I am a longtime Ubuntu user and I turned off Unity as soon as I figured out how to do it. It is really really wrong IMO.
Shuttleworth should realize that a desktop computer with a mouse is very different from an iPad and things that are all the rage for tablets are not necessarily good for desktops.
For example on a desktop you have a mouse which has very high precision and accuracy, whereas on an iPad you have your fingers which are not very accurate at all. Thus, tablets make sure they have few and large buttons, while this is not necessary for desktops. In desktops you are allowed to have more and smaller buttons.
Also, tablets usually have limited real estate so that they make sure any program you use can take up the entire screen. Desktops on the other hand can have huge screens and thus should allow people to have several windows open and visible at the same time.
Unity is cute for the first time but it is almost unusable if you have multiple windows open. I want to see which windows are open so that i can switch between them easily. Unity requires several button pushes to find a minimized window.
Actually, unity has that feature where if you drag a window towards the side of the monitor, it'll tile to one half instead of the full monitor.
What really bugs me is the dumb launch menu. I think it's pretty much the same idea as the one on macs. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to group applications together? Why is everyone (win7 also) following suit? It's dumb to extrapolate that just because two windows are from the same application that I'm using them for the same task and want them grouped together. It's also dumb that when I give one look at the bar I can't immediately tell what is open. I have to consciously scan all the way down. Finally, I hate the additional click it brings when I have to pick between two windows of the same app. Does anyone really know how anyone decided on this? I'll stop complaining when they let me disable it.
When I first started using macs, I hated the group-by-application idea too, but I've come to prefer it. Combined with application-specific expose, I find it scales so much better for when I have over 10 windows open on a non-huge screen - which I do most of the time. When I go back to a WM with a list of lots of windows open, I find myself hunting and pecking amongst all these tiny, almost indistinguishable icons, and it feels like it takes forever.
edit: What I'd quite like is another expose mode which shows, say, the last 6 windows you've worked on. While I often have a lot of stuff i want to keep open, I often have a relatively smaller immediate working set.
I Cmd+M the ones I want to keep around but don't plan to use right now. They go in a smaller mode below a divide line on Exposé. Also I tell the Dock to "minimize into the application icon".
Document window + Application icon + Exposé can really scale up, to the point I rarely ever use Spaces (when I was an avid user of virtual desktops under Linux).
This is the first release. Consider it a glorified MVP.
It's not that this is the greatest idea ever! It's more like, given the constraints and the available options, this option has enough goodness to out-weigh the badness.
The grouping of multiple windows from the same application together is the only major problem I find with this setup, and even then it's not so major. It can probably be solved by providing a keyboard-shortcut to cycle current application windows.
Overall I like the launcher very much. In fact, it's my dream dock-clone: vertical, and integrated with the panel and window manager, and makes the windows-style task-list obsolete.
My only complaint about the launcher is it takes a variable amount of time to expand. I haven't nailed down what causes it, but sometimes it pops open right away - and sometimes it takes a couple seconds. It's also nearly impossible to right-click on an item - the panel disappears right before I'm able to click. I partially blame that on the shitty trackpad on my Cr48, though.
On the contrary, I find that Unity is much more keyboard friendly than Gnome. Multitasking with the keyboard is very easy, just hold super and press the relevant number. I find that it is much more conducive to multitasking once I got used to it. Give it a fair shake. It's different, and I had some initial revulsion, but once you get over it, it can be one of the most pleasant desktop experiences you've ever had.
On the contrary, Unity broke all my keyboard shortcuts. I gave it a fair shake (used it during the beta, tried not to mark it down for bugginess) and am back to classic.
For my settings, multitasking with the keyboard is very easy
- just press super and the relevant workspace number
- just press super and the relevant character to launch a particular application
Heh. Close to six months in Gnome and I never realised that those shortcuts existed. Apparently, I have severely underestimated the Gnome desktop for a long time.
> Unity is much more keyboard friendly than Gnome. Multitasking with the keyboard is very easy, just hold super and press the relevant number.
Do you touchtype? I find it extremely difficult to use super or arrow keys or any other keys which aren't touch type friendly. super + num is worse than using the mouse for me.
I kinda liked Unity at first but after a few days of using it I am really finding I am not as productive and am switching back to good old gnome. I think ultimately its failure is the difficulty of seeing what apps are open and switching between them quickly.
