Ubuntu 11.04 upgrade with Unity GUI is a disaster - dead on arrival

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating disaster. After waiting almost 2 days for Ubuntu 11.04 to download, I had to wait most of the day for it to install. This was the slowest download, and longest install of an upgrade that I've experienced.

When the machine rebooted all I saw was my wall paper and the few icons I have on the desktop. The menu bars at the top and bottom of the screen were gone.

This was a bit of a panic.

But then I remembered we were getting some sort of new, proprietary GUI – a thing called Unity. I guess the idea is that you push the mouse against the left edge of the screen, and then all the menu's you would ever want will pop-up.

I can't say anything about that feature, because I've never seen it.

Without having the basic menu bars there was no way to start any applications, or even turn off the computer and give the 'one minute wait and try again'. I had to kill the machine by brutally switching it off.

Several on-offs got nowhere.

So then it was time to start hacking the system. Suddenly it came home, that ache in the guts – I've got some stuff on my computer that I really don't want to loose.

The first bit of fun was interrupting the boot process to try to find the old version of Ubuntu. Somewhere, on some menu there used to be a 'Rollback Installation' option. No sign of that. On a little menu on the bottom there were some options as the the GUI I wanted to wake up with. In the old days that was a choice between GNOME and KDE. Now I had UBUNTU and UBUNTU CLASSIC, and the SAFE options. I tried the SAFE, and only got a root terminal. Not much help.

I then tried the CLASSIC, and got the old GNOME look – my menu bars across the top and bottom with my applications and my destop-switcher choices.

Being nominally alive I then decided to figure out what was wrong. But my Wifi was dead. For some reason the Broadcom Driver would not be accepted.

So then it was back to the boot menu. I have several versions of the kernal. The top choice is supposed to be most advanced, and the lower ones just that – lower in 'goodness'.

I chose the next kernel down. A generic version without the -PAE extensions.

I got some WIFI connection.

So then it trying the older kernel, with the Unity GUI. No joy.

With the less-flashy kernel, and the CLASSIC GUI choice I was alive. I started looking at all the bulletin boards. I was not alone.

It seems the Unity GUI is a disaster. Every bulletin board was flooded with copies of my problem. I tried various of the solutions without any luck and finally decided to give up.

Conclusion: Ubuntu 11.04 and it's new Unity GUI is a disaster. It's the beginning of the drift away from the rock solid LINIX OS that UBUNTU used to be the forefront of. Who ever is calling the shots at UBUNTU wants to follow the MICROSOFT model and drift into the proprietary world of flawed software and operating systems.