Last night, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to 11.4. Long story short, that was a mistake. An hour of back-tracking later, I had re-installed 10.4. I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.
11.4 is buggy, to put it mildly. There’s some conflict with the drivers for my Nvidia card, and the system locked hard several times. I once enjoyed hand-configuring Slackware installations by hand, but my zeal for that faded years ago.
The Unity interface is laggy, cluttered, and counter-intuitive. While I can understand why some might find the Gnome interface to be bland and utilitarian, the OSX-looking dock on the left side just eats valuable screen real estate. Frankly, I can’t tell what its exact purpose is. In some ways, it acts like WindowMaker’s dock, but it also serves as a redundant menu.
Speaking of menus, the original Gnome panel is also there, but most of its functionality has been removed. Continued...