Lev Lazinskiy

Unity and Netbook a Match Made in Heaven

Ubuntu 11.04 came out last week and in addition to all sorts of wonderful changes such as LibreOffice being the default office suite and Banshee replacing Rhythmbox (FINALLY!!!) the biggest change of all is the incorporation of Unity replacing Gnome as the default desktop manager.

Having used Gnome for many years, when I first heard of the change I was slightly skeptical, a bit disappointed, and nervous of what it would be like to not work in a gnome environment. My biggest fear was that Unity would be a copy of the netbook remix desktop manager, which I was never a huge fan of.

I use a netbook most of the time, it is very convenient and since I typically carry three or four books around with me at any given time you just cannot beat the fact that it weighs so little. Having said that, the usability of the desktop manager is very important to me because I do not have much real estate to give up. I was not a huge fan of NBR because it seemed a little clunky, lots of lag, and was not very well polished. I found the default gnome desktop to be much more usable on a netbook so i stuck with it.

After using 11.04 with Unity on my netbook for the past several days, I must say that they were meant for each other. Now, it is important to mention that Unity is not only a part of the “netbook” edition, but it is the default desktop manager system wide, but it is especially useful for the netbook platform.

The following is a short list of reasons why I think Unity and the Netbook were meant to be together.

• Responsive, beautiful, auto-hiding menus that work well with no lag with even the most basic netbook with atom processor and integrated graphics card.
• Applications take up all of the screen! Which is very important when you do not have much screen space to give up.
• New Apple-like search feature makes finding files and applications a flash!

All in all, Ubuntu never lets me down - so I think Unity will be just another improvement on one of the best Linux distros out there today.

On a side note, another very useful and usable netbook distro that comes to a close second to the new Unity is Meego - it is a great system, still in development, but pretty much designed for the netbook from the ground up.