Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot – 11.10 review
Ububtu Oneiric Ocelot - 11.10
As you all may know, the new version of Ubuntu was released on October 13, 2011, which is just over a week ago as of the time of writing this post. I wanted to upgrade right away, but decided to wait a bit for the user response as upgrades don’t always go smooth. Well, this one worked like a charm for me.
It took a little over an hour to perform the full upgrade. I made a backup just in case, which I also recommend doing. So far just a few programs need to be reinstalled. A ton of packages got deleted, but it’s mostly because they have a newer and improved versions.
As for the changes, the first thing I noticed was the desktop. It does look a lot better due to improved unity shell. I remember how much I hated it with the last upgrade when it just got added to Ubuntu and I am still not a big fan of it. It is, however, a lot more convenient and clean. I went from “definitely removing” to “may be I’ll poke around and keep it for a while”. I also don’t like the dock sitting on the right side, but I still have to look if I can relocate and change the size of it. The dash interface became a lot more usable too.
There are a few other small, but noticeable improvements, such as a new gnome login screen, login manager now uses LightDM. Overall performance got slightly improved. Default mail client is now mozilla Thunderbird. Ubuntu now has a better support of 32 bit apps on 64 bit systems. It has a new backup client, which I still have to look into as it looks like they give you 5gb of online storage for free. Improved software center looks a lot better. These are just a few changes that I was pleased with.
There are other changes, but I think these are the biggest ones, at least for me. I like where it is going and will be waiting patiently for the next release. I want to see more improvements to unity as it looks like they put more focus on it now and it is here to stick.
