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Since none of my spare or test machines have hardware 3D, I was unable to try it until recently. Then I was testing an MSI Wind Top all-in-one touchscreen Atom PC as part of the Simplicity Computers project. (We've decided against it now.)
(The Wind Top works OK with *buntu, but for one entertaining bug: the axes on the touchscreen are reversed. Move your finger left, the pointer goes right; move finger up, pointer goes down. Install the drivers and config to fix this (which depends on HAL, and so doesn't work right on modern *buntu) and the screen image moves offcentre and goes all blurry, so though the touchscreen now works, you can barely read anything, it's all ugly, and the picture is offset about 5mm vertical & 1cm horizontal from where it should be and thus where the pointer is. As it's an all-in-one, there are no screen geometry controls, hardware or software. At which point, we gave up and sent it back.)
Anyway, I got Natty alpha 3 or so working on it.
Compiz crashes more times than Aeroflot in volcano season, taking the "desktop" - not that that word is accurate any more - with it.
The autohiding menu bar is insane, combining the worst of MacOS (menus randomly changing depending which window is active and having no spacial association with whichever window they control - if they control any visible window) and the worst of the Amiga (on which menus are hidden unless you whack the mouse up to the top of the screen and then right-click.) It's about as discoverable as Minoan Linear A.
The NotADockHonest™ is weird and feels raw and unfinished, not like something that shipped as part of Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 Netbook Remix. I don't like it as much as the Mac OS X Dock - and I don't like that much - but I am prepared to give the Unity Dock time. Maybe I'll adapt to it.
I mean, I don't like GNOME panels much, either, after all. They're much more customisable than Windows ones, except not in the ways I want (e.g. vertical orientation (b0rked), e.g. large panels but small icons; (no, you can't have that. And you can't have any pudding, either. Bad user, no biccie.))
(Incidentally again, if you like vertical docks and panels, Docky and GLX-Dock and AWM are all broken, too. If you want a nice, attractive dock that actually works quite well in a vertical orientation, try ADeskBar. It's good. Best I've found for Linux yet. Homepage seems to be down, though.)
Mind you, after a little playing, I like the WindowMaker docks much less than OS X ones. (I mean, no labels or tooltips? You are taking the mickey, right?)
But so far, the new Ubuntu 11.04 layout, from a play with a flaky, unstable implementation, just felt like it wasn't something powerful and capable enough to run a PC with. Not yet.
I have no choice but to stick with GNOME 2 on my laptop. It's seven years old, but rock-solid and nicely fast & responsive with Maverick. Much much better than Windows XP on the same hardware. But its ATI Radeon Mobility - actually a 16MB Rage II or III, roughly - doesn't work with Compiz and to give good performance (and to be able to drive a 1280Ă—1024 external monitor) it has to be dropped to 65K colours.
Which Ubuntu provides no UI at all to do, of course.
So you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Only *buntu >10.x doesn't have an xorg.conf file any more. So you have to write one of your own. (I found a blank one that can be adapted, which is very handy.)
Once you've done that and got the graphics working, then you might, perhaps, want suspend/wake and hibernate/resume to work. That means adding "nomodeswitch" to the kernel boot parameters.
That means you lose the graphical boot sequence (which has the colours corrupted on this machine, anyway.)
So you might want to add "vga=791" to the kernel boot params too, to get a graphical boot back, in the same resolution as your desktop.
After doing all this, it works like a dream and is really nice, but forget any hardware 3D, so forget the Netbook interface - or the new Unity one. And also, I think, that means forget GNOME 3, as well.
The obscure and poorly-supported make of this weirdly non-standard machine?
IBM.
Not Lenovo, actual IBM. It's from 2004. A Thinkpad X31.
Saying all that, I still prefer *buntu to the alternatives.
But I think that as of or after Natty, I might be going over to Linux Mint full-time...
Mint, of course, is based on GNOME 2 and has no truck with any of this netbook or unity or GNOME 3 business.
But what is going to happen when GNOME 2 is no longer supported or updated, I wonder?
I mean (*shudder*) I might have to go over to KDE. But the ugly, it burnsssssss... I don't want 23,452,356 options to tweak, I want it to work, and it really helps if it looks vaguely professional and smart while it's at it, not like a red/green colourblind 13 year old's LSD nightmare.
