Usually i used to be amongst the early adopters of Ubuntu Linux Releases. As such i was installing Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) directly after it was released the 28th of April 2011. I knew that Canonical decided to switch away from Gnome to their own Desktop environment called Unity but i thought this was more a strategic move than grounded in functional considerations.

So i started to use Unity. My first impression was unexpectedly good, but playing around a bit with the Window Manager i found out that it was far to inflexible in comparison to Gnome 2.0. I don’t know why, but then i decided to give Gnome 3 a chance by installing a PPA that updated Natty Narwhal to Gnome 3.0. First impression was good as well and i worked for a while with that Window Manager. But together with a bug in the Linux kernel implementation that made my CPU literally burning and the battery capacity going down by as much as 30% i was finally sure that the entire update to Natty was a mistake.

I decided to downgrade all my computers (including machines on work and home server) to enterprise stable 10.04.03 LTS (Luxid Lynx). This release just works fine on all my computers and i still like the look and feel as well as the handling of Gnome 2.0. I must admit that i fully agree to Linus Torvalds (the inventor of the Linux Kernel) who recently said that that distributors should spent some effort to correct the step that the Gnome Foundation took. Maybe i am foolish but also Gnome itself could recognize that the step they took was a step back.

I hope the Open Source Community and the Gnome Foundation will reconsider going back and improving Gnome 2 instead of spending ages on Gnome 3.0. Maybe even Window Managers like LXDE or XFCE could step in here.