I hope this means my brand new laptop with a Core i5, 8GB of Ram and an SSD will now have the performance to run the standard bloody desktop. I'm currently using the classic desktop on 11.04 because my laptop starts crawling on Unity after short periods.

if you have got the sandy bridge processor, do NOT give into increased-graphics-performance temptation and upgrade to the 3.1 kernel.

There is a 76% power regression vs 2.6.3x kernels http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...

You can always download and install the latest kernels while keeping the older versions as backup. No need to worry about GRUB settings either as that's all handled when you install the kernel debian packages.

Only caveat to this is you might have to reinstall your graphics driver for the new kernel.

Thanks for the info. This does affect me. I'll be sticking to 2.6.38 until they sort these issues out.

That's strange.

I had 11.04 on an old, battered machine (Athlon 2500+, 768 MB RAM, Radeon 9600) for about a week and it worked OK. Scratch that, I had no performance issues at all. The only reason I installed xubuntu on it was that after I'd disabled Zeitgeist (a passive logger that tracks everything you do, every site you visit, and your online communication) the dash went empty.

Unity looks great, but I don't like that there's no easy way to configure it. I would surely like to move the launcher to the bottom and make it auto-hide automatically even on a desktop with no running apps.

I know they are still experimenting, but I think they've confused innovation with copying tablet specific features. Take as an example the position of the launcher. It's perfect if you're working on a tablet with touch screen, but on desktop its position is a bit strange. Maybe that's just my preference, but the "natural" position for it on desktop would be the bottom of the screen.

Do you have a reason for the bottom being the 'natural' position that isn't 'Apple puts it there by default'?

I don't know exactly why, but my mouse tends to be in the lower right corner of the screen most of the time. Considering that, launching an app from the bottom of the screen involves less work for me. I'm not sure if that's true for the rest of the people or it is just my thing.

Elementary OS Jupiter might seem more 'natural' until Unity configuration is sorted

I run Unity on a netbook with 1GB of ram - and since all I run is vim, chrome and a few terminals, I don't see any problems. But, your mileage may vary

Yes, some people have no problems. But the performance issues with Unity on 11.04 are well known and wide spread.

FWIW, all I usually have running is Thunderbird, Instantbird, Firefox and some terminals, and since switching back to classic I haven't had any performance issues.

Most likely yes. I run 11.04 with Unity on an 1.5 GB Intel Atom-based netbook and have no problem with it. I find the extra screen space specially nice when I am mobile, but also welcome when I am hoked up to a large screen.

Did you try unity-2d?

Nope. I ran with plain Unity for the best part of a week and found it didn't give anything of value over the classic interface. The performance issues forced me back to the classic interface though. Not had any performance issues with classic.

I'll give Unity another go when I upgrade to 11.10 in January (3 month delay gives them time to fix the worse bugs). I'm not spending my time trying to make it work nicely if I can just fall back to classic to fix things.