(X)Ubuntu 11.10

Yesterday, I installed 11.10 oneirc on my HP 5103. The HP5103 is a netbook, which is not very fast, so I was wondering how good the new Ubuntu would work. First I tried Unity. The good part ist that they included now many of the nice features that I was missing before, e.g., multiload, which is an applet to show the cpu and network load. The reason I decided not to use Unity is because the windows key is too unreliable. Since staring application with the windows key is a central part of the Unity concept, its needs to work 100% reliabel. Pressing [win]-[e][enter], must always open Firefox regardless of the CPU load or windows focus.

Then, I installed gnome-shell. The first thing I tried was if the windows key is working as expected regardless of the CPU load or windows focus. It did work as expected, good news. However, the system monitor seems to be work in progres and I could not place it on top, it stayed on the bottom. The interesting part is that those extensions are written is javascript and are using css. This makes the extensions easy to write (no gcc, no libriaries), but it needs a good development environment, something like Firebug. Another point I am concerned is speed: while the javascript extension is flexible, I am not sure if the UI remains fast and snappy. I recently read that the Firefox developers decided to replace their XUL layout engine with a native one for greater responsiveness and less memory consumption. It seems that gnome-shell is heading in the other direction.

The feature that made me finally switch back to Xubuntu is dual monitor, which was not working with Ubuntu (gnome-shell and Unity). The screen would go black, then show colored stripes. I am having a GMA 3150, which does not have the best Linux support, but at least in Xubuntu, I can attach a second monitor. Another thing I noticed is that it just feels much faster than gnome-shell and Unity.