Ubuntu 13.10

I have been using Ubuntu 13.10 for a while, so I can finally sum up my thoughts on how well the Dell XPS was performing on this release. In terms of hardware, it is pretty much well supported, everything more or less works out of the box, except the multi touch on the touch pad, at least I can not get any of the gestures to work properly. It also seems to have a bit of a sweet spot in terms of right clicking, which I struggle to hit at times. In terms of the touch screen, it works, but Ubuntu is not made with this in mind, so it is a limited functionality. For example, there is no multi touch zoom, and a touch is only registered as a left click, nothing more.

When it comes to software, I am a bit torn. Most work, and most of the stuff I need is available. I even got my Epson Stylus SX445W to work over network, though I had to use the Android app to determine the host / IP to search for the printer. I also had to install the Epson driver, which you can get from their support website. For work, I managed to setup Citrix Receiver Engine, though as I use a 64bit version, I had to do some Googling and rebuild the package to update the dependencies for the latest release.

As for Unity, I am a bit torn. It works, but also it isn’t as good as it could and should be. I frequently get crashes from it, and the report functionality blames Compiz every time, yet it is Unity that is crashing. What even surprise me that nothing breaks even after Unity has crashed, except for having to deal with the error message.

What I really dislike is that the menus of every app is on the top bar, regardless of the window being maximized or not. While it might save some real estate on the screen, the menus are hidden and more than once I have caught my self being confused about where to find them. While this is only a small annoyance, it is counter intuitive that you will find the menus of 20px window at the top of the screen. This should be for maximized applications only, not every application.

Also, the “start menu” is something I really hate. There is no categorization, just a huge, but hidden list, of all applications installed. On this laptop, at the moment, I have installed close to 90 applications, and they are listed alphabetically. I know the entire idea is that you should search for whatever you want to run, and I have to admit that the search works fairly well, even when you try using keywords like editor, games, settings etc, but some times you just want to see what you have available and using nicely nested categories or similar is the best visual representation for this. Also, the fact that files seem to be more important than applications in the menu isn’t the best UI approach in my opinion. Applications should come first, then files and folders, and if you have more suggestions, the user should actively ask for them. It might be that I am a bit too conservative, but I really like having a nested menu with categories defining the type of applications I find within.

My general opinion of Ubuntu? It is actually really good. It is fast, responsive, and it works. If I could ever solve the issues with Unity crashing all the time, I think it is a distro I could stay with for a while. However, I just bought an external CD drive, in the hopes that I can boot Magiea liveDVD from it, as I hear lots of nice things about it. Maybe it will tempt me to remove Ubuntu, maybe not. Ubuntu’s main advantage at the moment is that I have the Citrix client running on it, and if I can’t run it on Magiea, I think I would have to move back to Ubuntu. What Ubuntu is lacking for the moment is the fact that I cannot start Feed the Beast Minecraft client on it, which is really annoying to me.