This morning came the release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot. I rushed to install it, left in a hurry for school, and arrived back to find it pretty much done (it had to pause to ask my permission while I was at school). So now I have Oneiric. Cool. It brings signifcant improvements. Skype, for example, loads about three times as fast. The settings are much neater, and Mac-like. In fact, it has a bit of a Mac OS feel to it, what with Unity. But that's good, because Mac's user experience is fantastic.

Anyway, I was awfully excited to be running the new and improved version of Unity that comes with Oneiric, because I'd grown to like Unity, despite it's bugs, and the improvements were pretty big. But about 5 minutes in, I discovered that I could hardly use my computer for lag. It was awful. The cause? Compiz, the 3D effects behind Unity. It was using a whole 120MB of RAM, and that was increasing my computer's viscosity tenfold. Essentially, I need a better computer.

So what do I use now? I loved Unity but I can't use it, and Unity 2D is hideous and featureless. I'm not going back to GNOME 2. I'm currently running GNOME-Shell, which seems cool, but unlike anything I've ever used before. It's very minimalistic, which I love, but unfortunately (and necessarily, considering the design), seems feature-light. Not too shabbily, pressing the Super (that's Windows) key opens up a Unity-style dock, notifications, expose-style window previews, and previews of all the workspaces open (which are organised in a vertical manner, for some reason). It reminds me of iOS, because of the clock right in the middle of the panel up top.

Well, I may settle for this, I'll probably have to. I suppose I could try Xubuntu or Kubuntu, but KDE and XDE don't really appeal to me from what I've seen of them.

None of this would be an issue if it weren't for my blasted hardware issues.