[Wylug-discuss] Ubuntu and Unity Desktop ... anyone like it?

[Smylers]

Dave Fisher writes:

> Am I the only one struggling to be productive with the new GUI?

I like some things, but not others. I've persevered with it for a couple
of months to give it a fair trial, and also cos I first encountered it
in an alpha release (I skipped Ubuntu 10.04) and it seemed unfair to
completely dismiss something which wasn't claiming to be release-
quality. Many little things have improved during that time.

> I'm trying to use it on a traditional desktop and laptop ... and
> despite my willingness to learn new tricks and my openess to the idea
> that it might eventually work well, it's really getting in my way at
> the moment.

My experiences are with 'Ubuntu 2D'; my initial attempts with 'Ubuntu
3D' suggested my laptop doesn't have enough oomph for the snazzy
graphical stuff, but from what I understand the features, controls, and
so on are very similar between the two.

I'm prepared to believe that Unity is superior to Gnome or KDE for some
significant target audience (people new to Linux, or new to computers,
or who aren't very techie perhaps), but I don't think it's the optimal
desktop environment for me. Some of my issues are undoubtedly bugs which
will be fixed, or teething problems with applications which haven't
entirely switched to the Unity way of doing things; others seem to be
intentional parts of the design and which I don't expect to change.

Here's where I'm finding it inadequate (compared to what I'd like, not
necessarily Gnome 2):

* Use of vertical space. The menu bar along the top of the screen is
  compulsory, whereas previously it could be moved or made to auto-hide;
  this takes up valuable vertical space (particularly on a wide-screen
  laptop).

  For many users this is compensated for by the lack of a per-window
  menu bar, so the total space remains the same. (Or possibly even
  bigger if you had two applications stacked vertically, thereby losing
  two per-app menu bars and only gaining one global one.) But most of my
  windows didn't have a menu bar anyway: in the terminal and GVim I'd
  disabled it anyway, and in Firefox I'd hidden some of the menus and
  moved the bookmarks toolbar items on to the menu bar. OpenOffice was
  one of the few apps I used with a menu bar ... but it (now as
  LibreOffice) isn't a Gnome app anyway so still has a per-window menu
  bar even with Unity!

  And when giving a demo on a projector I don't want the audience to be
  distracted with icons not relevant to what I'm talking about. To give
  a demonstration involving a couple of terminal windows (so couldn't be
  full-screen) I ended up running killall unity-2d-panel (twice seems to
  be necessary) to get rid of it!

* All items in the per-screen menu have to pretend to be menu items,
  making them less useful than some items I used to have in Gnome 2
  panels. For example, the weather applet can't give details simply by
  hovering the mouse pointer over the icon; it needs to be clicked on,
  to show a fake menu -- where information can't be arranged optimally,
  but has to be in a vertical list of same-sized text, cos that's what
  menus look like, even those which don't do anything.

  Similarly the battery life applet can't display time remaining by
  hovering the mouse over it. (It does have an option to permanently
  display that, but I find that looks too similar to the clock and I
  confuse the two times.)

* Having to remember which workspace windows are on. Alt+Tab only cycles
  through apps on the current workspace, so first I need to switch to
  the required workspace.

* Clicking on an icon in the launcher switches to an already-opened
  window rather than launching another one. For some apps where it only
  makes sense to have one instance open at once this is handy, but it's
  particularly irritating for terminal windows, and doubly-so if there
  aren't any terminals on the current workspace -- clicking on the icon
  then magically teleports you to whichever workspace happens to have a
  terminal window, and you have to manually navigate back to where you
  were.

  In other words, what clicking on a launcher icon will do depends on
  state that _you can't currently see on-screen_! That's awful.

* No task list. There isn't a panel/bar with a list of currently open
  windows aside from the launcher (which also has icons of non-running
  but common apps there). And it only includes a single icon when
  multiple instances are running. Again that's particularly irritating
  for terminal based apps, where mentally I consider that I have 'a Mutt
  window' or 'a MySQL window'; that they both happen to be running in a
  Gnome Terminal is an implementation detail I don't want to be thinking
  about, so grouping them together with a few Bash prompts and so on
  unhelpful.

* No custom launcher commands. The way of creating a button on the
  launcher for running a command is to run it once through some other
  means then right-click its icon in the not-quite-a-task list and tick
  'Keep in launcher'. That doesn't provide a way of specifying the
  precise command. In particular, it doesn't allow creating buttons for
  launching terminal-based apps, cos it doesn't know what's running in
  terminals. So I can only have an icon for Gnome Terminal, and have to
  type in each app's name each time.

* Can't have the focussed window not be on top. When looking at one
  thing and typing into another window I like the thing I'm looking at
  to be on top, partially obscuring the window I'm typing into if
  necessary (which obviously has to be the one with the focus). Often it
  isn't actually the place where I'm typing that's obscured, just some
  other static part of the same window, but I can type without looking
  if necessary. This requires the concepts of focus and window raising
  to be separate.

  For years I've had this with focus-follows-mouse, but the Unity single
  menu makes that no longer possible. There's still a GConf setting for
  it, but it isn't usable: in a window which isn't at the top of the
  screen choosing a menu item with the mouse involves the pointer
  travelling upwards out of the app's window. Which very often requires
  it passing over another app ... so by the time the pointer has reached
  the menu bar, it's no longer the menu bar of the app you wanted
  because the app you've just passed over has been focussed.

  I would prefer focus-follows-mouse in general anyway, but having now
  used Unity without it I could manage without it, so long as some other
  way is provided of separating focusing and raising windows.

* Lack of categorized app menu. Sometimes I want to see a list of
  media-playing apps or games or whatever. Unity seems to provide a way
  of filtering apps by name or displaying a massive array of icons of
  every available app.

* Lack of customization. My first thought on encountering the single
  menu was 'I don't think I'll like that, but I'll try it for a bit to
  see if it grows on me before I find the option for disabling it'. It
  didn't occur to me there wouldn't be such an option.

  I will accept that several of things I don't like are reasonable
  defaults for the masses, but I'd like the option for turning them off.

  I can also certainly see advantages in simplicity, in locking things
  down and removing certain options -- but that's gone too far if Unity
  is aiming to be the desktop environment of choice for all users.

  And if the answer is that Unity isn't supposed to be for people like
  me, that's also fair enough. But it makes life harder to support other
  users who _are_ in Unity's target audience if I'm not using it myself.

There are plenty of things I like. I like that the launcher auto-hides
when there are windows wanting to use that part of the screen but pops
out to have priority over the desktop background if no other windows
want it. That's clearly been the right behaviour since Windows 95 made
users pick between two inadequate options of always having the task bar
visible (so taking up space you might want for an application) or always
having it auto-hide (making it unnecessarily hidden when there isn't an
app there) -- and something I used to fake in Gnome 1.3 by configuring
two panels in the same location with the same contents, one permanently
shown but below other windows and one auto-hiding and above other
windows.

I like the general slickness, and things seem to be integrated well.

I like the new Ubuntu Mono terminal font.

And I feel I'm being slightly unfair in that there are probably many
other very small touches that I'm appreciating but which are so slick
I'm not recalling them right now and giving credit for them.

So overall I quite like Unity. I can see what they're trying to do. But
the above points are sufficiently irritating that now Ubuntu 11.10, and
therefore the version of Unity I've been running, has been released I'm
going to start looking around. LXDE also comes with Ubuntu and from a
quick look seems quite plausible.

Smylers
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