Don’t get me wrong – I’m really looking forwards to what Unity will become (if Canonical plays its cards right). But it is a mixed experience for users at the moment. A friend of mine upgraded his laptop from Maverick to Natty and had some serious problems. Unity had worked at first (although he preferred the old interface) but then it stopped. The launcher and the panel vanished and he needed some help escaping Unity and using the Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) interface. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to simply log in and change to Ubuntu Classic as per HowTo: Disable Ubuntu Unity Interface.
The first thing I suggested was that he follow the instructions at Missing top and side panels in Unity, Natty Troubleshooting. Great! It worked and now he could interact with the system much easier. The sharks were backing off 😉 (See http://xkcd.com/349/).
But how could he get the system to let him log in using his name and password? For that I needed the control panel. The easiest way to get that seemed to be via the terminal with the command:
gnome-control-center
Once there I could select the default log in session:
Success!
While I’m at it I should add a couple of opinions about Unity. Why not? Everyone else is 😉
- Canonical needs to give users the option of Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) for a few releases more than intended. Depending on how Unity works with dual widescreen monitors I may need Gnome 2 for quite a while.
- Users need to have a few configuration options easily available – e.g. how to remove the overlay scroll bars**
- Unity could be awesome and I think it will be a great option within a couple of releases. See a reasonably balanced review here – Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 I am already trying out Oneiric Unity on my notebook so I’m not a hater.
**
At the moment you have to do the following:
sudo su
echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars
from How To Disable The Overlay Scrollbars In Ubuntu 11.04 [Quick Tip]