I upgraded my Ubuntu from 11.4 to 11.10 Oneric Oncelot … and back. I’ll try to keep it short.
- Performance inside VirtualBox became unbearable. That’s my development environment and it has been performing extremely well with 11.4. After the upgrade I could count till 10 between a click and something happening. I tried disabling all kinds of Unity stuff and switching to Gnome “classic”. I played with system settings to no avail.
- Aside of being dog slow, “Unity” is unusable in my scenario. I use Linux in Seamless mode on top of Windows where I make no distinction between Windows and Linux anymore. But the Unity bar docks only on the left, which happens to be on my second display overlaying a bunch of Windows icons. So it’s basically in the middle of my view obstructing some of my existing desktop links. By default it enables auto-hide and imagine how hard it is to open the bar when your mouse goes past the right-hand display onto the left display and needs to stick it in the middle. Pressing Alt-F2 or the Windows key requires me to focus on something in the Linux world, which is impossible if I don’t have anything open yet.
- You’d think that desktop settings is something that’s easy to find. For example, you would expect it to be easy to change the bar’s auto-hide. I can see someone’s kid helping his mother do that on the phone: “so, type sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager …“.
Face palm.