Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Reviewed In Depth

Features
By Adam Overa
published

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) has arrived, and we have the scoop on everything you need to know about Canonical's latest Linux, along with the usual review and benchmarks. Is this the change we've been waiting for, or is the Natty Narwhal a fail whale?

Benchmark Results: File Copy Times And Archiving

File Copy Times

When copying from a hard drive to another location on the same disk, the new Ubuntu is a few seconds slower than the previous LTS, both with Unity and using the old GNOME 2 shell of Ubuntu Classic. Ubuntu 11.04 Classic finishes a fraction of a second before Unity.

Copying from a USB drive to the hard drive yields the same results, with Natty Narwhal coming in behind Lucid Lynx by a few seconds. Unity and Classic are again pretty even, with Classic having a negligible edge over Unity.

When copying from the hard disk to a USB drive, which is incidentally the longest file copy scenario, it's Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity that has a clear edge over both Ubuntu 11.04 Classic and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Archiving

Whether compressing or decompressing, using either tar.gz or .zip formats, Ubuntu 11.04 Classic and 10.04 LTS hold a noticeable lead over Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity interface.

Adam Overa
121 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jryan388
    One problem I faced with the standard unity desktop is the horrible performance even on my Athlon II @ 3.6 and Radeon 5750. I upgraded on launch day, so maybe canonical fixed it by now, but the performance was absolutely abysmal. The easiest fix is the unity-2d package. Great performance, doesn't look any worse.
    Reply
  • ksa-_-jed
    U should add more distros to the benchmarks like Debian, Fedora, and open SUSE.
    Reply
  • shiftmx112
    Meh is exactly how I described 10.10 Still gonna try Unity.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    11.04 sucks; plain and simple.

    Power users can do little to nothing to fix things between gnome3 and the buggy Unity.

    I wouldn't even bother with 11.04 when 10.04 is rock solid.

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • davewolfgang
    I tried the upgrade, but unity is blech. I am still using the upgrade, but doing the classic.

    But I may go back to 10.10 for my EeePC.
    Reply
  • adamovera
    jryan388One problem I faced with the standard unity desktop is the horrible performance even on my Athlon II @ 3.6 and Radeon 5750. I upgraded on launch day, so maybe canonical fixed it by now, but the performance was absolutely abysmal. The easiest fix is the unity-2d package. Great performance, doesn't look any worse.Wow, that isn't right, the old X2 test system which has a considerably older Nvidia card runs it great. What's the full specs?
    Reply
  • adamovera
    ksa-_-jedU should add more distros to the benchmarks like Debian, Fedora, and open SUSE.Fedora 15/GNOME 3 coming up next. I have never had any luck whatsoever with openSUSE, will keep trying new versions as they come out though.
    Reply
  • bellman80
    I tried 11.04. Unity was more annoying than useful. I installed the new Linux Mint instead, I'm a happy camper now.
    Reply
  • Tamz_msc
    I'm going to stick with 10.04, because it has been running rock-solid without a glitch for almost a year. It was able to find drivers for my on-board audio which even Windows 7 could not find.

    Unity is not my cup of tea., though I'm looking forward to GNOME 3.0.

    Till then Lucid Lynx FTW!
    Reply
  • RogueKitsune
    Unity is a nice idea, but not my cup of tea. Overall I am happy with the changes in 11.04. Right now i have my laptop(AMD Turion x2, radeon x1200)running it with no problems(everything worked out of the box)
    Reply