Obviously all the normal libraries have been updated, Linux kernel 2.6.38.2, Python 2.7, GCC 4.5, X,org 1.10.0 and so on. More interestingly, there are some application upgrades. The office suite OpenOffice.org has been replaced by the forked version called LibreOffice, this has a few extra features from Go-oo (a previous fork of OpenOffice.org) which never made it into Oracle's OpenOffice, but otherwise you are not going to notice the difference.
They changed the default music player from Rhythmbox to Banshee, which has been integrated into the desktop shell. However, the downside of this change means that you have to reimport all of your music if you want to start using Banshee. Also Banshee is written in Mono, which some people have reservations about (Mono being an free/open source reimplementation of Microsoft's .NET framework).
Firefox has been upgraded to version 4, which Mozilla claim is up to 6 times faster in Javascript execution. The tabs are also above the address bar which looks much nicer (and makes more sense since the URL is specific to that tab). There is also a bit more support for HTML5. There has also been some thought into what happens when a plugin such as Flash crashes, and try to protect the browser session.
On Linux, Firefox support for hardware accelerated graphics is switched off due to bugs, but hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 does already work on Windows, so I hope they will be able to fix it in Linux soon, however I think the problems are mostly to do with the graphics drivers in Linux rather than with Firefox, so it might be a long wait. If you have an Nvidia card and the right driver, you can turn it on and test it, but it may crash, I will probably look at this in a future post.
Firefox 4 includes support for the Do Not Track header, which is supposed to tell web sites that you do not want to be tracked (e.g. for behaviour based advertising or for any other use). Of course bad websites can just ignore that, but the US congress has been looking into ways to make it legally mandatory or part of industry code of conducts.
And Tab Candy (as discussed earlier) is now called Panorama. You press Ctrl+Shift+E and you then get an overview of your tabs which you can then group. As in the picture below:
The biggest and most obvious change in Ubuntu 11.04 is the adoption of 'Unity' as the default desktop shell. What is now called 'Unity' was formally the interface for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I loved it in UNR, and it has now been improved substantially since then. By the way, the separate Netbook edition is no more, as the normal desktop edition uses this interface. Unity is now more responsive with the main launcher getting out of the way nicely and semi-intelligently, giving your application(s) full screen width. For me this is the main advantage of Unity over the classic GNOME look, the desktop clutter smoothly fades away when you are not using it.
So if you haven't used UNR, I will show you how Unity works. Look at the following screenshot:
That is my web browser, but it is also the whole desktop screen, everything else is hidden when you have a maximsed application. If you move the mouse over to the left of the screen, or if you do not have a maximised application, you see a launcher:
If you have ever used Mac OS X, you will understand automatically, as it is not dissimilar to the dock in Mac OS X. The above screenshot is a bad example, because LibreOffice's menu still only works in the classic way. Proper GNOME apps put their menu bar at the very top of the screen, a bit like Mac OS X.
On your keyboard, you have a super key somewhere left of the space bar. If you have an IBM style PC, the super key often has a Windows logo on (at least until a GNU/Linux user scratches it off), if you have a Mac computer, the super button has "cmd" written on it. Mac people call this the "Command Key", however the 'super' is the original name (from the 1970s, e.g. see this image).
If you press the Ubuntu logo at the top left of the screen or hit the super key, you get an application chooser.
You can click on of the icons to navigate through installed applications or navigate through your files and folders, or you can type something into the search bar:
When your application is open, the corresponding icon will appear in the launcher, if you want it to stay in the launcher, you can right click on the icon and choose "Keep in launcher". You cannot type a shell command into the application chooser, however, if you use ALT+F2, then you can:
The top right corner of the Natty desktop has the same notifications and indicators as in previous few releases, although they have been tweaked and extended in Natty.
As I said above, I like the changes a lot, because the desktop environment gets out of the way when I am using an application, but the launcher and application chooser is there if and when I want them, which is not too often because once I have all the applications open I tend to use ALT+TAB to move between programs.
