Comment by gsoltis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gsoltis | Hacker News Reader

I've been using ubuntu for about 5 years now, and using it as basically my only OS for the last 3. I was very satisfied with it. The reason I'm not a fan of Unity is that not only did it break my workflow, but there appears to be no way to customize it to get back to what I have been doing for the past 5 years.

I understand the developers don't owe anyone anything, and everyone's free to leave (and I may, once staying on 10.10 gets to be a problem). I'm just unhappy that they decided to break what I was doing after 5 good years.

For those curious, the features I'm referring to are alt-tab to switch between windows (not applications) and proper virtual desktop support. Doesn't seem like much, and indeed, these features have worked flawlessly for me for years. Once I'm too far behind the upgrade curve, I'll probably have to try another distro or window manager, since from what I've read, Unity has no intention of un-breaking these. It was fun while it lasted though.

I've been using GNU/Linux of various flavours at home since around 2006 (and whatever locked down Windows PC they give me at work, I'm not a programmer).

I use Unity 2d as the graphics card in this three year old desktop is blacklisted so I can't use compiz. In Unity2d, alt-tab shows a row of windows in the current virtual desktop.

I open half a dozen Firefox windows and a few LibreOffice windows (middle click on launcher icon for new instance/window) and when I alt-tab I can see each window represented on a small horizontal panel in Unity2d by the application icon. As you alt-tab through the icons, the title of the window appears in type below the row of icons.

Unity isn't hard to customize. It's generally customized the same way that window managers in Ubuntu have been customized for the last few years, through CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm). For alt-tab just choose another switcher under "Window Management" -- there are 4 to choose from. To remove the menu-on-top silliness, `sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk indicator-applet-appmenu indicator-appmenu` And I don't understand your comment about virtual desktops. They work fine in Unity.

I'll give this a try. I did some research a month or so ago when I upgraded one of my machines to 11.10 (which I now really regret doing). At the time, everywhere I looked said alt+tab for switching applications, and alt+~ for switching windows within applications. If there's a way to get alt+tab back to just switching windows, I'll gladly give it a try.

The issue I had with virtual workspaces was that alt+tab still showed every app on every workspace. The menu on top thing is annoying, but not a deal-breaker I guess.

Anyways, I know this is not the ubuntu forums, I just thought I would chime in with the regressions in my workflow. I spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make it work. I am aware of ccsm, and I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not a complete n00b either. I gave up and went back to the GNOME fallback. My other machines I won't be upgrading. Backwards compatibility is important, even with new fancy window managers.

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