I did the upgrade with all the standard options, and everything seems to work
fine. The new taskbar looks funny, though.

So far I wish I had not done the upgrade. To me this upgrade was not ready
to be released. It is full of bugs. I probably will be going back to 10.10.

Just done my first install of Natty and although slow due to poor
download rate for updates ( heavy server use ?? ) it went smoothly,
picking up all the hardware in an Acer Extensa laptop just fine.

First impressions are - it's a *lot* different to previous Ubuntu
versions so not really surprised that updates tend to go awry !!
Little bit 'Mac' like with the title bar of a program having the menu
and the side bar is useful for regularly used programs - would prefer
it to be permanent on a wide-screen laptop, must be a way to do it but
not investigated yet. Like the search too - will make finding things a
lot easier

Will I switch my main PC to it ?? Maybe not, need to play with it a
bit more - we'll see

One of the nice things in 11.04 that people should consider is that you can
now upgrade from the Live CD/ DVD. Just insert the CD or DVD and then it
will detect your old installation and offer to upgrade. If the upgrade does
not work (and I am hearing that lots do not) then you cna use the same media
to do a fresh installation (after backing up of course).

I have used Unity and GNOME 3 for several months and both are much improved
and will likely get better. However, the basic design of either is not going
to change. They are basically full screen desktops with lots of workspaces.
There are hotkeys to switch workspaces and activities, but the old metaphor
of dragging and dropping and minimize, maximize and restore is pretty much
dead. It is cut, hotkey to another workspace and paste rather than drag and
drop. too many clicks for me It is one activity per workspace. GNOME does
not even have buttons to minimize and neither has a system tray. Youc an run
in a windows in Unity, but it is useless because the menu is way above in
the top panel and you can only have one menu on a panel so than limits the
way you work, if you have lots of things open at one screen for anything.
You cannot customise much or add to the top panel. Anything that runs from
the system tray with a few exceptions will not work. That includes wallpaper
rotators, etc. GNOME 3 does not even have a shutdown option in the menu,
just Suspend and Logout (until you wise up and press Alt then Suspend
changes to Shutdown). Talk about dumb ideas!

I have heard people say they like both, but many say it is not for large
monitors and people who do lots of multitasking. It is more for people who
like the interface on smartphones and netbooks. It is the epitome of dumbing
down the desktop, IMO. For me it is just too much work. Too many mouse
clicks and too many hotkeys to remember and greater distance to travel on
the desktop. Besides I work best in chaos with lots of things open and many
distractions and both Unity and GNOME 3 work against that. Neat freaks will
love it! ;)

Thanks to the upgrade to 11.04 and then trying to recover from that doing
away with the ability to go into either Ubuntu or Windows, I still cannot go
into Windows, even after a reinstall of Ubuntu. It looks like I'm going to
have to backup Windows not too so I can go in, delete all partitions and
reinstall Windows XT and the Ubuntu 10.10. I have had it with 11.04 and may
start looking into a better OS the Ubuntu. One that doesn't screw up my
system so easily.

Well you will get lots of advice as to what is better than Ubuntu. It has
its share of fans and detractors. I have tried them all and have stuck with
Canonical through thick and thin since 2005. I still try out other distros,
but always go back because it has the most of everything; most packages,
most choice, most support, biggest community. It is not driven by ideology
as Debian is so you don't have to watch what you say for fear someone is
going to jump all over you. It just feels right to me. I don't believe for a
second that it is best for everybody.

Even with Ubuntu's family there is lots of choice. I run Kubuntu which is
from the same folks but it uses KDE and they tend to leave you alone, i.e.
they aren't changing the interface all of the time. There is also Xubuntu
which is XFCE based and it is going to replace GNOME Classic for many people
as the desktop of choice when GNOME phases it out later this year. There are
other choices such as Lubuntu which uses lightweight (and less powerful)
LXDE. If you want to go a bit farther from the tree you can run Mint which
is not from Canonical at all, but is based on Ubuntu. It uses a modified
GNOME but will switch to GNOME 3 and change it up with the next release.
There are a few Debian based distros that also are worth considering,
aptosid and MEPIS spring to mind. Then you can go to the dark side ;) and
run rpm based distros where there are many excellent choices, Mandriva,
PCLinuxOS, openSuSE and Fedora. Generally RPM distros offer less choice,
fewer packages, fewer outside repositories and less support. That does not
make them bad. Many people do not mind limitations. If I was not running
Kubuntu happily then I would run Fedora, but it is for power users and is
not newbie friendly.

