome back.
For one the “Spotlight” like feature why does it have to take up all your screen, couldn’t it be a little intrusive?
And the Unity menu, there seems to be no means of configuring it other than having it popup when you either mouse over anywhere of your left edge of your screen or the left top corner. What about placement on your screen or size of the icons for starters?
Bottom line, Unity did not offer me any features that Gnome 2.3 didn’t have, it only took them away!
So what I did I gave it a shot installing Gnome 3 shell to replace Unity on my Lenovo thinkpad T400 but regretfully it only launched without any 3D features of Gnome and I started seeing some strange errors, possibly because I tried these before the official release so I will give it another go in a short while before I consider changing to another distro.