Ubuntu 11.10: Dreamy or Nightmarish?

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric OcelotYes, today was the day of the upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, so let’s talk about that.

Ubuntu 11.10’s friendly alliterated animal name is Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric is defined as dreamy, which brings me to the riddle I just made up:

Q. Why is Ubuntu 11.10 called ‘Oneiric Ocelot’?
A. Because they were asleep when they made it!

Stop laughing. I’m not joking.

The Upgrade
First of all, the upgrade took over 2 hours! Why? Because we all know that Ubuntu is not known for it’s slim girlish figure anymore. A few nicknames came to mind while watching some of the many packages get installed: Bloatbuntu, Ubun Too Goddamn Fat, and Moo-buntu. Yes, this is one fat OS.

The upgrade itself was smooth. After all, you can’t do anything but make dinner or watch T.V. while the packages are installed and downloaded. Why? Because networking is disabled throughout the whole process. Well done.

Ubuntu 11.10 boasts a hideous new login screen
I noticed two things once the upgrade was complete and I logged in for the first time: Oneiric Ocelot is incredibly sluggish when launching apps. 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough on a linux system, but not here. Ubuntu has become the Windows of linux distros. Fat, bloated and with way too many processes eating up your cpu.

2nd thing: NO WIRELESS.

Well done Canonical/Ubuntu. Maybe I’m being harsh, but can you have everything work out of the box for once? Least of all the wireless. I’m pretty sure that in 2011, wireless technology is kinda a requirement. Jesus. I kind of expected to have to re-configure the desktop environment after upgrading, but the network settings? You’re kidding, right?

As I write this, I can connect to my wireless network so the driver seems to be fine, but I can’t ping anything. Yep. I get an ip address from DHCP, but no ping and no internet. Yes, it’s back to wired for now. Slow clap.

3.0 Kernel
Oneiric Ocelot uses kernel 3.0. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux. It was Linus Torvalds‘ idea or something like that. It’s kind of cool to see 3.0 after seeing 2.6 for so long, but it’s not making much of a difference, yet. We’ll get a better idea after some testing.

Desktop environments and Unity
Unity is “cute” but not something I’ll be adopting anytime soon. It’s clean but not necessarily optimal. It’s just sluggish. Gnome 3 is not much better, so I switched to Gnome with no effects. Decent, but not great. It should be faster once I tweak the performance. Again. Like after every upgrade. Probably should have forced it to leave my previous settings.

The Verdict: Oneiric Ocelot is a lazy cow. Arch Linux is starting to look more attractive. Or maybe a clean Debian install.

P.S. After using Ubuntu 11.10 for awhile I’ve come to really hate the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s ok and does the job eventually, but I feel that Synaptic Package Manager was cleaner, faster and more robust overall. It feels like aesthetics were the main reason that they replaced  the old Synaptic Package Manager with the Ubuntu Software Center.

22 thoughts on “Ubuntu 11.10: Dreamy or Nightmarish?

  1. I absolutely HATED this upgrade!! Not only is it bloated (I miss the netbook edition), but once you get it installed it’s so unorganized!! I hate unity, so was still using classic. My wireless didn’t work either. I ended up doing a fresh install and am sticking with 11.04 (which is still HUGE 3.9 gigs to download…wtf when did ubuntu get so fat?!).

  2. Mhm Actually runs great so far for me, my wireless is 3 times faster than what it was on natty narwhal >< even with power management turned off

  3. I seem te be the only one that doesnt have any problems with 11.10, everything just works! fast, and easy. And unity still beats Windows…

  4. For me Ubuntu 11.10 is great, it asked to install proprietary drivers in my son’s dell vostro 1310 and it works very good and, in my hp pavilion dv2000, it just installed and works excelente.

    Thank you Ubuntu!!

  5. Awesome OS, feels like my Mac in many ways.,that been said it’s almsost 2012 and the fact that a user will have so many issues with the wireless connection is amazing ! as a matter of fact I’ve spent over a week trying to get any kind of wireless to no avail……back to the ‘big brother’mind set and uggly Windows !!!!

  6. Bah! I installed 11.10 on my I3 ASUS P7P55LX LGA 1156 (for the i3) with 4GB Ram and a 7200RPM Seagate and a generic white box N wireless PCI from Best buy and a low end Nvidia GT450 video card. This motherboard is a low mid range board so its nothing special. The Wifi is bottom of the barrel $14 card. My install is both fast in loading as well as program execution. streaming video while loading Gimp is crisp and as far as wireless, it ran flawlessly connecting on first boot to my local office wifi. Like others have said before I think it must depend on the chipset on the motherboard/wifi card but as for my experience it is running as good as my older ubuntu install…just with more eye candy!

  7. Yep, this is exactly why I usually stay at least one revision behind the latest.In doing so, it keeps me from running into problems, such as no wireless on the upgrade.

    Thanks for the heads up!

  8. It should be called married-buntu because the slick, slim, & sexy Ubuntu got lazy, content, & fat now that you’re comfortable with it. It started stuffing itself with useless bloat like Gnome3. It also now popped out a child….like interface called unity.All this might cause one to “divorce” it & look for the more attractive & sleek Arch Linux.Though it can be more high maintenance with the lack of an easy intaller. 😉

  9. Honestly if you don’t like Unity installing a different desktop environment takes but the effort of typing a single command.

  10. Yep, we removed Unity, but Gnome 3 is pretty flaky as well. Overall, 11.10 has not been a good experience. We’ll see what happens when 12.04 LTS is released next month.

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