Ubuntu 11.04

I am loving the newest release of Ubuntu – it is fastest, leaner and more user friendly than ever. I also really like the docking bar on the side – all of the ease of access that previously was in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but with an intelligent autohide feature.

benbernier.com - Ubuntu Review

Some of the complaints that I have about this version of Ubuntu Linux are:

  1. Nvidia graphics support has taken a step backwards, drivers are less stable, and you are encouraged to use the native linux driver, which is not as advanced as Nvidia’s
  2. The Start Menu – this new start menu has a great search feature and usually is able to find what you are looking for, but i’m stubborn and old fashioned and i really miss being able to open a fulll listing of my apps (i don’t always know what I’m looking for when I go to my menus)
  3.  Updates introduced issues – on two machines that are running the desktop version of this Ubuntu 11.04 hard crashes were introduced by system updates. One of them updated the grub files on a hard drive that was not the boot drive, and then removed the MBR records from the boot drive, this ultimately lead to the users data becoming corrupted due to a reboot link it introduced. The other user lost X (graphical mode) and was basically unable to dual screen (with Twinview) for a few days.

None of these issues are super-major, but they all were setbacks in the new version of Ubuntu. I guess that in the open source world when a person installs a bleeding edge software product, one must expect it to still be bloody