Thanks for your comment.
I’ve grown used to Unity and, in general, like it (I find the traditional menu driven paradigm for navigating a computer so-o-o-o last century).
Ubuntu is a Linux derivative and over the past 6 months I have come to realize that Canonical (Ubuntu’s parent company) focuses on the front-end user experience and not so much on the back-end OS. In fact, Ubuntu is often criticized for not contributing more to the OS – whic is true, Canonical does little OS development. Consequently, the OS code it runs is fairly stock stuff – code that will be running in other distributions – so switching to another distro will likely result in the same problems.
Where Ubuntu shines (compared to other Linux distros) is that it works out of the box – the fiddly details of running / installing / updating applications on a Linux box are nicely hidden from the average user.
Unity is a big if. It is cler that the Unity in 11.10 was not finished. It was only good for launching applications. In 12.04, with the HUD, Unity is much more powerful. Canonical’s biggest blunder with Unity is in not providing a tutorial or walk through. You can’t change the UI paradigm and not explain it to people.

Thanks for your comment.
Since I wrote the article, Ubuntu 11.10 has stabilized and I haven’t encountered many of the problems mentioned.
I do run Ubuntu 11.04 on a laptop (without Unity) and am happy with it.
I have no problem with running OSes under VirtualBox and use 11.10 quite happily there.
As for upgrading, well … I feel the typical home user is more interested in an “upgrade” rather than installing a fresh OS every time there is a new version. They want to keep all their old applications , data, and setup as is. Installing a fresh OS means the user has to (1) backup and reinstall their data, (2) reinstall all their applications and (3) do any tweaking and customization they had in place.
For a typical home user, I think Unity is a pretty good interface. After using it for a while, it grows on you.
Canonical made two errors: (1) recommending upgrades to intermediate versions. I think the average hoem user is only interested in stable long term support versions rather than the in progress versions released every six months; (2) Unity was dropped on users without any tutorial or training. I think this was a place where Canonical should have included some sort of interactive tutorial when Unity is first run. If you install KDE, you get little popups and hints that try to guide you through the interface.
As for user interfaces … well, they change over time. I have considered doing a review of “power user” desktops (like ratpoison, spectrwm, ion, etc), but I figure most power users are using emacs 😉

I’ve learned a fair bit since I wrote the article. I think Ubuntu (and other software distros) should better distinguish between stable long term supported releases and potentially problematic interim releases. But I doubt they would be happy to call it 11.10 Beta
Unity does grow on you after a while. Ubtuntu should have had some sort of interactive tutorial running to guide people through the new interface – just dropping it on people is a big no-no.
Alt-Tab works well to locate minimized apps.
All said, after testing many Linux distros, Ubuntu is the one that comes closest to “getting it” when it comes to releasing a usable distro of Linux. Not just usable, but install friendly.
I’ve been playing with 12.04. The earliest releases were horribly unstable, however, since mid-January, they’ve been reasonably stable (but new updates can always break it).
My expectation of 12.04 is that it may suffer from some issues at release but they will be fixed up as time progresses.
Overall, 11.10 isn’t that bad. Yes, it did have some inital issues, but they got ironed out.

I haven’t used 10.10, but I was happy with 11.04 – as mentioned in the article, I had that “Linux finally got it right” feeling. While the initial release of 11.10 was horrible, whne you do the install now, it goes very smoothly.
Unity is still an issue, but, for the average user, it’s probably all they need. The fact they need to be “taught” a new interface is another matter. Ubuntu seriously dropped the ball on Unity – they should have had some tutorial script that walked user’s through it (if flash game on the web come with built in tutorials in the first few levels, surely Ubuntu could have done the same).
Since I wrote the article, I’ve tried out over a dozen different Linux distros and keep coming back to the feeling that Ubuntu “gets it”, whereas the other distros don’t (Ubuntu based distros obviously “get it” because they basically have the same installer as Ubuntu). My biggest disappointment was Fedora 16 which failed to install under VMWare – clearly RedHat is more interested in the enterprise market (which pays money) than the “free download” market. Linux Mint is nice (although, it i based on Ubuntu) – the main problem with Linux Mint is, I think (I could be wrong), there is no upgrade path: when a new version comes out, you have to INSTALL it instead of UPGRADE to it.
Thanks for your feedback.

Over the past many weeks, I’ve been playing around with lots and lots of Linux distros. I have come to the conclusion that (1) Linux is all pretty much the same under the hood, (2) there are only handful of truly distinct distros (like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc), (3) most Linux distros are just a customized version of some main distro (customizations are typically: the appearance and the bundled / default applications), (4) when it comes to desktops, there are only really four: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, and XFCE – some distros offer all four, others focus on only one.
Because of this, any distro that wants to be economically viable has t, not only differentiate itself from the others, but also has to lock users into it.
Most smaller distros fail at this because upgrading to the latest version means installing the new distro instead of upgrading. The average user is not going to be happy to have to reinstall all their favourite apps, restore data, etc.
Major distros have to focus on making themselves incompatible with other major distros – thus preventing people from upgrading from Ubuntu to, say, Fedora.
Having said all that, I find Ubuntu to still be the best. I was disappointed with many of the other distros – they don’t have as extensive a list of software apps for installation, or the installation procedure is not as nice as Ubuntu’s. I was particularily disappointed that Fedora Desktop failed to install (I didn’t troubleshoot why), but, then again, their focus is on providing Enterprise solutions (where people pay for support).
Believe it or not, I am finding Unity less and less annoying – not that I am a Unity power user (and I still use Windows as my primary OS – Windows 7 now that my XP machine finally died).

Ubuntu has probably removed legacy support from its newer distributions. There is only so much space available in a CD sized disto (~700Mb). DVDs can store more, but that makes for a bigger download, i.e. more bandwidth, more time.
I have’t booted from CD. On my desktop, I run Ubuntu inside a VirtualBox machine and it runs fine there.
I also have 11.04 installed on a 7 year old laptop (an Averatec) and it runs quite well there, although … I do find the inteface kind of sluggish – it is not the “Let Linux breath new life into your aging hardware” experience. Over the past 3 days, I’ve been trying out various window managers and dekstop environments and have discovered that the sluggishness is Ubuntu’s desktop environment – or, more accurately, Gnome 3. Mind you, the other main contender, KDE Plasma doesn’t come off any better – in fact, I think it even more sluggish.