Canonical made 11.04 to compete with windows. Bad move. MS is in a very different league and trying to compete with them is like playing with fire. MS made that same mistake when they tried to go after Mac.

Unfortunately, 11.04 needs a system with powerful 3D accelerations. If you do not have that brand of GPU, then you won't be able to run unity which is the new DE for ubuntu. However, you can still use it 11.04. Just switch to the classic DE witch is gnome 2.32. It should work fine.

This sounds like another issue that was posted that was due to the AIT proprietary drivers not working correctly on the kernel that ubuntu 11.04 is using. It is just odd that the included drivers are havin similar issues. Have you filed a bug report in luanchpad for this issue?

As for the difference, I think canonical changed to unity to make a unified interface for desktops, netbooks and tablets sp that they can offer a seamless appearance for all platforms and simplify support. The idea is sound, but the jump to unity was drastic for most users despite the fact that they had plenly of warning.

RickSMO wrote:

I installed Fedora 15 and the ATI's drivers, works perfectly fine, same linux kernal. What the heck is going on lol.

Both Fedora and Ubuntu use modified kernels, most distros customize their kernels with extra modifications prior to shipping. It sounds like the ubuntu specific modifications are the source of your problems.