A beard of bees.

[reddragdiva]

• You know, I really need to resolve more of my life problems with the question: "What would markeris do?"

• I have a special way of knowing things. (courtesy ciphergoth)

I have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The new Unity interface is stupidly shit. If you woke up one day and thought, "Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down phone running an obsolete version of Android through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience," this gets you quite a lot of the way there. If you want it to feel a bit more like a computer, log out, select "Ubuntu Classic" and log back in and then you'll only have the Mac ripoff menu arrangements to contend with.

I suspect I'm going to get a BlackBerry 9300 on about £10/mo if I can find that. I've spotted some weird variants of such a plan in the wild.

I am planning to go to the Pembury on Sunday evening. Anyone else?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I hate unity. I haven't even used it and I still hate it. And wayland.

[foxfirefey]

metaquotes this, yes?

[reddragdiva]

Feel free!

[foxfirefey]

Tada!

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

I expect I will be there!

I've changed several of the tables since you were last there. Better support for smaller groups.

[slybrarian]

Yeeesssss. I want my simple, reasonable GNOME interface, you idiots! Not this nonsense of stuff stuck to the side and moving window menus up the top where I can't actually use them when, y'know, messing around inside a window.

[reddragdiva]

I found the menu thing (which is still in Ubuntu Classic) interesting and not unusable. A bit more free vertical real estate is valuable. But Unity is a bunch of interesting features put together really badly.

[hairyears]

I plan to Pemburambulate on Sunday: it's been a while since I spoke more than a few words to you.

[ciphergoth]

Overall I'm in favour of bold UI moves (eg abolish the min/max buttons on windows, use workspaces instead of minimization) so I'm going to give Unity a go and I'm looking forward to Wayland. Good to know how to switch it off though :-)

[reddragdiva]

Wayland is unrelated to this - it's the replacement for the twenty-five years of cruft in X. That it's being developed by three lead Xorg developers pretty much seals X's fate :-)

Unity is full of good and interesting new ideas, and I spent most of yesterday trying to give it a serious go (as I set my netbook up for working from home again), but it was pretty much unusable on this netbook, and bits of it just don't actually work. This is with release day a few weeks away. Note that it's a derivation of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface, which I did like a lot.

[mstevens]

Debian is quite good at the moment.

Although that's obviously because they just had a release, it'll become old again over the next couple of years.

But they seem to have got the release frequency to a state that's moderately tolerable (at least for me) if it supports your hardware.

[(Anonymous)]

No one ever got anywhere by asking What Would Mark Eris Do?

Although thank you, I may have T Shirts made.

[reddragdiva]

And a remarkable number of home Debian users just run Sid.

[mstevens]

I've always liked the delicious refreshing taste of stable.