Ubuntu 11.10 Review: It's a lot better than 11.04

Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 was something i really hated.  it was half baked and bad.  I tried to live with it for a while but it was just not working well.  Plus I hated the change because it seemed to remove functionality and confused the interface.

Fast Foreward to today,  I installed 11.10 on a spare junk laptop.   It's a P4 with2 gig ram and the slowest hard drive on the planet.  so far many of my gripes with Unity have been resolved.   back are the application sections instead of "one big mess"(tm) of app icons, and many of the administration tools have been ported over than they forgot about. #1 was the touchpad tools for disabling tapping and clicking.   They finally added it back making Ubuntu useable again on a laptop.

There is still no way to add useful widgets to the menubar, and the "themes" for the Unity interface are still limited to 2 useable ones and 2 broken ones.  So customization is still very limited for the power user.

My big gripe change that Unity has compared to 10.10 is that the wireless hardware firmware detect and load is not working still.  the intel Wifi board is not working because 11.10 wont detect it from the click and drool tools.   I can fix it in the command line, but that makes it an epic fail for the target audience that Ubuntu is aiming for.

Basically they are Fixing Ubuntu.   It's still early Beta as far as I am concerned.  Maybe 12.04 will actually be a RC1 quality where I can start recommending it again to non techie users.

One thing that does drive me nuts is the really dumb 2 pixel wide pop up slider bars.   I hate them with a passion.   I want real sliders back.  But you cant get them back.  

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