[GRLUG] Ubuntu Oneiric

[Mike Williams]

OK, I'm really trying to be open-minded about it, but I'm not sure quite 
how much more I will let Oneiric Ocelot tempt me to fling my laptop 
across the room before I give up on it and go back to 10.10 or 
something! Even on this second attempt (my desktop ran Natty until 
recently), I am not getting along with Unity. I don't like the orange 
and gray color scheme, but it's the least annoying of the only four 
choices. I haven't found any way to install more themes, manually adjust 
the colors, adjust things like window border thickness, or add any 
shading. I can sort of understand the theory that it's the active pane 
of the interface that you should be most concerned about and the 
"chrome" should not distract from it, but this theory is taken way too 
far! I can hardly tell where one window ends and another begins when 
they're all the exact same shade boring gray.

Unity is responsive enough most of the time, but occasionally it 
completely locks up for upwards of 20 seconds, which is just not 
acceptable. I still don't like the window manipulation gadgets being in 
the upper left, but I can accept that the Mac way is as sensible as the 
Windows way once I get used to it. However, I doubt that I'm ever going 
to agree with the designers that the menus should show up on the top of 
the screen regardless of where the active window is, and it's especially 
bad when they don't show up at all if the interface is in a bad mood. 
Said bad moods happen way too often. Having media player gadgets drop 
down from the speaker icon in the top bar is a decent idea, but when you 
click on them, they should be able to actually launch the program if 
it's not already up. Unless the player is an already open window, 
clicking the entry does absolutely nothing. Launching amarok often 
produces one of the 20-second lockups I mentioned, although I might be 
able to blame that on KDE versus Gnome issues or amarok itself.

And for my final gripe of the evening, it should not have taken me as 
long as it did (somewhere around two hours, I think) to figure out how 
to get ANY of the various media players to stream DLNA or DAAP from my 
media server / NAS box. None of them had it available at first, and 
there was no rhyme or reason to give me a hint where to go to activate 
the necessary plug-ins. It could be in the program's configuration menu, 
a tick-box in software center, or a completely random-sounding separate 
program to install, which may or may not even appear in the search if 
you don't tell it to display "hidden technical items".

And one more thing (the above was going to be the final gripe until this 
message reached the bottom of the thunderbird window): when Unity is 
designed for laptops and netbooks, and thunderbird is the default mail 
client, under no circumstances should a window open up with part of it 
hanging below the physical screen. I about went nuts trying to add mail 
accounts to t-bird when I couldn't find the Add Account button because 
it was down below my keyboard. See, if there was a little bit of variety 
to the window borders I would have been able to more easily tell that 
that was what had happened! And I don't have all that small screen. If 
bad things like that happen on a 1280x800, what about 600-line netbooks???

Here ends the rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled 
conversation.


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