Some quick screenshots from Natty Narwhal which I have been tinkering with since December. Still in Alpha so only use it you are comfortable with your system self-destructing routinely, though it makes the daily updates even more exciting because you never know what will happen when you reboot. The big change this release cycle is ‘Unity‘, the very flash new dock that is not a dock. They rolled this out on the Netbook Edition in 10.10 and I hated it. Used up too much screen space and slowed down my netbook too much, so I just installed the desktop version and ‘hey presto’ everything worked again. However, it is much better now, more refined and quicker, overall I have been impressed and think they are onto something now. There is much more to come from this and by time the next LTS (Long Term Release) arrives, for the end-users who want stability in April 2012, Unity will be polished to a shine.

Just to go off on a tangent, all this talk of desktop and netbook editions is no more. From 11.04 it will all just be ‘Ubuntu’. Ubuntu will run on whatever you install it on, just download and go. Or as Canonical puts it;

So we are going back to our roots. From 11.04 the core product that you run on your PC will be simply, Ubuntu. Therefore the next release will be Ubuntu 11.04 and you can run that, my friend, on anything you like from a netbook to a notebook to a desktop.

Click here for the entire blog post describing the reasoning. Enough about that, here are a few screenshots of my current install: