Ubuntu Vista 11.04 defies expectations

THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, “Venereal Vista,” based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

Ubuntu Desktop BacksidesUnity is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”

12 thoughts on “Ubuntu Vista 11.04 defies expectations”

      1. I was using Unity before it was Unity.. I had this bizarre combination of docks, global menu hacks.. etc.

        The main thing Ubuntu doesn’t have that I did now is RGBA translucency. I’m sure we’ll get there after LibreOffice gets a complete UI rewrite.

        1. Unity claims to be descended from Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which I actually quite liked around 9.04. It’s not at all clear to me where it all went wrong.

  1. I like it.. on my laptop. The efficient use of screen real estate is great. I’d hate it however on my desktop, for the simple reason it’s impossible to have a constant sense of open windows, or switch to them with 1 click. This might not be a big problem, I suspect more people use ubuntu on laptops than desktops, where productivity with Adobe, Office, etc products means ubuntu cannot be used.

  2. The problem is that, for the Gnome user, choices are evaporating.
    As far as I am concerned, I am being given the choice between the plague Unity and Gnome 3 cholera!
    So for me it is, which way do you want to die?

    NB: I know that I can switch to KDE, XFCE and so on… but there was a reason why I wasn’t using them before: because I liked Gnome 2 better! So to be complete, I now can choose between 2 new interfaces I hate and a whole bunch I didn’t really like! BRILLIANT!

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