I’ve been an Ubuntu user since I first started using Linux. Things have been good, not great, but good. But as of recently things have changed.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 today, on both my laptop and desktop, which turned out to be a stupid choice. I was happy with the setup that I had but being on the bleeding edge of software is just so risky that it’s worth it, I guess. The emphasis is on the “bleeding”, though.

My first complaint is in the upgrading process itself. Whenever I upgrade my desktop, something always goes wrong. I can’t remember a single upgrade that went smoothly. When I upgrade, that entire day because an “upgrade day”, where I spend the rest of the day trying to fix my computer so that I can use it again. This time, the issue was related to the login process. I had to uninstall lightdm (which uninstalled ubuntu-desktop as well but I guess I don’t need that) and install gdm in order to get it work. I’m not really sure why that made it work, though. lightdm was pretty, but I guess I can’t use it.

I didn’t realize that upgrading to 11.10 would require me to use GNOME 3 rather than GNOME 2. And even though I remember reading something about that, I didn’t realize that GNOME 3 was going to be so radically different than GNOME 3. All of this Unity stuff has always gotten on my nerves. I feel like Ubuntu is straying away from providing a solid user experience and focusing more on the extras. I suppose that many noticed this a lot earlier, though.

Overall, I just don’t feel like GNOME 3 is a polished experience in the same ways that GNOME 2 was. It feels thrown together, almost amateur. I would be more specific in how it doesn’t feel like but that will be another post.

This is just my initial reactions from using things for a good half an hour (although I spent a lot of that getting the login to work.) I’ll be talking about this more in the future, so stay tuned.