Impressions on Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity

This is not an official review, more of a first impressions article.

After reading up on all the press coverage regarding Unity and Gnome 3, I looked at Linux Mint XFCE. The environment itself is good and functional, however it didn't have the necessary bling that I crave and left me feeling empty and loveless.

I then decided to return back to Ubuntu, a few weeks after the 11.04 release, all sparkle eyed and full of glee. These are my impressions on the latest incarnation of Ubuntu after a week's solid usage:

1. Unity itself is "okay", and I do appreciate the fact the Canonical is moving away from the boring Gnome 2 desktop.
2. I've grown accustomed to the new way of running apps. Just press the Super button (a.k.a. "Windows" key) and type the first few letters.
3. Firefox 4.0 intermittently grinds to a halt on a 4GB system, and silently returns back to normal after a few seconds. Pretty annoying.
4. I haven't personally used Software Center in ages, as I'm more of a command-line guy. I've come to appreciate the searching functionality within Software Center and using it more extensively to emulate "the common man user experience". I have to admit that it works well, even if it lacks an ETA indicator.
5. Alt-Tab doesn't always bring up the application list but still works invisibly, so many times I have to guess the sequence of applications that's running.
6. The theme and backgrounds are fine and suites the environment well.
7. All the tools I need, e.g. Maven, Netbeans, OpenJDK, PHP, Apache, etc, are updated to very recent versions and runs without glitches.
   

In short, the new Ubuntu is kind of like a colourful purple version of a Mac, but without the fanboi status and slightly buggy.

Am I sticking to Ubuntu? Definitely not. For now, at least.

I'm now going to do some more distro-hopping and decide. Unity feels fine, Ubuntu runs solidly, and yet it leaves me with a slight fluffy aftertaste on my teeth after drinking too much Cola.