Now that the first waves of rage calmed down and i’ve been using Unity for a few days, it doesn’t seem that horrible anymore. I managed to tweak many stuff to my liking, and many still await, but now i can at least get stuff done without constantly being held up by the clumsy interface.

There are stuff that disturb me still though. There is no simple way to switch between workspaces. In the classic Gnome, there was the handy workspace switcher applet on the tray, and it took only a click. In Unity, i’ve to click the icon in the launcher for the workspace wall to show up, and right-click on the workspace i want to move to. I can’t even use the “send to workspace …” options on the right click menu of windows, because it closes the window without warning or question. Not to mention that Unity is prone to crash without any real reason. In the past three days it crashed at least three times when i was just normally using the system and pretty much every single time i tried tweaking the settings. Luckily it restarts quickly, but it’s still annoying.

I have a DSL network connection, which is really nice fast, at least inside Japan, if it works. Luckily unlike my previous provider at the dorm, who would randomly cut off my net for days without warning if i left the torrent client on for a bit too long, there are no problems on the provider’s side. There are smaller ones on mine though. I have to manually connect whenever i boot Windows, but i never really bothered to look deeper into it, since it only happens once or twice a week. However, under Ubuntu the problems are quite different.

After i upgraded and then reinstalled the 11.10 o-something version, i faced some problems i couldn’t really handle. First it was the “waiting for network configuration” thing mentioned in the earlier post, but that went away after the reinstall and home folder wipe. But then there were other problems. It wouldn’t or only partially load certain pages (without any connection to each other, such as Rakuten and Tumblr) although i could ping and netcat them, it wouldn’t connect to MSN and in general it was slow. I rebooted to Windows to check, and found that everything worked all right, thus confirmed that it was an Ubuntu thing. I checked every setting in the network config manager gui, but none had any effect.

So, again Ubuntu delivered a distro update, and with it, another afternoon of pure rage. First, why the hell do you need to remove Gnome if i already have it installed? I don’t give a flying fuck about Unity, i’m not using a tablet and i always have lots of windows open at once. But all right, if you want to install that pile of crap Unity, do so, but leave Gnome on. No, you must remove Gnome. Okay then, remove it, but let me reinstall it after the hour-long update misery is over. I was naive enough to hope it’d work. I installed Gnome, rebooted (of course the distro update fucked up my bootloader too), chose the Gnome session, logged in, and faced something that reminded me of Windows 98 in 8bit color mode with the monitor’s cable having serious contact problems. I thought maybe it didn’t reinstall some required Compiz stuff (which again is fucking stupid considering what’s the point of installing Gnome if it just won’t work), so i logged out, and tried to log in into the Unity session to install stuff. It wouldn’t load. Reboot. Wait three minutes for some kind of “network configuration” (implying this fucker erased even my PPPoE settings), and i couldn’t even skip it. Still neither Gnome nor Unity would boot. So now i’m burning the install CD and getting ready for erasing the system and reinstalling from scratch. For the first time in two years.