(The Wind Top works OK with *buntu, but for one entertaining bug: the axes on the touchscreen are reversed. Move your finger left, the pointer goes right; move finger up, pointer goes down. Install the drivers and config to fix this (which depends on HAL, and so doesn't work right on modern *buntu) and the screen image moves offcentre and goes all blurry, so though the touchscreen now works, you can barely read anything, it's all ugly, and the picture is offset about 5mm vertical & 1cm horizontal from where it should be and thus where the pointer is. As it's an all-in-one, there are no screen geometry controls, hardware or software. At which point, we gave up and sent it back.)
Anyway, I got Natty alpha 3 or so working on it.
Compiz crashes more times than Aeroflot in volcano season, taking the "desktop" - not that that word is accurate any more - with it.
The autohiding menu bar is insane, combining the worst of MacOS (menus randomly changing depending which window is active and having no spacial association with whichever window they control - if they control any visible window) and the worst of the Amiga (on which menus are hidden unless you whack the mouse up to the top of the screen and then right-click.) It's about as discoverable as Minoan Linear A.
The NotADockHonest™ is weird and feels raw and unfinished, not like something that shipped as part of Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 Netbook Remix. I don't like it as much as the Mac OS X Dock - and I don't like that much - but I am prepared to give the Unity Dock time. Maybe I'll adapt to it.
I mean, I don't like GNOME panels much, either, after all. They're much more customisable than Windows ones, except not in the ways I want (e.g. vertical orientation (b0rked), e.g. large panels but small icons; (no, you can't have that. And you can't have any pudding, either. Bad user, no biccie.))
(Incidentally again, if you like vertical docks and panels, Docky and GLX-Dock and AWM are all broken, too. If you want a nice, attractive dock that actually works quite well in a vertical orientation, try ADeskBar. It's good. Best I've found for Linux yet. Homepage seems to be down, though.)
Mind you, after a little playing, I like the WindowMaker docks much less than OS X ones. (I mean, no labels or tooltips? You are taking the mickey, right?)
But so far, the new Ubuntu 11.04 layout, from a play with a flaky, unstable implementation, just felt like it wasn't something powerful and capable enough to run a PC with. Not yet.
I have no choice but to stick with GNOME 2 on my laptop. It's seven years old, but rock-solid and nicely fast & responsive with Maverick. Much much better than Windows XP on the same hardware. But its ATI Radeon Mobility - actually a 16MB Rage II or III, roughly - doesn't work with Compiz and to give good performance (and to be able to drive a 1280Ă—1024 external monitor) it has to be dropped to 65K colours.
Which Ubuntu provides no UI at all to do, of course.
So you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Only *buntu >10.x doesn't have an xorg.conf file any more. So you have to write one of your own. (I found a blank one that can be adapted, which is very handy.)
Once you've done that and got the graphics working, then you might, perhaps, want suspend/wake and hibernate/resume to work. That means adding "nomodeswitch" to the kernel boot parameters.
That means you lose the graphical boot sequence (which has the colours corrupted on this machine, anyway.)
So you might want to add "vga=791" to the kernel boot params too, to get a graphical boot back, in the same resolution as your desktop.
After doing all this, it works like a dream and is really nice, but forget any hardware 3D, so forget the Netbook interface - or the new Unity one. And also, I think, that means forget GNOME 3, as well.
The obscure and poorly-supported make of this weirdly non-standard machine?
IBM.
Not Lenovo, actual IBM. It's from 2004. A Thinkpad X31.
Saying all that, I still prefer *buntu to the alternatives.
But I think that as of or after Natty, I might be going over to Linux Mint full-time...
Mint, of course, is based on GNOME 2 and has no truck with any of this netbook or unity or GNOME 3 business.
But what is going to happen when GNOME 2 is no longer supported or updated, I wonder?
I mean (*shudder*) I might have to go over to KDE. But the ugly, it burnsssssss... I don't want 23,452,356 options to tweak, I want it to work, and it really helps if it looks vaguely professional and smart while it's at it, not like a red/green colourblind 13 year old's LSD nightmare.