The downside of this graphical bling is that it needs some graphics memory to work. One nice thing about the old uglier GNOME interface is that it used very little graphics hardware to work. You would get the same experience even on a 10 year old PC, it is just slower than a modern computer. With Natty, this is no longer true, if your graphics card or integrated graphics chip does not measure up then it falls back to a classic GNOME interface which obviously looks quite different.
However, the requirements are not very onerous compared to say OS X or Windows. If you have an ATI or NVIDIA card then all you need is 128MB of graphics RAM which could still mean a quite old computer, if you have an Intel integrated chip then it needs to be newer than the GMA 950 chip (GMA 950 will just about work also but ideally newer). So fairly old computers are still fine, but really old ones not so much. If your computer is less than five years old, then it should be fine. Obviously, any computer you can buy new now should be fine also. More info on the ubuntu wiki.
If you have a desktop computer, you can always upgrade the graphics card. On a laptop it will probably not be worth it, it will probably be cheaper to just buy a cheap netbook like the Acer Aspire or something than to upgrade an old laptop.
Natty and Unity also has improved support for key navigation, I might talk about this another time. If you hold down the super key a bit longer you can get a rough idea.
There have been the predicable mailing list and blog flamewars about the fact that Ubuntu has diverted quite far from stock GNOME in this release, and some GNOME developers had their own plans for a new desktop metaphor called GNOME Shell, the first version of this came out in March.
However, Unity works, it looks good and is already released in a distribution. As I write it is probably already being used by millions of people. So no need to get grumpy. Competition within the free/open source desktop is good. GNOME Shell and Unity can be developed in tandem, and the free desktop users can decide which one they prefer. Eventually one will win.
So that is all I can be bothered to say. What do you think of Ubuntu Natty?
I gave Unity a fair shot but I don't think it's a good fit for me. I like that more space is devoted to the application (I'm a big fan of tiling window managers like wmii and xmonad), but the default behavior is just completely unintuitive to me. I use virtual desktops to separate tasks that I'm working on, but attempting to launch another terminal through the dock while one is already open jumps me to the desktop that already has a terminal. Yes I can launch one through the menu at the top, but the terminal has to be in focus to do that.
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<br/>It's good that there is another option on the desktop shell front, but I can't see using it until it's been through a few more iterations and the kinks have been worked out.
Hi Daniel, thanks for commenting!
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<br/>Your general point is why a lot of people do not like Mac OS X's dock too. However, what is intuitive is often just what is habitual, and that basically means we can never improve things beyond the Xerox Alto from 1973 (which is pretty much still the same in say Windows 7 and GNOME 2).
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<br/><blockquote><em>Daniel</em> <br/> attempting to launch another terminal through the dock while one is already open jumps me to the desktop that already has a terminal. Yes I can launch one through the menu at the top, but the terminal has to be in focus to do that.
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<br/>Well the solution is to use Ctrl+Alt+T which will just open a new terminal right now on the virtual desktop you are on.
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<br/>However, I try to discipline myself to keep only one terminal open, so I use Shift+Ctrl+T when in focus on my terminal. Otherwise after a long day or two of work I will end up with 30 terminals open. The result would be not only confusion but I would not get the benefits of reverse-i-search ( <a href="http://commandline.org.uk/forum/topic/81/" rel="nofollow">http://commandline.org.uk/forum/topic/81/</a> ) because what had happened in open terminal 13 would not be available in previously open terminal 3 (hopefully that makes sense). By keeping the lifetime of a terminal tab instance short, the environment keeps up to date.
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<br/>I also try to do this for Firefox as well, just keep one Window but with lots of tabs. Therefore the Unity launcher works well for my particular computing habits. More generally, I am trying not to work on too many things at the same time, because in the past I end up doing ten things at once, which results in near omniscience inside of my head, but nothing actually gets finished and delivered outside of it!
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<br/>You are probably a more naturally organised person, however for me the virtual desktops are fatal since they encourage me to create more virtual clutter, and I have enough physical clutter in my life without virtual clutter also!
Have you tried Gnome 3? Its absolutely terrible. I thought I was going to hate unity, but I acutally love it (despite its many many problems).