Ubuntu 12.04 review

Workspaces

As with previous versions of Ubuntu, Workspaces are an important part of the OS. These virtual desktops let you neatly organise your computer, segmenting different applications to different workspaces. Canonical has changed the way that task switching works in relation to these Workspaces.

In all other editions of Ubuntu, pressing Alt-Tab to switch between open applications or Windows-W to show all open windows in a Mac Expose-style view used to work across all Workspaces. Now, these commands are restricted to just operate on the currently-selected Workspace.

Pressing Windows-Ctrl-Alt reverts the task switching back to the old behaviour, but we couldn’t find any way to show all open Windows on screen. The closest you can get is using Windows-S to zoom out and show all Workspaces.

Press and hold the Windows key to bring up a useful list of shortcut keys.

Applications

Every version of Ubuntu sees the OS get new and updated applications. This time around there are newer versions of Firefox and Libre Office installed by default; however, the big change is that Canonical has decided to reinstate Rhythmbox as the music player.

This means that Banshee has been ditched for now. We see it as a good move, as Rhythmbox was always the superior media player. Banshee’s only advantage was that it could handle video as well as audio, but dedicated media players are still included by default.

Our only complaint about Rhythmbox, and Ubuntu media players in general, is that support for streaming is poor. We couldn’t get Rhythmbox to work with a UPnP server. It supports DAAP, which is a protocol invented by Apple, but it doesn’t work with music shared on iTunes 7 or higher. Given that we’re currently on iTunes 10, this doesn’t look like it will get fixed in the near future.

Performance

As with every version of Ubuntu, we like to run our benchmarks on the operating system to see how well each version performs. With Ubuntu 11.04, Canonical made some big improvements to system performance, but that’s a rare change. What’s important is that on the same hardware, the new OS maintains the previous version’s performance.

We ran our tests on an 3GHz Intel quad-core QX6850 PC with a 250GB hard disk. As you can see from the results, Ubuntu 12.04 has the same overall score as Ubuntu 11.10 and, indeed, the same score in every test, bar Image Editing, where it was one point faster. This isn’t enough of a difference to show that there’s been a speed increase, but adding new features while maintaining the same impressive performance is impressive.

All of our benchmarks record the time taken to complete the task in seconds and normalise these against the results for a Core i5-2500k PC, which scores 100 in all tests.

Conclusion

A LTS version of Ubuntu is largely about creating a more stable platform to give the OS longevity. While it’s fair to say that Ubuntu 12.04 does that in spades, Canonical has taken Ubuntu and given its interface a much-needed tweak. There are still likely to be a fair number of Unity detractors out there, but the updates in this version take it from an experimental interface with plenty of irritation to a generally-smooth and smart way of interacting with your computer.

We like the new HUD and think that it gives an interesting and quick way of interacting with applications, in a way that old-fashioned menus simply can’t provide. However, it needs some more work before it’s there yet. As it stands, though, 12.04 is everything that we’d want from a LTS version of Ubuntu and a great step forward for Unity.