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Monday 26 December 2011

12.04 Precise Pangolin; moan & groan about Oneiric Ocelot

Precise Pangolin (PP)
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/103797-ubuntu-12-04-precise-pangolin-unveiled


They're keeping Unity, urgh.



Oneiric Ocelot
I started out with Ubuntu 9.10 (about a year), I've been down with 10.04 LTS version for over a year and been using 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot for over three months now - I'd say I could make a well-off comparison.

I'll be straight, I'm not crazy about Unity. I thought I should wait until I get used to it, but to no avail. I was almost thinking of switching to Fedora, believe me.

If I have 3 windows of the same app open (don't ask me why, need may arise to do that) why do I have do make the double amount of clicks to close all of them? Say I have three Firefox windows open and I want to close them.
a. go to Unity, click on app icon to call screen with 3 Firefox windows (grey overlay one)
b. pick  appropriate Firefox window
c. close window

Oh wait, that's 3 times more clicks.

And then, there is the really annoying window controls situation. Always placed at the top of the screen on a singleton kinda nav bar (looks like they were trying some Mac nav style, really?). If I've got a puny messenger window and an Office document window open, it's annoying to have to make deliberate extra clicks just to get the tool bar of the Libre office show up. And then click back on Unity to get messenger back on, go to the far top-left corner to access this time messenger's tool bar. Or even click on some random person in my Pidgin list, just for the sake of bringing back on the Conversation dialog and actually talk with whom I want to.

I won't say anything about the boot time, how slow Ubuntu Software Center loads, OR about the sporadic bug that my Asus EeePC 901 is experimenting. It goes like this:
- open Firefox, Pidging, maybe Rhythmbox (not much of a Banshee fan, so I'm glad they're reinstating RB on Pangolin 12.04)
- do your stuff happily for some amount of time
- then, out of the blue, everything dies and you see the black screen with a list of registers and commands.

The error messages sounds like this: "Panic occurred." Reading between the lines, the errors are due to a semaphorization issue, lack of sync between threads and/or processes. Is there some bug in the kernel? I may be asking too much though so I suppose that this is an issue affecting this brand of notebook in certain circumstances I have yet to reproduce. I'll be careful and make a photo with the death screen next time and post it here.

There is also something tiring about their avantgarde concept of scrollbar. Please. I can't ven get Eclipse to show correctly these types of scrollbars they've pushed onto PP. The users know what I'm talking about. Thank God double-touch pad is working blissfully.

What am i happy about in Oneiric  Ocelot? Not sure. It's like a bittersweet gift. Unity is cool for sliding in and out faithfully (I really expected bugs on this, blocks and so on), providing fast access to windows (if you've got only one window of an app open...) and I have to confess that when I occasionally get on a Windows, I have the tendency to go to the left and have Unity show up. Call it the power of habit. Other than that...all functionalities were working the same on 10.04 LTS. I bet there are a lot of other things that have changed but you know, this is the type of report you'd get from a User Testing/Acceptance Testing session.

I'll just wait a bit more, till April.

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