First, using keys to switch between windows makes Unity harder not easier to use. Second, the keys are not a good replacement for the bar that has all the minimized windows. With the keys you do not know what is already, you have to remember numbers of applications, etc.
One of the great things about Linux in general is that this is non-news plenty of users who don't use the default window manager anyway. Prefer something else? Just switch. You're not married to the window manager like you are on OS X and Windows. I'm very happy for that.
(Edit: I should clarify that I'm writing this in anticipations that the general sentiment will be that Unity is terrible. If you don't think it's terrible, then it's also not an issue.)
Indeed. I just installed 10.10 on a Thinkpad W500 using the Trinity KDE3 dstro.
I ever cared for Gnome; lack of easy menu hacking and navigation and not being able to set different backgrounds for each desktop were among my peeves.
KDE4 didn't work for me, either. Too much slickness for stuff I had no use for.
Lucky for me some smart, motivated people decided to keep KDE3 alive. My eternal thanks to them.
A downside is that most often when I search for help on something it ends up being how-to in Gnome or maybe KDE4, but with a bi of digging I find what command line invocation to run or what config file needs editing.
Truly a great thing to be able to have such a range of UI options (and every so often I try xmonad) while under the hood it's same hackable OS.
I think you should give Openbox or Fluxbox or LXDE a try. A lot many features to customize, and initially it will be pain in the ass, but eventually you will be satisfied.
Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried a few others, and have decided that KDE3.5 works quite well enough for most things, and I've gotten accustomed to the annoyances, so I'm good.
But the really nice thing is I can always toss on a new WM or whatever and try it out with very little trouble.
One bad thing about GNU/Linux is with the current direction of things, at some point in time we won't have this easy anymore.
IMHO the complexity gets a bit too high, and cost of maintaining forks gets too big, so even free licensing does not really matter anymore. One has to be very motivated, to keep up with his fork.
What's the complexity you're referring to? I don't see it.
Having lots of choice for window managers is decades old and completely normal. It's modular and it continues to get easier. I don't see any burden but perhaps I misunderstand.
I were thinking of complexity of patching the software and keeping up with upstream (i.e. maintaining a fork).
I just have a feeling (highly subjective, sorry) that some major GNU/Linux distros (especially Ubuntu) are turning from a distribution of loose coupled exchangeable components to monolithic tightly-integrated products.
Well, Debian seems perfectly fine in this regard, so even as Ubuntu user (for now) I don't care much about the situation. Sorry - I were wrong writing like this was about the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem.
I would call this a huge leap backwards. It is the first version of Debian or Ubuntu in 15 years that doesn't work. Wireless broke. Wired broke. Unity caused windows to randomly turn white. No obvious way to turn off visual effects. The UI feels like a clone of the Mac without a real understanding of what works and doesn't work on the Mac. A lot of the Mac paradigms come from a world of much lower resolution than modern desktops. The Mac-style top menu bar doesn't work well for modalless, Unix-style applications where you have several open at the same time. Focus-follows-the-mouse is slow and broken. Most of my favorite configuration options are gone. Clicking a second time on the terminal button brings up the first terminal, not a second one.
I'm waiting for 11.10 on the rest of my machines, but considering switching from Ubuntu.
I have to say, as an Awesome WM user, I was sceptical of Unity. But after a day of using it, I think I might never go back to Awesome. It is just ridiculously well thought out, in a way that I have never experienced on Linux before. It really is a leap, if only for the methodology they used. I hope other distros start doing this kind of deep analysis.
The built-in search and launcher are killer features for me, and the multitasking with super+num is great. It also has the 'run-or-raise' capability that I've failed to get to work in Awesome. As such, the window management capabilities of Unity pale in comparison with Awesome, but the fact that I can run Matlab and get the speed and multitasking is pure win for Unity. Java apps in Awesome are a source of unlimited pain for me.
Heh, I did exactly the opposite. I'm pretty happy with it, though I may still return to Gnome 2.
My main reason to ditch Unity was the screen space that unity takes and does give good options for customization. I've been running with just a single top bar in Gnome for ages and can't stand the unity bar looming over me. I figured now is a good time to experiment. Awesome seems to pack a lot of functionality that I like so we'll see how things go.
