Recently, I decided to ignore my own advice (to always wait until the .10 version before upgrading) and upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. I kind of knew that this was a bad idea from the start. Ubuntu has been headed down the path to Unity (a great example of a road to Hell paved with good intentions) for several iterations now. I have never been a fan of the Unity interface. Each time I upgraded Ubuntu, I completely removed Unity and ubuntu-desktop and replaced it with Gnome and Cairo-Dock.
But I know Canonical is hellbent on enforcing Unity on the nonconformist masses of Ubuntu users. I heard that they made a lot of improvements to Unity in Pangolin. So I thought, what the hell, I will give it a shot. One last chance before I ditch Ubuntu for good. I will either go along with Unity, or find an alternative to Ubuntu. I just don’t have the time to keep fighting this battle.
Well, the upgrade went smoothly enough, but Cairo-Dock looked like crap afterward. I’m not sure why but I think Pangolin uses a new window manager and it doesn’t play nice with Cairo-Dock. OK, so I shut down Cairo-Dock and just used Unity for awhile.
I still dislike the Unity interface. It is kind of like someone said, hey, let’s make something that is a little bit like Mac but uglier and much clumsier. No thanks. Unity has a couple nice features, but unless you want to memorize a keyboard shortcut for everything you want to do, it is a pain to use. For me, anyway. If you like it, that’s awesome.
For me, the last straw was when I discovered that VMWare Player doesn’t work on Pangolin. It worked fine on Oneiric, but Pangolin uses a newer kernel and it breaks compatibility. I’m sure VMWare will update soon enough, but in the meanwhile, I sometimes need a way to run Windows in a virtual machine.
I could just revert to Ubuntu 11.10, but why bother. I know which way Ubuntu is headed and that’s fine, but as I said before I am tired of fighting to get the interface I want. Goodbye Ubuntu, thanks for everything and good luck. I am switching to Debian, the Universal Operating System.