Ubuntu 11.10 with the Unity shell is a good looking OS. It nicely supports my duel monitor setup and even my Genesis printer. For a Nix build, it's pretty compatible. Unity works a lot like Windows 7, with smart docking of windows and seamless switching between windows and applications.

From this perspective, it's a pretty nice system.

But it's fatally flawed. The major one being that it is just flat out slow. This is a I7 960 with 8GB of DDR3 - 1600 and a OCZ SSD boot device. I duel boot this same machine to Windows 7, 64 bit.

Boot times may not mean much, you don't boot all that often. Still, the incredibly sluggish boot times of Oneiric Ocelot leave me shaking my head. Not only are the boot times uncomfortably long, but the odd, purplish screen gives you no indication that anything is happening. The first time through, I thought the machine had crashed.

This was understandable, because despite warning, the first round in I tried the 64 bit version. Ubuntu pretty well tells you it doesn't work, but I thought I'd try it anyway. - it doesn't work.

Okay, so it takes over twice as long as Windows to boot, that doesn't mean anything if the OS runs well, right? This is the 32 bit version. It works and appears rock solid, no issues that I've run into. It's just slow. I thought the Linux specific drivers for the Nvidia GTX460 would help, but they really didn't. The X Server interface provides much of the functionality that was present in Windows, which is nice. But Unity remains sluggish.

Windows has a distinct "snap" on this hardware. Launch a program and the response is instant - it should be with this kind of power. Not so with Oneiric. I can only describe it as "ponderous." You click on an icon and Linux ponders it for awhile, then launches the program. The same LibreOffice applications that run quickly under Mint, run eventually with Ubuntu. I can't help but wonder if the whole thing is memory starved and if a working 64 bit version would salvage it all?