Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal released
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually like the innovations canonical keeps bringing to unity (although I'm not in love with the amazon searches). My problem with it is execution - run gnome shell on the identical hardware and it will always run circles* around unity especially in terms ui responsiveness. Just press the super key after you've been doing something else for a while and start typing - in my experience gnome shell seems to respond almost instantaneously while unity can take as long as several seconds to bring up the default lens on decent hardware.<p>I like a lot of their design decisions like the global menu, dechroming maximized windows, easy custom lenses etc. But the compiz/custom code base just isn't up to the task. Worse, unity is so tied to their non-mainline gui stack that it is a herculean effort to get it to run on anything besides ubuntu, preventing them from getting fixes from outside their ecosystem.<p>I know there is a lot of bad blood these days between gnome and canonical but they really need to bite the bullet and rebase on mutter, gtk3 & gnome shell. Canonical is great at a lot of things, but core performance oriented software just isn't one of them. Let somebody else do the heavy lifting.<p>I haven't gotten a chance to try the gnome shell spin that they're producing this cycle. Can anyone comment on how well its working? My experience trying to go vanilla gnome 3 on ubuntu in the past has been less than stellar, but I really appreciate the ubuntu community and things like launchpad ppas.<p>*250ms-2000ms lag