Unity Desktop on Ubuntu 11.04

Those of you who follow this blog will know that I have been an Ubuntu user and devotee for the past 6 years.

Ubuntu powers my work machine and while there have been periodic bugs it has generally performed marvelously.

Now, in the second bad piece of news today, I have to report that I have upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity Desktop and I really do not like it.

There are a lot of bugs in Unity. It is not intuitive for users and it is clunky.

It is almost that in an effort to catch up with the desktops on Apple machines, Canonical have done a "Vista".

The concept may, in principle, be good, but only launch a system upgrade like this when its ready for the big time.

The fact that one cannot also easily install Gnome3 without breaking Unity and the OS is an unmitigated disaster makes live very difficult.

I hope all this is resolved shortly, or I'm off to Debian 6.0 and will build my own customised linux box.

MS and Apple must be laughing their heads off and I cannot blame them.

If you are using Ubuntu 10.10 ... do not upgrade yet!

Microsoft Close to Buying Skype

I really am concerned at this news.

It took long enough to get Skype to produce an effective Linux Client.

I can just see the "evil empire" keeping the existing Linux client and then as the product develops easing the linux version out because "it is no longer compatible.".

I can also see the "evil empire" also trying to turn itself into the "world's" phone network. Free Computer to Computer Calls will go!

With Google dominating search, Facebook social media and Microsoft voice communications, the world Interweb really is becoming dominated by a small cartel of US controlled IT companies.

We really do need companies like Amazon.com, baidu.com, yahoo japan etc. to start fighting back internationally and offer competitive products.