One nice thing about recent Ubuntu is that even though they hide the password box, you can start typing on the unlock screen and your text will be entered into the password box.
(Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the top right corner. Why it couldn't just be there and have keyboard focus from the start, I have no idea…)
So it's a hard-to-discover feature, and a misfeature unless you elect to keep this behavior forever.
It’s a shame really because these undocumented features mean 99% of people WON’T ever use them. Isn’t that counterproductive to engineers?
Why aren’t employees speaking out against this?
Can't please everyone I suppose.