I last tried gnome-shell when it was buggy as hell, so it's probably not a good comparison- but Unity is fast, really fast. Having used a minimalist wm for a long time, I'm generally intolerant of lag and other nonsense that gets in the way, but Unity was as fast as any wm I've ever used. A lot of it depends on the quality of the gpu, so ymmv.
i'm sure unity is great on a smaller screen, but on a 2560x1440 panel having a window take over the entire desktop when one maximizes it is a deal-breaker. tried to turn off this setting via compizconfig and the old way of doing it through the appearance > windows > maximize vertically setting (which i really loved) but the narwhal disobeys me and impales me with its unpleasant horn unless i go back to classic mode with no effects.
after getting all excited about 11.04, downloading it, reloading, and then being disappointed, i'm now back on 10.10. not crazy about mint's layout either, nor am i a huge fan of gnome3. i guess if i were going to make a major change at this point, it would be to xmonad (which i currently play with once in a while) and not to unity. at least xmonad is fast and intelligent.
Its going to get better. I agree unity is still too buggy for prime time. But I think the designers nailed the fundamentals. I look forward to see what they have by 11.10.
I liked Unity the UI itself but the fact that it was a Compiz plugin turned me off for my main desktop. My WM history goes FVWM2→Sawfish→Metacity. This means I've developed usage habits over the last 15 years that I expect the window manager to oblige with. Compiz is not... very coherent in that.
Compiz has tons of options but not all of them work yet there is only nearly everything that FVWM2 and Sawfish had. The transition to Metacity was a bit grumpy since it certainly didn't allow for all the things that Sawfish did, but eventually it was tolerable as I could configure the essentials right and it was much better integrated with Gnome than Sawfish.
Compiz, however, seems to be more concerned about cool effects than real adjustability and coherent configuration! I use the keyboard for most things, rarely the mouse, and thus I have a number of keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, do window operations, flip around virtual desktops etc. That means I need to carefully configure the keys to work with me, as well as take care of unbinding anything that I might need in an application. So here's an example.
I expect to be able to configure those in the Keyboard Shortcuts window but Compiz apparently pays not much attention to what's set up there. I then googled and tried the ``ccsm`` utility but using the Commands plugin to bind actions into keys didn't work either. For some reason, in Unity/Compiz the <Super>t brings up the fucking trashcan can no matter what I do while I think the same keyboard combination is just perfect for my terminal. I don't want to use Ctrl-Alt-t instead because control and alt are valid application modifiers, and it especially in Emacs translated to transpose-sexps. The super key is great for any of these meta or desktop-level bindings.
So here we are: the program insists on something and thinks it should win. It was after I realized Unity is based on Compiz that I had ditched Compiz before, pretty much for the same reasons. Enabling the desktop effects in earlier Ubuntus was tempting but I never got my keyboard bindings and desktop behaviour quite right wrt that.
A non-compiz Unity would probably be a killer: I like the dock and the Super key menu where you can just type the name of an application and find it in real-time.
The sticking point for me with Unity was switching between multiple open windows. I typically have a dozen or so terminals and gedit and Chrome windows open across a half-dozen workspaces, but if I want to bring (let's say) a specific terminal on my current workspace to the foreground, I couldn't figure out a better way to do it than to open up Unity's display of all the many terminals I have running and try to pick out which one I mean.
I'm open to trying it again once it's had a bit more polish, but I'm sticking with Gnome classic for now.
Yeah I find that too. Problem is I cant identify the Chrome windows very accurately, and they keep reordering themselves by last used. I remembered the tabs by position, and reordered them, but the screen views are less useful, especially if lots of them have say wikipedia as the top site.
I map Ctrl-Fx for F1 to F8 to each of my 8 virtual desktops, and have specific tasks (and window sets) open on each of them -- mostly xterms and emacs buffers. A couple of keystrokes always finds what I need. The key is establishing a task-to-desktop mapping, such as: current big programming effort on 1, email and issue tracker on 2, source code main trunk on 3, smaller jobs on 4 and 5, release terminals on 6, web browser on 7, SQL terminal on 8.
I have an earnest question for certain people who dislike Unity: Why are you switching distros entirely? I'd understand if Unity was the only available option, but GNOME2 still works fine, GNOME3's in a PPA, and there's other DEs that are more-or-less officially supported (KDE, XFCE, LXDE).