There really is no end to choice with over 400 to choose from and then with
all of the combinations of desktops you can go wild. My over 10 years of
distro hopping has led me to a couple of conclusions. There is no perfect
distro and some distros work better than others with some equipment. What
works for one person is not necessarily going to be universal which is very
different from what former Windows users are used to, because the hardware
was made to run Windows and not Linux. That being said, Linux has come a
long way from the old days and now most things work out of the box. It is
those few hardware inconsistencies that keep it from wider adoption.

I think I would be OK with XFCE, but the file manager which comes with Xubuntu
is incompetent as far as I'm concerned. Any suggestions?

You can run Nautilus or Dolphin in XFCE. The good thing with 11.04 is that
Nautilus is no longer integral to the desktop. Previously if you ran
Nautilus in XFCE you would lose the XFCE desktop and get the GNOME one
unless you ran nautilus --no-desktop from the commandline. Now it is just a
file manager. I prefer Dolphin to Nautilus because it has more features. The
filtering is outstanding and in Nautilus it is very basic. But many GNOME
users find KDE apps overblown. To each his own.

Now I have problems with XFCE also. the system freezes stiff every day after a
few hoursof usage. I am going to reinstall tomorrow, as I have time.

An friend have Windows 7 and put SP1 on his computer. He told me SP1 for
Win7 has about 5,000 complaints on-line so far. Maybe more. Looks like
every body is in an rush to put out updates.

I upgraded on line from 10.04 via 10.10 to 11.04 on
my netbook and upgraded on line from 10.10 on my PC so far no problem with
Canon' upgrades. I did have some further updating to do on other repos software.
Have you considered updating via the 'alternate CD'?

As has been said many times, upgrading OS's is a dangerous operation
at the best of times and the changes that 11.04 makes are a lot more
demanding than most so it's not surprising that reports of updates
that have failed are prominent !

Unfortunately, once an update has screwed up the most permanent way to
fix it is to start all over again - there are ways to try and repair
through command line that can be tried but IMHO you can never be sure
that the repair is anything other than a fudge that will bite you hard
at some time in the future

The upgrade process took twice as much time than a fresh install without
formatting and then installing additional programs and configuring the
system.If I get really angry I am going to install Linux Mint again.

GNOME Shell cannot be installed with Ubuntu or you break Unity and vice
versa. You need to choose one or the other and remove the one you are not
using. I am not sure if this caused your problem or just made things worse.
Both Unity and GNOME 3 are similar, but very different under the hood. They
use different window managers (Compiz for Unity and Mutter for GNOME 3).
GNOME 3 uses mostly Java up front and Unity uses lots of QT mixed with GTK.
Performance can vary. Some people find Unity faster and some find GNOME 3
faster. GNOME 3 does not work well on my equipment while Unity works fine. I
need to upgrade my Fedora partition to F15 and give GNOME 3 a fair trial
before I pass judgement on its performance because it does not work well on
my K/ Ubuntu partition.

Personally I don't like either UI and will stick with KDE. Unity and GNOME 3
require me to change the way I work and it is just too much work. My feeling
is they are toy interfaces meant for users who like smartphones and abandon
the desktop metaphor completely. For example, you cannot run GNOME 3 in
anything but full screen and drag and drop is not possible. Unity lets you
run in window but the menu is up on the top panel and you cannot run more
than one window in a workspace, so you cannot drag and drop. I have a large
monitor and drag and drop for everything. Also you cannot run anything from
the system tray as neither has one. I run Radiotray and in GNOME I like to
run Wally to rotate wallpaper since it is not built in. You cannot do this
with either Unity or GNOME 3. So KDE or XFCE get me stamp of approval and I
take a pass on both.

I am not surprised that people are having trouble upgrading from 10.10 to
11.04 with all of the changes made to the UI. I always do fresh
installations. However a nice new feature of 11.04 is that you can upgrade
from CD or DVD. It detects your previous installation and will offer to
upgrade rather than do a new installation.