Ubuntu 12.04 Quick Review

The Bad

• Thunderbird still takes up 50% of the CPU doing nothing? - Check
• Alt-tab behaviour between multip-desktops even worse than before? - Check
• Random crashes of core system components (unity-music-lens, desktop notifications, sound)? - Check
• Default music player still has the user adding podcasts by XML feed? - Check
• Default music player doesn’t save position in a file? - Check

The Ugly

• Unity dock menu still has odd, unefined behaviour? - Check
• Unity Dash even worse a UI disaster than before (doesn’t save search between modes, icons and defaults ? - Check
• Potential security flaws like showing what you have running in the dock and any tool tips exposed when the password prompt dialog goes up still there? - Check

The Good

• Unity Dash seems faster. Maybe.
• Haven’t hit the “HUD” key accidentally
• Refreshed look and feel
• Ubuntu software center (app store) not a horrible slow beast!
• Newly added apps go into the dock (a la MacOS).
• My keyboard’s multimedia keys actually work! (We’ll see how long this lasts though).
• New desktop notifications do look nice, though you still can’t close them like with growl on MacOS
• My Skype icon has moved to my main desktop menu bar now (good yes, though I don’t understand why it’d move from one or the other).

Long story short, and bitching aside, this is still a good OS update and a lot of the issues that I found with the previous verions of the post-gnome2-era desktop have been resolved, but the desktop is still plagued with UI issues, odd bugs and a lack of general polish (amidst the lot of great polish that has been given) to areas that would stop me from being able to give this to a non-linux user and being confident they’d figure it out.