Exactly. I've been using Ubuntu for the past 2 years without ever logging into a Gnome session. The package management, the drivers, the sane defaults are all worth it even if you disagree with all their design decisions. What doesn't work in the repos get fixed really fast. I am typing this from a Natty laptop running Awesome WM and I never have to see Unity if I don't want to.
I don't know what it is like for an everyday user but as an experienced power user I found Unity slower than the classic interface. I use gnome-do for launching programs, and it runs faster and supports more than Unity does.
A thing I don't like about Unity are the context-menus. When your application is fullscreen they are ok, but when your window is smaller it's strange to have the context menu still on top of your screen. I also never understood why Apple is doing this. To me it just feels out of context.
But overall I think Unity is great. People don't like changes so there will be a lot of boo-ing and bah-ing, but I think in the end this is a great step forward.
The menubar is at the top of the screen because it's easier to click them. Fitt's Law[1] says that the larger something is, the easier it is to target. When something is against the edge of the screen, you can't move the mouse past it, so it has infinite width or height (or both; corners are nifty). By placing the menu at the top of the screen, you go from a clickable area with a height of about 20px to a clickable area with infinite height.
Even on my smaller than average 1280x1080 monitor, the top of the screen can be a long way from the current mouse position - notice that Fitts Law factors in that Distance.
(And as you've brought up Fitts Law, think about what that says about the very much smaller target provided by those Unity overlay scroll thumbs compared to a window size scrollbar.)
The scroll thumbs actually have about the same area as the scrollbar. Maybe larger, because the little tab pops up under wherever the mouse is, so you don't need to seek for it vertically like with a normal scrollbar. In theory.
In practice, they're too fiddly, sometimes appearing on the inside, sometimes on the outside, and requiring you to move your mouse in and out of the window frame. If they get that sorted, they'll be on par with (if not better than) normal scrollbars, imho.
I very much hope that this will become standard practice across all of free software, because in my view the future of free software is no longer just about inner beauty (architecture, performance, efficiency) it’s also about usability and style.
+1
Yes, the Gospel according to Mark. I've used Unity on the netbook for the past 6 months, and when 11.04 beta was released, switched to Kubuntu. It was just too slow, what with the 3d reliance and the idea that everytime you searched the launcher it polled the software center for matches. As for the desktop, I've no problem with it, just that make sure you don't try anything Gnome3 with it, as it will seriously break your system.
Normally I upgrade Ubuntu on several machines immediately upon the release of a new version. Often before it is released, which has occasionally gotten me into trouble. This has been my cycle for, I don't know, at least since 5.04 or 5.10.
I'm not upgrading to 11.04.
11.04 is clearly a disaster. We'll see if 11.10 is the same and whether I need to find a new distribution or not.
I didn't see how to (with an update rather than a new install) but I eventually figured out how to use the Login Screen Settings to make Ubuntu Classic the default.
BUT switching back to Ubuntu Classic did not get rid of the Unity Overly Scrollbars - so it's still a game of hunt the scroll thumb.
I was reluctant to update from 10.10.
Finally, I updated to Natty, to see what everyone was talking about.
I then discovered that my hardware is not compatible with Unity. I can't even complain about what it looks like, because I've been left behind in the "leap forward".
as usual, wait at least a month to complain about an ubuntu release, I think with the exception of 10.04 you should wait until the next release to download the previous one.
I have to say that I was very skeptical of Unity before I tried it yesterday for the first time. It's certainly different from what most people are used to, but it's also better in many ways. I have tried at least GNOME2, KDE3, KDE4, XMonad, wmii, and different versions Windows, and I can't decide which of them I like the best. Unity is not the best for everything and takes some getting used to, but it certainly isn't bad either.
Shuttleworth should realize that a desktop computer with a mouse is very different from an iPad and things that are all the rage for tablets are not necessarily good for desktops.
For example on a desktop you have a mouse which has very high precision and accuracy, whereas on an iPad you have your fingers which are not very accurate at all. Thus, tablets make sure they have few and large buttons, while this is not necessary for desktops. In desktops you are allowed to have more and smaller buttons.
Also, tablets usually have limited real estate so that they make sure any program you use can take up the entire screen. Desktops on the other hand can have huge screens and thus should allow people to have several windows open and visible at the same time.
Unity is cute for the first time but it is almost unusable if you have multiple windows open. I want to see which windows are open so that i can switch between them easily. Unity requires several button pushes to find a minimized window.