Ok, I’ve been running Ubuntu 11.10 now for about a week. Now that I have my desktop PC running solo (single user), I decided to flop over to my rarely-used Ubuntu install and upgrade it to check everything out now that Windows isn’t a requirement (had someone using a lot!!1! of Windows-only software and had no inclination to set up a VM and train said person on Ubuntu and VirtualBox).

First impression: Uh, what the…?!

Unity. Meh. Opened a terminal. How do I open a new one? I’ll try clicking on the icon. Nope. It just brings the original to the front. Right click! Yes! ‘New Terminal’ brings up a new window. How about a new terminal in a tab. I thought [ctrl]+t is it. Nope. Where do I go? *Mousing around for a while*…. Where the hell is it? And where are the prior menus for the terminal? Gone missing. Wait a sec… something just flashed as my mouse shot up to the top. Ha! They’re hidden from view. Hrmmm. That’s kind of dumb. Does Apple have a patent on having all of your options show at the top? Well, I’ll just have to fix that.

There has to be a way to configure it. Let’s go to settings. Settings… where the hell are they? Let’s click the Ubuntu icon, maybe… Well this isn’t helpful.  No settings in the default menu. Let’s click around on icons and…. nope. I guess I’ll have to ‘Search’ for my settings. Ok, there we go: “System Settings”. How to fix the stupid menu and show the menubar for the program in focus all the time… No luck. Come on now, there has to be a Unity option for the configuration to get to. Nothing.

We’ll check the Internet. Ok. So I now have to download another application just to make changes. I hope it lets me move this bar from the left-hand side.I’d much rather see it on the bottom, preferrably with smaller icons. Ok. CompizConfig Settings Manager should do… oh. no. it won’t. Well, let’s just make a few small edits and I’ll just force myself to live with it. Save. Close. Now let’s tool around this weird menu full of hidden items that I must be too stupid to view any other way. Filters are kind of cool. But it still feels weird not having some kind of hierarchy of menus. Let’s go back to Compiz. I want to see what other changes I can make…

CompizConfig Settings Manager opens, freezes and then… I lose the launcher bar and the main bar on the top of the screen. I can’t do anything on the desktop. except use what apps are open on the desktop. I can’t close out or… change user! Ctrl-Alt-Del to the rescue. Let’s try logging out and back in. Nope. How about rebooting?… Nope. Let’s log in under the Guest session and – hey, the Unity desktop is working under Guest. Back to doing a web search. Now I need to delete some config file under my regular user. No problem. And everything is back to… not quite normal. Now a little black box shows up under my mouse pointer. I install some updates and reboot. Everything is back to “normal”.

Let’s watch something on Netfl…. Suck. No Netflix player. Roku has one. Ubuntu none. It’s a Netflix issue. Let’s check out Hulu – christ. wrong version of Flash. A couple of hours later and after installing a browser add-on to detect the correct version to install, I’m in business, watching “TV”. No Netflix. Suck. (Not that I’m happy with Netflix… but still something).

Now I’ve got my PS3 within reasonable range. I’m on a automatically-working wi-fi connection (that wasn’t working under 11.04). I can do something like Internet Connection Sharing in Ubuntu. Plug it in and :

Connected. Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.

Can’t keep a connection open on eth0. Must  be a buggy driver or something. Works fine under Windows. Although there is one funny thing, my usb wireless adapter works much better under Linux than it does under Windows! It doesn’t drop connections nearly as often. I wonder if Belkin knows this device they don’t make Linux drivers for works better under Linux than it does Windows.

And that pretty much covers my first week with the addition of some aggravations of getting Netbeans installed, having issues with Enemy Territory sound (and lack of playability)… I swapped over to Windows last night to check in on Netflix, watch a show and play a game or two.