As always I’ve been waiting with curiosity the new Ubuntu 10.10 release which this year was auspiciously launched on 10.10.10. I had also heard some rumors about the new netbook “Unity” interface so I’ve decided to give it a try.

I own since a few years a Acer Aspire One which despite the very slow SSD drive I still use for bedtime book reading, watching some internet recorded tv shows (mainly envoyee special) and morning news reading. I also take it on holidays for internet access and map preparation before cycling trips.

Since I did not had any patience to wait a few days the romanian mirror was not synchronized yet so downloading the iso took a couple more minutes than expected. The install to the SSD was not fast either but this was to be expected and, believe it or not, I took the time to recuperate on some push-ups.

The first impression of the new interface was: “wow, didn’t I told you that the icons should be there since I was using WindowMaker?”. Of course immediately I wanted to move them on the other side and did not managed to do so.

The second impression was: “yes, the titlebar icons should be there” as this saves vertical space which is getting sparse these days.

Very good, Firefox looks nice, fonts look nice, the interface looks stylish.

The first annoyance came when searching for my “/data” disk which is a 4G SDHC on which I keep all the data I want between installs such as books and comics :) I clicked on the “Files & Folders” and found an interface which had no means of getting up a level to / and strangely neither ALT-TAB or ALT-F2 (to open nautilus by hand) did worked. First by mistake I realized I had to go to Documents and then click the top right corner icon to get the nautilus known screen. At this point I also realized that the icons on the left changed and also noticed the arrows which all reminded me of the OS X Dock.

Having found my documents I read a few pages and went to sleep. Next day when I rebooted I’ve noticed the wireless connection did not connect automatically so I had to go to settings to find the “Connect automatically” switch in preparation for next times. I’ve also installed the “Compact menu 2” firefox plugin in order to save more space with the menu.

I knew flash was already installed but in the evening I found that all needed plugins for media streaming were also already installed so no manual install of “*-bad, *-ugly” gstreamer plugins set was needed. Quite a nice surprise.

I’ve also decided to give a try to empathy even if I stuck with pidgin for the last ubuntu versions. It looks like they polished twice since last time I tried it so I decided to keep it for now however I have to admit I’ve searched for a few moments for the menu in order to hide the offline buddies. This also reminded me of a Mac. Why haven’t I noticed it before? Because of course, the firefox menu is not standard and could not be moved so easily. I will not complain about the top menu because it’s indeed a space saver but it’s just that sometimes 2-3 more pixels between the titlebar icons and the menu would not have hurt.

The menu is also supported by QT applications since this feature also works with skype which I installed. Have to admit skype looks a bit strange with only title and menu up and buttons on the skype window. Also dark theme integration is no perfect since again I get the all black menu when right-clicking on the skype indicator icon.

In conclusion, after spending a few hours with the new ubuntu as a regular netbook user (I only have opened the terminal once) I think the new theme is quite nice and polished and there is a distinct Apple influence. Sometimes the new Folder and Applications interface seems a bit of a bad copy but this might be because I am not much used to Macs either. The screen height optimizations are really great and quite useful for small screen netbooks. It’s worth to give it a try and as a geek I liked a lot to find a new version which adds much more than a theme change.

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