The naming of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) was announced on 17 August 2010 by Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal was released on 28 April 2011. It is Canonical's 14th release of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 11.04 used the Unity user interface instead of GNOME 2 as default. The move to Unity was controversial as some GNOME developers feared it would fracture the community and marginalize GNOME Shell. The GNOME desktop environment is still available in Ubuntu 11.04 under the title Ubuntu Classic as a fallback to Unity.
Ubuntu 11.04 employed Banshee as the default music player, replacing Rhythmbox. Other new applications included Mozilla Firefox 4 and LibreOffice, which replaced OpenOffice.org. The OpenStack cloud computing platform was added in this release.
Starting with Ubuntu 11.04, the Ubuntu Netbook Edition was merged into the desktop edition.
In reviewing Ubuntu 11.04 upon its stable release, Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said "There is a lot to like in Ubuntu 11.04, but also a lot of room for improvement." Jesse Smith of DistroWatch said "I'm of the opinion there are good features in this release, but 11.04 definitely suffered from being rushed out the door while it was still beta quality. Ubuntu aims to be novice-friendly, but this release is buggy and I think they missed the mark this time around. I'm limiting my recommendation of 11.04 to people who want to play with an early release of Unity."
Support for Ubuntu 11.04 officially ended on 28 October 2012.