Canonical Ubuntu 11.04 review

Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, is one of the biggest changes that the OS has seen in good couple of years. For this version, Canonical has completely overhauled the user interface to use what the company calls the Unity UI.

If you’ve played with Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, you’ll have already seen a large part of Unity in action. This time around, Unity is the default UI of a single consumer edition of the OS, with no dedicated Netbook Edition. If you find that you don’t like Unity, it’s possible to switch back to Ubuntu Classic if you miss the old interface.

The biggest change that Unity brings is to ditch the old Taskbar. It’s a good move, as having this and the title bar at the top of the screen cut down desktop space, which was particularly noticeable on low-resolution screens, such as those used by netbooks.

Instead, Ubuntu now has the Launcher, which is a dock appears at the side of the screen. It’s always visible unless you maximise an application, in which case the Launcher disappears out of view until you move the mouse cursor to the left of the screen. It’s possible to configure the Launcher to only reappear if you move the mouse to the top-left of the screen, but that’s the limit of customisation, sadly. We’d have liked to have been able to move the Launcher to the bottom or right-hand side.

The Launcher is a kind of combination short-cut and task bar. By default there’s a set of applications pinned to it, including the Software Centre, Ubuntu One and Libre Office applications. When you click one the application is launched, and a white arrow appears next to it. The number of arrows to the left of an icon denotes how many windows that application has open; click these arrows and all of the open Windows are displayed on screen in a Mac OS X Expose-style, so you can jump to the one that you want.

New applications appear in the Launcher when they’re started. If you want to keep one on view for quick-access, you can simply right-click it and select Keep in Launcher. Once the Launcher starts getting too crowded, icons fold over so that you can fit all of your open apps on to a single screen without having to scroll through a massive list. It works really well and is certainly neater than the old taskbar, which was starting to look a bit dated.

Some program icons also have additional features when you right-click them. Firefox, for example, lets you Open a new Window. The range of options available depends entirely on the application, so it’s worth experimenting.

The other new part of the interface is that applications no longer have their own menu bar. Instead, the Mac OS X method of putting the menu bar in the main shared title bar is used. To save on more desktop space, maximising an application inserts its title bar with the Maximise, Minimise and Close buttons into the shared title bar. We think it works pretty well and you’ll be pleased the OS does this if you’re working on a small, low resolution screen.

Gone is the traditional applications menu, replaced instead with a new search facility. Clicking the Ubuntu icon at the top left of the screen opens a search bar. All you have to do is type in the name of an application or document you want to find and the results are displayed on screen.

There are also dedicated search menus for documents and applications on the Launcher. The Applications menu displays, by default, the most accessed applications, the first six applications alphabetically and six promoted applications for download. Using the search box finds applications installed on your computers, plus applications available for download. You can also browse applications by category, without searching; however, once you’ve got used to the search menu, there’s little reason to do this.

The Files&Folders menu lets you search for files only. You can filter the search by document type (music, video, presentations, documents, etc) to make it easier to find what you’re after. This menu also displays recently accessed files, plus Favourite folders as denoted by the Bookmarks in the Nautilus file browser. Selecting a document from this menu opens it in the related application, while folders are opened in Nautilus. Again, this system works really well and makes it quick to find the program that you’re after.

There’s no way from this menu to connect to a network share or other server, as you could from Ubuntu 10.10 and earlier. Instead, you have to click the Home Folder button to start Nautilus and use its menus to do the same job.

We’re pleased to see that the Workspace Switcher from Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition has made it into Ubuntu 11.04. Clicking this in the Launcher brings up all four available Workspaces, and lets you drag and drop applications between them. It’s a neat way of keeping your PC organised, particularly if you’re only working on a single monitor.

Ubuntu 11.04 also has better windows management, taking its lead from Windows 7. You can now drag a window to the left- or right-hand-side of the screen to have it take up half of the vertical space on a display. Dragging a window to the top of the screen makes it maximise. We really like this system on Windows 7, and here it’s just as good making it really easy to neatly organise your workspace.

Under the bonnet, Canonical has worked hard to improve the performance of the OS. We ran our new Expert Reviews benchmarks on the same Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 PC running both Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 11.04. We saw similar results in the Image- and Video-editing tests, but were stunned by the improvement in multi-tasking. Running Ubuntu 10.10 we got a score of 53, but Ubuntu 11.04 scored 65. This meant that the overall score of 72 for Ubuntu was seven points higher than for Ubuntu 10.10. By comparison, Windows 7 running on the same PC scored just 58, making Ubuntu a lot faster overall.

Other than this, it’s business as normal for Ubuntu. We like the way that broadcast accounts, email notifications and instant messaging pop-ups are all housed in the main title bar. It makes it easy to keep an eye on what’s going on without having to have big applications open all of the time.

Other applications can integrate into this space, too. So, the Banshee media player also appears up here, letting you control playback and change playlists automatically. Banshee replaces Rhythmbox as the default media player, but it’s very similar in operation so you won’t have any problems getting used to it. Libre Office replaced Open Office, but as both are derived from the same source code there’s little to tell the two apart. It’s safe to say that if you’re happy with Open Office you’ll be happy with Libre Office.

Ubuntu 11.04 is a fairly big change for the OS, ditching separate Netbook and Desktop Editions to create a single OS that works on both. For the most part it’s very successful and the new built-in search tools make it easier to find applications and documents. We’d have preferred the ability to customise the Launcher more, but that’s a minor complaint. Given the massive increase in performance over Ubuntu 10.10, 11.04 is a worthy upgrade that’s well worth installing.