Ubuntu & Me
I just upgraded my Ubuntu from 12.04 to 14.04 LTS. In this piece, I’d like to talk about my user experience on Ubuntu.
This is personal review of Ubuntu from a average user with 2+ year experience. This is my first Linux distro and the first version I used is Ubuntu ver. 8. At that time,the internet access is so terrible in my country and I gave it up. At 2012, I restarted my Linux journey because of a new job.
Unity
Before 14.04, I replaced Unity with Xfce since I feel like unity seems to be taking too much resources. Now,I am heading back to Unity to see improvement. The result is there is no significant changes with some polishes in here and there.
I use Synapse instead of Hub and I still strongly believe that it should be included as default app launcher.
Laucher bar can minimize to 16px is a good thing since nobody like to waste spaces. Snapping windows is working and that’s awesome.
For backup and resource intensive work,I am working with i3 window manager.
To conclude, Unity is the best looking window manager but the trade offs is computational power.
Web Apps
It seems like a good idea but fails. I don’t like to open a gmail as web-app container which costs you around 100-ish RAM usage.
Notification indicators
Indicators are cool and handy but still taking too much resources. One weather notif indicators take around 30MB RAM.
Nautilus
I have no problem with this wm but some tweaks like sushi should be came along with it. One problem is that for unknown reason,it seems to crash while copying data from/to external devices,especially when copying data size is in GB digits.
Geek it up
As a fallback and concentration mode,I installed i3 wm that is simple tiling windows manger. You just spend some time with the configuration file and it’s good to go for tasks with demanding high computational power. I also use it to avoid the distractions of Unity graphic and UI interaction. It takes some time to get use to it but it’s worht your time.
Sum up
As a summary, Ubuntu is the Linux distro that grows with me. It’s good for newbies,average users and people enjoys beautiful operating system with interaction and animation.The Ubuntu community might be the biggest one among Linux distro and for that reason, the learning curve can be slightly lower than others. For the troubleshooting, Ubuntu forum & askUbuntu from StackExchange do a good job. Just have a decent machine with average computational power and enjoy the taste of open source platform.