(Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

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.

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.)

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.

Ubuntu 11.04 (and in particularly Unity) made me realize that the best thing about free software is freedom of choice, so I installed Debian.

i like natty...except for unity.

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.

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.

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).

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.

We aren't the target for this interface.

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.

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 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".

The tips at http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/things-to-tweak-fix-after-ins... solved a lot of pain points for me.

The switch to Unity along with video card problems with the latest version made me leave Ubuntu and start using Mandriva. Happy of the change so far.

Shuttleworth should have had the courage to postpone this release until it was fit to use.

He may be a little biased.

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.