It has been a few days since the Oneiric Beta 1 was released, and I’ve had a few days to play around with it.

The major change that most will notice is that 11.10 does not ship with GNOME 2, in fact it does not ship with GNOME at all! The only interface available is Canonical Ltd.’s proprietary Unity interface. As I have said  before, I don’t like Unity very much. Regardless, I began testing with an open mind.

There are many things that bugged me about the Unity interface when I first used it in 11.04, so many in fact that I can’t exactly list them all here. The first problem that I had was that all my favorite panel applets were no longer compatible. I used applets like System Load Applet, and Hardware Sensors Applet. Over time the two projects were ported to become ‘indicators’, that is that they can show up in the indicator area on the top panel in Unity. The System Load Indicator project is progressing along well, and it looks great, almost exactly as it was before. The Hardware Sensors Indicator is not exactly ready yet, but it should be ready soon. These software ports help make Unity usable to the extent that GNOME 2 was.

Enough about panels. Time to delve into Unity itself. The first improvement I noticed was that Unity was slightly faster than before, which is a plus. The idea of replacing the applications menu with special ‘lenses’ in the Dash makes Unity seem more unified (no pun intended). Another welcome change is that the old ‘Ubuntu Button’ which was previously in the panel is now in the Launcher itself. The Launcher also now comes with some settings. It still has very low customizability over other systems, but they are a welcome advancement. Some new settings include being able to change the backlighting on the icons, change the icon size, and hide behavior. The setting that is still missing is the ability to move the Launcher to another edge of the screen. When this question was posed to Canonical’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth upon the release of 11.04, he responded that he wanted the Launcher to be close to the Ubuntu Button. While that might have been true, now the Ubuntu Button (now called the ‘Dash Home’) is part of the Launcher, so it can move with the Launcher. I am still wondering why they haven’t done something about this.

The biggest problem of all is multiple monitor support. 11.04 pretty much had none. I have a two monitor setup, one in front (my primary), and one to the left. The Launcher is shown on the primary monitor, on the left side. In 11.04, this put the Launcher right in the middle of the monitor setup. Since the Launcher auto-hid itself, you would have to move the cursor to the screen edge to show it. The problem was that there was no screen edge there. This meant that I had to use the keyboard super key to show the Dash, then cancel it and scramble to hover over the Launcher before it hid itself again. As you can see, this was the main reason that I never used Unity. 11.10 changes the setup a bit. It treats the monitor to the left as the primary, always. This solves the screen edge problem, but it creates another. I have to move the cursor across both screens to get to the Launcher and back, a distance of sometimes 7000 pixels. While this problem is much more tolerable than the old one, it is still an area for improvement.

Unity, just as always, has been designed for 3D acceleration. However Canonical was forced to create a 2D software accelerated version, and I must say that it has major problems. It has bugs galore, and major features don’t work, including things like not being able to rearrange the Launcher. The 3D version isn’t without bugs either. Zeitgeist-daemon crashes often or becomes a runaway process. The music lens doesn’t seem to work at all, the volume indicator has major problems when you click and drag it, and other assorted problems that should be ironed out by release time. I strongly suggest not installing the Beta on any computer that is any bit important because it will let you down. I would wait until at least the Release Candidate.

In terms of bundled software, I was surprised to see Synaptic Package Manager not installed by default. While Ubuntu Software Centre does practically the same things, Synaptic is far more powerful for administration, and I wish that they had not removed it. It can still be installed through Software Centre. Speaking of Software Centre, it has had a major upgrade since 11.04. The first welcome change is the speed improvement. It is still slow as all-get-out, but better than before. The replacement of Evolution with Thunderbird is another interesting one. I have nothing against Thunderbird, however Evolution does the non-mail tasks far better than Thunderbird. If you don’t think that I’ve been positive about anything, 11.10 also ships with a new login screen, which is the best I have seen so far, in any OS.

Overall, 11.10 is shaping up to be a much better OS than 11.04 in the Unity department, and I think that it will be welcomed throughout the community despite its (major) flaws. Two of my testing machines were fresh installs, and they went just fine. I also did an upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 and the machine became unbearably slow, over 4x slower startup. I’m not sure if this is just a bug, or if this might be the time to reinstall.