Welp, now that Ubuntu 11.10's out, it's time to reflect on 11.04.
11.04 was bullshit.
I've got my share of gripes about Unity, but I think the biggest problem with the switch is that it seems to have distracted the devs from maintaining everything else. Even in sister release Kubuntu. I don't even USE Unity, I've opted to stick with KDE, and my experience with 11.04 has been probably the worst I've had since I had to run a Windows wireless driver through a wrapper sometime back in 2007.
Every update was an opportunity for something to break. On more than one occasion, all my icons disappeared. And by "all my icons" I don't mean "all the icons on my desktop" or "all the icons in my panel", I mean ALL MY ICONS. It's a good thing I'm used to navigating Firefox with my keyboard, because there were no Back or Forward buttons and no New Tab or Close Tab buttons.
Later, when I was installing something from command-line apt-get, it finished an already-in-progress update and my icons came back. (So the second time it happened, I knew to try that!)
So, the GUI updater fucked up somewhere; it got as far as uninstalling old packages but didn't finish actually installing the upgrades.
At this point I'm about ready to throw that fucking GUI updater out, because not only does it not always work, about once a week it'll peg my CPU.
Not in any obvious way, of course. It shoots dbus-daemon up to 100%. For you Windows users out there, that's like if svchost is at 100%: you know some service somewhere is fucked up, but you can't figure out offhand which one it is, and probably don't remember what you need to run to find out.
I still don't remember the name of the specific process I need to kill to fix the problem; I just leave a Firefox tab open to a page that tells me.
And of course it's one of those things that doesn't immediately manifest itself in an obvious way. The system doesn't visibly bog down, KDE just starts flaking out. Like, I start a filecopy and the dialog never comes up. So I figure maybe I misclicked, and try it again. Still nothing. So then I try restarting the file manager, and it takes a minute of the launcher refusing to actually launch anything for me to realize that dammit, it's happened again.
Or, similarly, I try to watch a video and it doesn't come up; try a couple times before realizing that yes the damn update notifier is the culprit.
I've also had multiple kernel updates where my graphics driver doesn't get properly reinstalled to load with the new kernel. Which is another one of those easy fixes except I can never remember off the top of my head what the hell the nVidia graphics driver package is called and for some damn reason can never find it trivially with a Google search.
All in all, this is pretty trivial stuff. But it's exactly the kind of trivial stuff that I switched to Ubuntu to AVOID. This fucking distro used to be solid and friendly, and 11.04 is just a goddamn mess.
Now, I'm an optimist at heart, and think most of this boils down to 11.04 being a major change in direction for Ubuntu, and things being rough as a result of that. 11.10, then, should be the bugfix release that tamps down all the bullshit that's come up. For that reason, I am looking forward to upgrading to it in the hopes that it will fix the various infuriating things 11.04 introduced.
But I sure am happy I have a laptop to test it out on before I try it on my desktop.
(Oh, one more great thing about KDE's update notifier? It's popped up TWICE in the time it took me to write this post, to tell me a dist upgrade is available. Unlike the now-standard Windows update nag screens, there is no "Don't remind me for another [n] minutes" option; it just fucking pops up every five minutes. I am sure there is a way to disable it, but again, if I wanted to have to Google for solutions to things that should be goddamn obvious, I'd still be using Gentoo or Slackware.)
