Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, I decided to take Canonical’s advice and upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 11.04 - Natty Narwhal. Bad decision.

It installed easy enough, but once done I was a bit confused by the new Unity desktop. I couldn’t easily find what used to live in the old Preferences or Administration sections of the System menu.

Then I noticed that the Desktop Cube of the compiz 3D desktop had been disabled. A short bit of hunting later and I managed to open up Compiz settings manager and re-enable it. Immediately, all the window decoration disappeared, and the main taskbar and became unresponsive. All I could do was use the currently opened applications. I tried to revert the compiz settings back to the defaults, but no dice. I tried to restart, but this just booted me into a desktop with no menus whatsoever, and no keyboard shortcuts working. In short - no way to launch an application. Crap.

So I fell back to the shell, and tried to revert to the Gnome 3 desktop. This installed okay, but didn’t work.

So, in short, I innocently and completely broke my upgraded installation in less than 10 minutes. 1 hour of trying to fix it later, and I’m giving up. This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning. I’m reinstalling the system, and am going to wait a few versions before trying to upgrade again.

This version is really not ready for prime time. Canonical’s reputation will suffer.