Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Reviewed In Depth

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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: Multimedia

RawTherapee

Converting RAW images to either 8-bit JPEG or 16-bit PNG formats using RawTherapee results in essentially identical times in all three variations of Ubuntu.

Blender

The Blender render benchmark gives off another round of scores, which are, for all intents and purposes, the same.

POV-Ray

Surprise, surprise. the POV-Ray scores are also identical, with no release or GUI having a meaningful lead over the other.

LAME

Encoding .wav files to .mp3 files with LAME again results in a three-way tie between the trio of Ubuntu variations.

HandBrake

HandBrake also gives identical scores to each of the three competitors.

Apparently, it really doesn't matter whether you stick with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx or upgrade to 11.04 if multimedia is your main concern.

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