Unity vs. GNOME Shell

As opinions on both Unity and Gnome Shell are contraversal, I'd like to state mine.
I already blogged about Gnome Shell, however it has changed a lot since then.
In short, I used Unity for about an hour using live CD and my impressions were mostly negative - I found Gnome 2 being better for me. In case of Gnome Shell, I used it for some time in the past and am using the final release for some time now. I also tried final version of Gnome Shell via live CD before upgrading to Fedora 15 and impressions were mostly positive.

Unity impressions:

• Positive things
  
  
  
  • Looks like more of screen space is used for usefull part of window compared to Gnome Shell
  
  
  
  


• Drawbacks
  
  
  
  • Too much stuff in dash
  
  
  • Not completely clear, what the button in top left corner is supposed to do
  
  
  • Application launcher is not comfortable: it appears to be based on search function, browsing categories via drop down is usability drawback
  
  
  • Places: same issues as with application launcher
  
  
  • Workspace switcher based on window movement, I like GNOME Shell version better - I use this for moving window to other workspace, not for changing it's coordinates
  
  
  • Not sure I like the single menu at the top panel
  
  
  • Alt+Tab is not very usefull with all windows from all workspaces being there
  
  
  
  

Gnome shell impressions:

• Positive things
  
  
  
  • Overview mode is great
  
  
  • Alt+Tab is awsome
  
  
  • Workspace management is great
  
  
  • Notifications at the bottom of screen are very comfortable
  
  
  
  


• Drawbacks
  
  
  
  • All application view is bloated and takes long to load
  
  
  • Pressing Alt to shut down is both unintuitive and unuseful
  
  
  
  

To summarise, I like Gnome Shell and certainly believe it's better than Gnome 2. Although I have used Unity for only about one hour, but that was enough for me.

Ubuntu 10.10 first impressions and expectations

I've been using Ubuntu 10.10 for few weeks already, so it's time to tell my first impressions about it.
The is not much new as primary focus of GNOME developers is GNOME 3.0. The notable differences between this and previous releases are:

• Changed default font. A bit unusual at the beginning, but I quickly got used to it, so I don't feel much difference.


• Keyboard indicator. This one is what I'm not pleased at all. First of all the icon does not look like a keyboard to me. Also, now I can not see which is my current layout. Also, I don't think that using menu is good. Since there are only two layouts on my system, the older versions was better, as a single click switched layout, while now two clicks must be done. Hopefully I use Alt+Shift to switch layout. Having in mind that this is Ubuntu custom modification, it's disappointing, because doing nothing would be better.


• Some games no longer work. Swell Foop, Lights Off and Nibbles doesn't work anymore. Seems like a problem with GIR, but I don't know if this is Ubuntu specific, or more general bug.


• Metacity issues with menus. Few times it happened to me, that menu widget does not close properly and remains visible on screen (but is not repainted properly). A work around for the problem is to press Alt+F2, open gconf-editor and disable and enable again compositing for metacity.

To summarize: this release is not as good as 10.04 was. Problems are minor so the release is rather good.


Look forward

There are a lot of dispute about Ubuntu's decision to switch to Unity as default desktop for next release. That doesn't please me, as I like GNOME. I tries GNOME Shell in the past and I quite liked it. I haven't tried the most recent version yet, but I'm thinking of sticking with GNOME. For this reason this might be my last version of Ubuntu. I'm really thinking about switching to other distribution as I dislike current Ubuntu's direction.

Ubuntu 10.04 final feelings

I have upgraded my system to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. So it's the end for Lucid on my machine. Quite a time to express my thought on it.

Stability

Probably the most stable release of all I used. I can note only a couple of problems I had. First, I had few cases when system didn't boot when machine is turned on, hopefully it did after first hard reboot in all cases. I think this is related to Plymouth, though I'm not sure. Second is the X server, which somehow moved to other virtual terminal somehow. I needed to press Ctrl+Alt+F8 to get it (I remember one case, when I needed even F9). In all cases this happenned when system was at GDM login screen waiting for someone to log in. Everything else worked really well.

The rest

Mostly it worked well. There were few cases, when Totem YouTube plugin didn't work, but I think this was due to changes in YouTube itself, as in all cases this problem went away after system updates. Another disappointing thing was that Epiphany plugin HTML5Tube didn't work at all. I don't remember any other issues, so I proudly say that this is the best Ubuntu release I've used.

Look forward

I'm now using Ubuntu 10.10 for 2 days, maybe let's wait about 2 weeks for first feelings about it :)