To release or not to release ..(Unity)!

Like most of the Linux enthusiasts, I have closely been following the progress on Unity’s development and the Natty Narwhal release cycle. I have come to different conclusions at different times after testing each release. It seems like a roller coaster ride with this development cycle of Ubuntu . Never before have I been so enthusiastic about Ubuntu and equally so critical about shortcomings in the distribution.

Digging through the recent mail archives, I found that Canonical did a use case with 10 volunteers from different backgrounds . The task was to use Unity for two hours or so, give feedback to Canonical, so that Canonical can deduce a report on the user’s experience with Unity.  A lot of  users were unsuccessful in doing most of the ordinary tasks with Unity and was able to crash Unity within 1 hour of testing. The detailed report of the use case can be found here.

Interestingly, when these users were asked for feedback on the new Unity, they gave a positive response!  Most of the users liked the refreshing looks of Unity. Details of the feedback can be found here.

After going through the feedbacks from these testers, I filed a bug at launchpad, suggesting to add a video tutorial, in the cd, which would help Unity’s cause as this is a radical approach to Linux environment computing. The bug report can be found here. If you guys think it’s a good idea, please click  on this bug affects me.

Unity is being developed at a tremendous speed. Last report that came in , said about 1200 fixes have been made in the last month or so! It is no doubt a fantastic achievement . However. after all this development, bug fixing, testing and all the excitement, the golden question still stands. …. Is it good to release Unity as default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04? Again, as of today, Unity has made tremendous progress in developing something which is quite eye-catching and quite unlike traditional Linux desktops. However, I still feel, releasing Unity in 10 days would be a little ahead of time!

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