Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and the Unity Desktop

It looks like actually installing Ubuntu Natty gives you at least the option of a somewhat traditional GNOME environment. All I did was watch the live session go south on me ...

I didn't read through the article, but the article is titled with the word "Unity", but none of the screenshots shown Unity interface. Unity only work if you have compatible 3d graphic card, it doesn't work if install in Virtualbox. Of course you can go into "System -> Administrator -> Login Screen" and choose which desktop to start up. After you start up in GNOME you can purge Unity.

I install Unity to try it out a bit, its actually more horrible than KDE4, which is hard to do.

That's the problem with never having been able to get it to work, and only finding out afterwords that none of what was served up was what I thought it was.

Sorry to hear it sucks so bad.

Tmx, I've been using Linux since 1995, I know very well how to start an alternate desktop.

Didn't I make it clear enough that no matter what I did it Would Not LAUNCH?

There's not a suggestion you can make that I didn't try, except killing the X session, reconfiguring Xsession and then doing "startx" from the console.

Your statement that Unity won't run except on native hardware makes much more sense, since everything failed to run it.

Bummer. That's a seriously suck problem, and means it will be a very cold day in North Carolina before I will be running it.

I've run it om my netbook. Interstingly enough I think it will probably be a pretty good desktop for a tablet, with a mouse driven desktop I think it's a bit clunky, and on a full size desktop I think it's plain ridiculous.

So who is going to send me a tablet in order to do a decent review?

That's about what it would take. Oh well, in a revision or three I'll try again, and hopefully not make so many people unhappy.

Straight up I'll say that if the blasted core DESKTOP (unity) requires serious graphics hardware to run, it's not what I consider a usable desktop.

Oh, and yes, Natty GNOME works just fine. Seems quite nice, actually, simple, direct and clean.

I was able to get Unity to run, but it wasn't terribly functional (and at this stage is functionally terrible). If they can pull this together by the release, it'll be an astounding feat. They should do Unity as a spin - a "technology preview," and ship GNOME 3 as their main release. But Ubuntu already made considerable noise about Unity, so I guess they're going to ship it in 11.04 regardless.

I didn't want to run 10.04 because I felt they shoved too much non-upstream alpha software in there. I ran it as my main desktop for a couple of months at one point, and I still have another machine running it, but I don't use any of the Me Menu/Ubuntu One features. It looked like things calmed down for 10.10 (not running it anywhere), and now for 11.04 they're going out on a technological limb.

As some have said, there will always (or for now anyway) be Xubuntu, which will bypass all of this. There are also hundreds of other distributions.

I'm amazed that the 11.04 graphics worked on my main laptop. I'll give it another shot at release time.