Mini-screenshot tour of Ubuntu 11 Natty Narwhal beta

[cimorene]

Click through to enlarge.



Here's the default wallpaper, the same one that is behind the login screen, and the default GTK theme and icons, Ambience and Ubuntu-Mono-Dark. The Unity desktop replaced Gnome for this release. On the top you have the panel, which looks the same, but is not a Gnome panel. Panel applets don't run in it; what you see on the left are all indicator applets, which have a much stricter set of guidelines for developers, apparently? On the left you have the launcher, which functions as a combined taskbar and application launcher. You can add, remove, and reorder the launchers on it at will except for the bottom ones (Trash, mounted volumes, Files and Folders, Applications, and the Workplace Switcher). The background is non-configurable atm, but you can resize it. It displays whatever icon theme is selected for the system and individual icons are still non-configurable. You can, however, turn on and off the background glow. The top panel can be made more or less transparent but not skinned independently of the GTK theme yet. Its transparency settings do not affect the launcher.



The search/shortcut menu that appears when you click the OS logo/start button in the upper left corner



The applications menu that appears when you click the search apps icon on the launcher. Those weird rendering errors that show up in the screenshot weren't there when looking at the screen. Must be a Shutter glitch.



This happens when you click the launcher icon of an application that already has multiple running instances open. (If only one is running, it simply rises to focus.)



Indicator applets



The new "Me Menu" lets you set your chat status, configure your chat and microblogging (Twitter/Facebook/that open source imitator) accounts, and Tweet from the menu.



The messaging menu launches chat, email, and microblogging programs and notifies you of new messages. You can also apparently back up your data to the cloud from here (that's what Ubuntu One is, but I haven't set an account up).



The title and menubar are both integrated with the panel, which displays the title of the active window by default and the menu on hover.



This is how the Unity launcher handles overflow icons. First they tilt sideways at the bottom and sort of fold up away from you, but if you put the cursor over it the hovered icons comes back to focus/full size and some of the icons disappear off the top or the bottom of the launcher.

Comments

[flamebyrd]

Yay, screenshot tour! Thanks for this.

I really like the search function, that looks cool. You can launch it with a keyboard shortcut, IIRC?

I think I have to do some research on the messaging menu to see if it's the same as 10.10 and if my custom indicators are supported. (I use one for gmail, and my rss reader outputs to it.)

I can see the top menubar being really useful for applications like Gimp, but I'm reserving judgement for other applications. I'm used to the concept with OSX, but I don't have enough screen real-estate for it to be inconvenient on my laptop, so it might be different on the desktop.

[zvi]

I think that it's supposed to be improved from it, but I'm not sure if they've re-worked the architecture from the ground up.

[cimorene]

Yeah, the search apps/shortcuts pane is what appears if you press the OS/Windows key (whatever it's called, the one with the Windows logo on it). Alt+f2 opens that thingy with the Run dialogue open and as you type it quicksearches recently launched apps/commands.

[foxfirefey]

Maybe crosspost a link of this to linux4all?

[cimorene]

Sure - I tend to lurk there because I'm not too leet, but it might be interesting anyway just for the images and so on since I haven't found screenshots through the official Ubuntu site...

[bookherd]

Thanks for sharing this! In the Linux community, you're always more leet than somebody. ^___^

[brownbetty]

Neato!

Are you withholding your opinion deliberately? I know Unity is a love it/hate it, thing, but I'm curious what you think.

[cimorene]

No, not really! I wouldn't have kept using it for a week if I didn̈́'t like it. The frequency of crashes is a bit annoying - worse than the more recent Mint releases I've used, but not bad enough to make me go back to Mint, since I like the new menus (that is, the integrated chat/twitter and the main menu and app/file searches). I'm sort of considering going back though if we can't get Samba shares working properly and reliably in the next couple of days. There are also some problems with permissions (e.g. everything being set to root on the other partitions) and apparently a chmod bug in the Known Issues.

OTOH Mint has had a custom categorized and searchable menu with favorites for several releases already, althogh I had to remove it in 10 because it was crashing; so Tweeting from the panel is really the only feature I really like that I don't know how to replicate from Mint (and presumably any other Ubuntu/Gnome) 10 or 9.