Back to Linux
It’s been sometime since my last post. There were quite a few things I wanted to write over the last few months but my laziness has been an obstacle. Today I have finally decided to break the silence and come back with a post.
Since Early 2010 I’ve been sticking with Windows 7 and Mac OSX – First OSX Leopard and later OSX Snow Leopard (A huge thank goes out to Basura Ramanayake for lending me his macbook). I’ve been quite happy with it so I never wanted to make a switch to Linux. I have used Linux here and there before 2010 but ever since, the only place I’ve used Linux is on my web hosting environments.
However, just a couple of days back I wanted to switch back to Linux, and so I have setup my favorite distro – Ubuntu. Sure, I have not used many distros so I may not have made the best decision. Anyway I went ahead and installed 64 bit Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot on my one year old fat beast, Dell XPS L501x.
Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Desktop
The main and obvious first change I have noticed was Unity. At an overall unity gives a clean and united user experience. I particularly want to comment on two unity components.
Unity Dock
Pros:
- Gives a nice and integrated look and feel
Cons:
- Doesn’t always auto-appear when the mouse is moved to the left corner of the screen. At times I have to press the windows key (wait. Linux Key) on the keyboard to get the dock back.
- Cannot move the dock to bottom so you are stuck with the dock hanging on the left corner. Found a few tweaks that can be done to move to bottom but I have not tested any yet. Only thing I can say is that change of dock position is not yet supported officially.
- Have to scroll through application icons when there are many applications open. (another shortcoming of having a vertical dock – See the collapsed set of icons at the bottom of unity dock)
Unity Notify OSD
Pros:
- Looks good and unobtrusive
Cons:
- Again, non-customizable out of the box? (There seems to have some 3rd party patches)
- Since the notification is unobtrusive, you can’t dismiss the alert forcefully. So if some awkward message pops up on the notification while someone else is looking at your monitor, well, you are going to stay without any help until your peer finish reading the message. Yup.
I guess it’s enough about Unity. May be more will come sometime later. Just may be. However, we can put the issues with Unity aside and go for an alternative. For example, if one really needs, they can simply get rid of Unity dock and get something like Cairo dock working.
Cairo Dock
I can completely ignore pretty much any issue with Unity. Because after all, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as everything else runs charmingly smooth. But I found myself in a bit of a disappointment this time.
Sounds
Honestly I am not quite sure what is wrong with the audio but clearly there’s something missing. Because I dont hear the finer audio details out of the in-built JBL 2.1 speakers. It can probably be the lack of Waves MaxAudio3 on this Ubuntu setup. But I don’t know to be sure. I have also tried installing Realtek audio drivers for Linux Kernel 3.0 just to find the system kills it sounds entirely. I have tried for many hours with no success and it cost me 2 another installations of Ubuntu over the old one. I dont prefer to do it once again, so bye bye Realtek Drivers. But somehow I am now stuck with friggin ugly sounds. YIKES!
Heat!
Sure, this XPS heats lot more than other laptops does. But when running Ubuntu it simply drives me nuts with it’s unbearable heat. Right now I have a cooling pad sitting beneath the lappy and a ceiling fan rotating at full speed just above it (I know the fan doesn’t matter much, but at least it keeps me cool in this summer 
), and as of now – without any heavey application running – I am reading a 74C temperature on all 4 cores.
CPU Temperature at Almost Idle
When running quite a few applications it starts heating more and eventually turn itself off. So far it has happened about 4-5 times; Twice today. I have looked around for a solution but still couldn’t find a reliable solution. Some claims this to be a bug with the kernel used in Oneiric Ocelot (Kernel 3.0.0-12-generic). However, regardless, this is annoying.
(NOT) Conclusion
So this time, I am not too happy about the experience I’ve got. May be I will try something like Fedora and see at least if it runs smoothly. Or else may be I might just jump the ship back to Windows or hackintosh after all.
Should I revert back or should I wait?
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