Ubuntu 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot, prowled out of the development forest earlier this month. In our review of Ubuntu 11.04, released back in April, we took a close look at the strengths and weaknesses of the new Unity shell and compared it with GNOME 3.0. In this review, we're going to revisit Unity to see how much progress it has made over the past six months. We will also take a close look at the updated Software Center user interface and the transition from Evolution to Thunderbird.

Unity

The Unity desktop shell, which provides the heart of Ubuntu's user interface, is one of the distribution's key differentiating features. It was originally unveiled at an Ubuntu Developer Summit in 2010 and became a standard part of the desktop installation in version 11.04 earlier this year.

Although the Unity shell brought a number of significant aesthetic and usability improvements to the Ubuntu desktop, it suffered from some real drawbacks. The quality of the Unity environment that shipped in Ubuntu 11.04 was eroded by technical rough edges, questionable design decisions, and a handful of reliability issues. It was ready to ship, but not mature enough to shine.

Ubuntu's developers have done a great deal of work over the past six months to fill in the gaps and make the Unity experience better for end users. This effort has helped to flesh out previously incomplete parts of the user interface and has produced a noticeable improvement in Unity's robustness during day-to-day use. It's now more stable and its behavior is generally more predictable.

A number of design changes have also contributed to better usability in 11.10, but some of our major grievances with Unity still haven't been fully addressed. Unity looks like a work in progress, and looks like it needs one more cycle of refinement to reach full maturity.

Dash

A particularly large number of changes were made to Unity's Dash interface in Ubuntu 11.10. The Dash is an overlay that exposes all of the application launchers and provides quick access to files. In the previous version of Ubuntu, the main Dash views were accessible through separate "lenses" that had specific features. In 11.10, the standard lenses have all been consolidated into a more a streamlined Dash.

The Ubuntu button used to activate the Dash was previously located on the left edge of the top panel, but in the new version it has been moved into the dock itself. It now appears as the top item in the dock. This seems like a good change because it increases consistency, making the function of the button more obvious.

The user can optionally maximize the Dash in 11.10, making it fill the whole screen so that additional content is visible. This feature can be toggled by hitting the maximize button that appears in the top left-hand corner while the Dash is visible. I like to have the Dash maximized on my netbook, but favor the regular size on a desktop computer.

The main Dash view gives you quick access to the Web browser, mail client, music player, and photo management application. At the bottom of the Dash is a new context switcher that allows the user to easily change between the various lens views: application launchers, documents, music, and home. The application and document lenses work mostly like their equivalents in the previous version.

The music lens is a new feature designed to integrate with the Banshee music player and with Canonical's music store. The music lens will show you the songs and albums that you have in your media library. When you click one, it will launch Banshee and start playing, and the music is displayed with album cover art. You can use the built-in search feature to quickly find specific songs and albums. In addition to showing music in your local library, it will also show an additional section of matching songs that are available for purchase from the Ubuntu music store.

The file and application lenses got some improvements in 11.10. The file lens has a more sophisticated set of filtering options that make it easier to find specific files, and it has already proved useful by saving me a few trips to the file manager.

In our review of Ubuntu 11.04, we singled out the abominable app lens for special criticism, accusing it of being one of the worst atrocities perpetrated in the history of desktop interface design since Microsoft Bob. The replacement of the wretched pseudo combobox in favor of a nice and clean category filter interface has made the whole thing much less execrable in 11.10. It's actually starting to feel respectable.

When you select a category, it shows three sections: frequently used applications in the category, applications in the category, and applications that you can install in that category. The list of installable applications is still a mostly-useless and seemingly random assortment of things that I don't care about. There is also sometimes redundancy between the list of frequently used applications and the regular list.

The application lens will now thankfully remember when you expand the full list of installed applications, so you don't have to do so every time you want to launch something. Between that and the proper one-click category filtering, the application lens is a great deal more practical in 11.10. It's finally workable enough for day-to-day use.

The Dash's home lens allows a global search of Dash content, including files, applications, and music. It subjectively feels faster than the equivalent feature from the previous version, and Dash performance in general seems a bit snappier.

Global menubar

My criticisms of the global menubar implementation still stand in 11.10. The issues with inconsistent titling, title truncation, dialogs that make a parent window's menus inaccessible, and the inherent lack of discoverability haven't been addressed. Some applications with non-standard widgets, such as LibreOffice, still don't support global menubar integration.

I wrote in my 11.04 review that I was on the fence about the global menubar in Ubuntu but thought that it seemed promising. Seeing that none of the issues have materially been addressed in 11.10 was a bit disappointing. I'm hopeful that the developers will refine it further before Ubuntu 12.04 or consider rethinking it in favor of an approach that fits better with the per-window menu paradigm of the standard Linux widget toolkits.