Yesterday I took the long overdue step of wiping my laptop completely and reinstalling everything from scratch.
First Stop: Windows 7
This time as well as reinstalling Ubuntu I thought I would redo Windows as well. I only duel boot Windows for games really. For some reason I’d be having major problems with the stability of Steam. Just to launch Left 4 Dead 2 caused a few crashes.
Thankfully Installing Windows 7 only takes about an hour. Install the operating system, install Chrome and Steam then just copy my game backups back from my external hard drive. Job done.
Natty: Installation
One tip if you’re going to install Natty. Don’t bother pressing the download updates in the background button. When it finished installing all the rest of the operating system it still had over half and hour left on those downloads. Thankfully there was a skip button. It’s worth just waiting until you’ve set everything up.
Apart from that the installation was smooth. I messed around with the partitions to get them exactly the size I wanted. Even that fairly advanced action was fairly simple. If you didn’t do that it would be easy enough for anyone to do it.
First Impressions
Upon first boot I was impressed by the new layout of things.
I was a bit fan of the appindicator icons in the top panel in 10.10 and I’m glad to see that they are the only thing that’s allowed now. It ends up with a much cleaner look and what happens when you click on them is much more consistent than the normal notification area.
The launcher is something that I haven’t had time to get used to. At the minute I could take it or leave it, but we’ll see what happens when I start doing actual work with it.
The dash is something I’ve found useful so far. Just pressing the super key and typing what you want to open is very useful.
One massive annoyance
The software centre.
The first thing I did on Ubuntu was to try and install Chrome. As soon as I tried to open the .deb file it opened in the software centre. When I pressed install it locked up and had to be force closed.
Honestly, the software centre is a great idea, however it needs a lot of work. When when it doesn’t crash it’s slow and buggy.
Overall
Overall I’m fairly impressed with Natty so far. I think it’s a massive change in user interface and will take some getting used to, but my impressions are fairly good so far.