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For some reason our administrator decided to update OS of my desktop. He installed latest version Ubuntu 11.10. My first impression was not very good. I did not find it userfriendly.


Main problem is accessing different windows you open. Say, you open a firefox window with many work related tabs opned in it. This window will minimize to the left sidebar under firefox icon that also is the desktop icon to access firefox. Now, if you want open another firefox window which should have pages not work related but say personal like gmail or youtube, you click on the same icon. Instead of what you wish, the same firefox window with work related pages which you minimized few moments back reappears. So, to distinguish work related pages from personal pages is not so stright forward. One option is you open your personal page in one of the tabs in work related firefox window and then drag and drop that tab out of the window. Then it allows you to have another firefox window. But why is needs to be tricky, it should be more straight forward.

Besides, this might work for simple tasks like Firefox or text editor, or office. I faced a problem while using a software called vmd used for visualisation of molecules and other related tasks. Normally you deal with 3-4 windows while working with vmd. one of them is the main window allowing you to open file, load properties etc, while another one is the molecule visualizer. Then you also need to open related windows dealing with different settings. If you minimize, all these windows will minimize under one icon in the left hand sidebar. If you try to open them again, it is a problem. Not all windows become active again. The visualizer window and one of the settings window were active while the main window governing all other windows never become active. So, only option was to restart vmd and reload all the files which is time consuming.I could not resolve this problem.

Another and main problem with Ubuntu 11.10 version was some graphic issue with some softwares. For example: not all options in vmd were visible. They were overlapping and it was difficult or almost impossible to access some of the options. This is a serious issue and nobody here has yet been able to resolve it.

So, finally we rolled back to the older version, Ubuntu 10.04 which is quite comforting. There are some issues with it but apparently not very serious. While rest of the OS is working good in English, Firefox and Office is all in French. But am sure I will get an easy solution to it.
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