When Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal was rolled-out in April last year there were lots of complaints suggesting that the new Unity user interface which is enabled by default upon installation was inferior to Gnome. We showed you how to switch back to Gnome and even listed the pros and cons, however many people instead jumped to different distros such as Linux Mint.
The developers behind Ubuntu have listened to feedback, however still seem to believe that Unity is the way forward, recently Jason Kennedy over at ExtremeTech tried out Ubuntu Unity 5.0 to see if it was an improvement and the answer has to be yes.
You can see Kennedy’s hands on here (there are six pages to see), he shows you how to get access to Unity 5.0 and also gives us a quick glimpse of what’s changed.
Firstly a lot of Ubuntu users like to really play with the look of Ubuntu, we can now reveal that CompizConfig allows you to really play with Unity’s appearance, there’s lots you can change including fade-out time, opacity, animations and more, you can see a full breakdown on page 2 of his hands on.
When you press the ‘Super Key’ you will still be able to search for applications and files easily, but now you will be able to choose filters to help pinpoint what you are looking for and we are told that Unity 5.0 searches deeper than ever before.
Kennedy says that in testing Unity 5.0 seemed far snappier than previously (even on older hardware), my personal gripe with Unity was the annoying delays which occurred far too often when using the ‘Super Key’ or trying to view different desktops etc, so maybe I won’t see such a problem with Unity 5.0. Kennedy also suggests that more functions are now available when you right-click a shortcut which shows up in Unity – this sounds like Unity 5.0 should be far more intuitive than ever before.
Do you like the sound of Unity 5.0? What other changes would you like to see? Let us know in the comments section below.
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