Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity

[mark-OGhnF3Lt4opAfugRpC6u6w at public.gmane.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

On 5/9/2011 9:36 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

> Unity has approximately the same UI as GNOME 3, so I'm not sure why they
> diverged from that project. The comments on the above article say
> they'll be using GNOME 3 in 11.10.
>
> I think I could live with the side-bar dock. Most of us use wide screen
> displays with horizontal pixels to spare. But the application menu
> (perhaps good for a small screen or touch screen navigation) and the
> Mac-style window menus in the top bar seem more problematic.

I like having things on the side rather than on the bottom; it's a much 
better use of the screen real estate on a widescreen display. I have a 
slight preference for the right side rather than the left; it seems less 
visually cluttered to me.

One thing I've always found annoying about Gnome 2 is that you can't 
effectively move the taskbar to the side of the screen as you can in 
Windows -- yes you can put it there but it misbehaves in various 
annoying ways. So you're stuck with two vertical UI bars, which is two 
too many on a widescreen display.

I HATE the Mac and Windows 7 style conflation of application shortcuts 
and icons for running applications; the separate taskbar and shortcut 
icons of older UIs like Gnome 2 (with shortcuts docked on the top bar) 
or the Windows Quick Launch toolbar work better for me. At least Windows 
7 lets you put things back to the old way, though it's harder than it 
should be; on the Mac you're stuck, and you're also stuck with it on 
Ubuntu so long as you use Unity. (Gnome Classic, Kubuntu/KDE, and 
Xubuntu/XFCE are all possible alternatives.)

I've also never liked the Mac-style menus on the top of the screen 
rather than in the window title bar. It strikes me as a UI decision that 
doesn't scale well. It was fine when the Mac meant the beige toaster 
with its 9" display, but when you're talking about 30" behemoths the 
menus are too far away from where you are working. Too much mouse 
movement, and too much confusion because they're so far away from the 
active window. And as somebody else pointed out, if you like focus 
follows mouse (I don't) it's completely broken if you move over another 
window on the way to the menu bar.

Moving the window widgets over to the left (Mac style) instead of the 
right (Windows, KDE, older Gnome style) happened in Ubuntu 10.10 and it 
struck me as a gratuitous UI change then. (At least it's easy enough to 
undo in Gnome Classic; a bit harder in Unity.) Neither is inherently 
better but what you are used to is better than what you aren't used to.

All in all, Canonical seems to be trying to make the UI more like the 
Mac and less like Windows. That strikes me as a poor move if they're 
trying to attract new users, because Windows is where the big pool of 
available people are and because the stability of Linux is less of a 
draw for people who are already on a Unix-based OS.

Speaking of cool shortcuts -- I always like the KDE shortcuts of 
middle-click on the Maximize button to maximize only vertically and 
right-click to maximize only horizontally. They're just so useful 
(especially the vertical one; I often want my windows to be as tall as 
possible and getting it in one simple click is great); I never figured 
out why other window environments didn't copy them. Clearly that won't 
happen in Gnome 3, which has followed the recent fetish of "clean" UI 
and gotten rid of the Maximize button altogether. Another bad decision; 
I'd prefer to keep it and add the additional KDE capabilities.