Against their recommendation, today I updated my Ubuntu 10.04 virtual machine to 12.04. As expected, some things broke but not too bad.
First, it messed up the grub bootloader, meaning it didn't work at all. So I had to download the Boot Repair CD, and it quickly fixed the issue.
Second, for some reason the Unity Dash / search thingy showed no search results nor any icons I could browse. Somehow, the packages unity-place-applications and unity-place-files were not installed by the update process. Why those packages are not required by Unity is beyond me.
Finally, and this isn't really Ubuntu's fault, it seems like the built-in mouse and video drivers for VMware were clashing badly with the different-versioned drivers on my Windows 7 VM running at the same time. That means I can't run both VMs at the same time until VMware or whichever's drivers are fixed.
So, my first impression? While I was lost for 10 seconds finding a way on make windows not full screen again, Unity is pretty nice. I miss a bit being able to fully browse all the software installed in a menu-like fashion, but otherwise it's a nice shortcut to be able to search and lauch applications à la Windows or Mac. I was also surprised to see how much backwards-compatible it was with what I previously installed, including Opera from a 3-party repository. I still prefer Debian, but I still liked a lot Ubuntu and how they're trying to push the edge in the Linux desktop experience.
Published on May 9, 2012 at 20:27 EDT
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