New Laptop

I've donated my old MacBook Pro (5,2 unibody) to the mobile development team. I've replaced it with a Dell Precision M4600 with a solid state drive, 16GB of ram, core i7 and various other bells and whistles. This meant upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 and the new Unity desktop. I was prepared to hate it. Shockingly, I think it is a big step forward for Linux.

dislikes

1. If you drag the window to the top bar, it will automatically maximize the window. This is annoying for people with large monitors (Dell 2711) who want vertical maximization, but not horizontal maximization.
2. The Mac-like menu-bar disassociation with the window. I just find this annoying. I prefer to work in context.
3. The lack of easy customization via right clicking on menu/task/etc bars. Having to download a separate tool is extra silly.
4. The task bar is too fat.

likes

1. Empathy and the way it connects to the top bar.
2. Banshee and the way it connects to the top bar.
3. Ease of search for things, I'm really done with hierarchies.

Things are still a little flaky, but I expect that will work itself out. In particular swapping between 1 and 2 monitors practically requires a reboot (NVidia drivers). BRTFS didn't work as root partition. Suspend is flaky again and slow to recover. However, these are common problems with they change things radically and I buy brand new hardware. I expect these things will be worked out in a release or two.

Now everything is lightning fast. With 4 cores, 16G RAM and a 128G main drive (I have a normal secondary drive), my complete and utter lack of patience for load-time is satisfied for now.