shoved out the door too quickly, just to meet an arbitrary deadline, and a prime example of devs not giving even a nod to the possible needs/wants of the community.
if you are a refugee from apple or ms, this may be the distro for your great grandma. maybe for you, too. but it's a step down, if you thought U-10.10 was Pretty Good!
in the desktop mode, many fine tweeks to the speed and performance of the distro, but the eyecandy and 'toys' are annoying at best, and pose an obstruction to useful and easy work: especially the lack of scroll bars, and the astonishing load of desktop "junk" upon log in. you gotta see it to believe it.

attempts to load the Alternate edition in console mode only, from the command line resulted in consecutive total crashes. attempts to upgrade from 10.10 via the console also produced a Black Screen of Death.
unusable.

Been using Ubuntu for years, but this release forced me to find somewhere else to go. I've migrated both my machines to Debian and am very happy. Unity is a smoldering pile of crap. On a machine with 256 MB of video memory and 4 GB of RAM, Unity felt VERY sluggish. It also felt very dumbed down, and does not offer very many customization options. The menu navigation in Unity makes it very hard to find applications because each application's item takes up an insane amount of screen real-estate. Even running the classic Gnome Desktop it runs extremely slow compared to Debian with Gnome. If I tried dragging Totem around while a video played the whole desktop would start dragging until I stopped. The installation also does not offer very many options in the way of customizing your installation. If you want to install server programs, you've got to download the server edition and use another CD, or install them manually after installing your edition of choice. If you want to use Ubuntu, go with 10.10 or earlier, because all 11.04 is going to do is make you angry. Otherwise you can go with a more stable distribution that is less worried about rushing out entire releases every 6 months, and more worried about producing a quality product.

They've tried to tart it up and have succeeded in spoiling my distribution of choice for the last few years. There is the option of the Ubuntu Classic desktop which I couldn't switch on fast enough, unfortunately it's still slow, just typing text into LibreOffice drove me mad as I had to keep looking up to see if it had got around to filling the letters in.

Voted with my feet and installed Fedora, works great and hey, guess what? I'm typing this post without having to wait for the characters to appear onscreen :) I do miss apt-get/Synaptic though but that's something I can live with.

@Ubuntu - You've messed up with this one but I'll give you a four for having the confidence to try something new, just make sure the bloody thing works better before launching next time!

Not the finest hour for Ubuntu. Unity seems to be better at getting in your way instead of getting out of your way.

I've put my work desktop back to 10.10, run my home desktop to Ubuntu no effects and installed Crunchbang on my netbook until things have settled down.

Better luck next time

I succumbed to whimsy and upgraded from the wonderful, stable Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and my computer behaves as thought somebody poured glue into its innards.
Just about everything is slow except those things that are slower.
Matthew

This is what I use when I'm trying to defect others to the Linux world. Sets up real easy, too. Yes, it is for noobs, but sometimes you just need something that works. I'm OK with Unity, but it needs some work. Waiting for 11.10!

[Edit]: I've defected to Arch, but I still would recommend this to noobs.

Utter trash
I've been using Open Suse for a number of years, and decided to run Ubuntu along side windows on my family/media PC.
I used the wubi - the windows installer to install this version of Ubuntu. Imediately after installation I fell out with it. It's slow the GUI is cluncky and awkward to navigate. I tryed to use the software installer, and imediately hit a brick wall with dependancy issues. I thought i'd gone back 10 years distro wise!
So I'll not be using or recomending this to anyone.
Back to Suse it is.

I cannot believe the negative reviews I am seeing on here. As a precaution from all the negative reviews I dual booted 11.04 with 10.04.2 LTS on a 100 gig dell lap top. I find myself using 11.04 more then 10.04.2 Installed google earth and wine..everything working perfectly!!! Thank you Ubuntu team for a new and obviously free product.

I have been using Ubuntu Linux for almost 3 years and I have loved every minute of it until now. I have to say that 11.04 is the most disappointing of all the upgrades I have experienced. I want to try something else, but I have no clue as to what is what. The technician that first introduced me to Linux is no longer around. If anyone out there is willing to introduce me to something else, I would really appreciate it.

Unfortunately, most of the mentioned cons go for me too; managed to hang Unity within an instance, not being able to get it back; ok, back to Ubuntu classic - well, after a very short time that simply meant back to another version, I just could not seem to find my way around in this version - none of the goodies I got so used to seemed to run properly anymore. If indeed as I have read version 11.04 is the last one to come with a 'classic' desktop, I don't think I'll install it very soon again...

After testing several distros other than Ubuntu I decided to go with Xubuntu, since Ubuntu seems to have the most available programs (if I am looking for something it is always there).
Result: a very flexible and extremely fast OS, would recomment this one to anyone! It did give me some problems over the past few weeks, but with the help of the XFCE-forum they were dealt with in an instance!

The default Gnome with Unity just contributed to formating the harddisk again after the installation of Ubuntu 11.04. Sure, you can use Gnome classic or other wm, but that is not an excuse for upgrading or update to Ubuntu 11.04, at least not for me. One can continue with Ubuntu 10.10. However, I changed completely to another distro (Slackware) because I dont like the way Ubuntu is taken with more computer-hungry desktop effect junks and inbuilded unnecessary packages.

The first time I installed this I did not like it. I did the daring upgrade from 10.10. That was a mistake. I then installed it a couple of months later from a full CD. It was much better.

The best part was I installed the updated ATI drivers for my laptop and they are easier to install in 11.04 compared to 10.10. Some libraries needed are missing in 10.10.

I also use vmplayer and it works awesome.

I would highly recommend this approach if you need to use windows apps instead of the dual booting.

I installed the automatic update from 10.10 to 11.04 -- mistake. Couldn't get the desktop working (no keyboard options).

Re-installed after downloading from Ubuntu. Also a mistake. I just can't figure out how to use Unity. Windows won't minimize or maximize, your programs are hard to find, and it's just clunky.

Went back to Ubuntu 10.10 and love it.

If Ubuntu insists on this interface or doesn't make it easier to use, looks like I'll be heading to Debian in the future.

Am running Kubuntu 11.04. This is my first linux (am a linux newbie), and on a netbook too. Runs great, although I had to work at making everything work well (firefox, java, flash, etc.) Stable enough and the UI is quite nice. Downloaded the Oxygen theme plugin for firefox which made it quite cool. And also installed a firewall (ufw) and antivirus (avast!) to protect everything when I move occasionally back to Windows to do backups (just an old habit of doing it from there using EaseUS Todo software).

What I really don't like:
It just drinks the life out of my battery. Just for that, I might soon look up some alternative distros. Am still learning what's out there; thank you everyone for your informative posts.

Cheers!
Nat
San Jose, CA

I have a mid-high end machine with 8Gb of RAM and a decent graphic card thus i didn't suffer any slugghish problems as reported before by somebody.

Anyway the system is really stable, it works immediately out of the box, it has all what is needed by a traditional Wind0ws user. It is a good starting point for newbies too.

P.S. Tested the Unity interface: awful. (think that i'm in love with gnome from the project itself starts...) I noticed that in 11.10 release Gnome2 will not be supported. For that i switched immediately on Xfce 4.8.

Cheers
David
Torino, Italy