[hetman]

Funny. On my netbook, Ubuntu used to feel like it was finally ready about one major version ago.

Today, 11.10 is so unusably slow it might actually make Windows Vista feel competitive. I thought it might be the outdated video card but then Unity 2D made no actual difference; any simple UI interaction still sucks CPU hard. Just for some icing on the cake, the Wi-Fi driver is now also causing random kernel panics on my hardware.

I heard someone exclaim somewhere OS X Lion was Apple's Vista moment. Well it looks to me like Ubuntu 11.x is Canonical's Vista moment. I'm holding out hope version 12 will be their Windows 7 moment, otherwise the long painful process of adapting to another distro will have to begin.

[amcintyre]

Today, 11.10 is so unusably slow it might actually make Windows Vista feel competitive.

Unfortunately, I'm having the same experience on my desktop. Unity didn't fit the way I prefer to work (and yeah, I tried it for a while, I didn't just dismiss it without some effort), and I switched to KDE. Holy slowness, Batman...my Windows 7 desktop becomes usable much faster (on the same machine) than the Kubuntu desktop. Applications sometimes take forever to start, with no rhyme or reason. I haven't chosen to explicitly install anything new--I just have the same basic boring dev and scientific computing packages I've always had.

And yes, Ubuntu used to feel like it was usable "out of the box" one major version ago. Then they started adding bells and whistles, and since then it's just been a steady degradation in performance.

Sure, I can probably go fiddle with a bunch of settings somewhere, but as soon as I have some downtime I'm going to try out some other distros that--hopefully--don't feel the need to add a bunch of performance-sucking features by default.

[Jach]

My non-technical mom has been using 10.04 (Lucid) since 2010, I really thought it could have been The One Linux to Rule Them All because it did/does everything right. I even use it at work. (I use Gentoo at home. (Where I sometimes do work.)) I recommend Xfce4 to anyone who can't get Gnome 2, since it's Good Enough. I really think that moving away from Gnome 2 was a huge step backwards and I don't think it's recoverable until a new Gnome 2ish UI is built on top of Wayland.

Desktops shouldn't have an App structure, they should have a Windows (or tabs if you prefer, the task bar is just the tab dock) structure. Microsoft realized this way back in the 90s, which makes Windows 8 OS even more amusing. It all feels like just a bunch of circle-jerk after noticing the iPhone was praised by the commoners for its UI.