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Comment by scriptproof | Hacker News Reader

1) We are used to have the toolbar at bottom. 2) This makes room for more icons. 3) It is better to lose some space horizontally because we have windows side by side horizontally, usually. Then, why a vertical toolbar?

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Netbooks (or more generally: small screen devices) where you can more easily lose a few pixels from the side than the bottom.

I keep reading people saying this, but my netbook screen is 1024px wide, and eating up any of that space turns websites into things that must be scrolled horizontally as well as vertically.

Unity ruined Ubuntu on my netbook because of that. Sites that I read before no longer fit in the screen width, including Ubuntu's own homepage.

I dumped that noise and installed LXDE and made my netbook usable again.

The default behavior of unity is to hide itself if you are using that space. You also have a number of options:

Hide Launcher: * Never * Autohide * Dodge Windows * Dodge Active Window

(the last is the default)

There is one thing that really annoy me with the autohide feature. When you want to close the window the launcher often gets in the way. My mother got a little annoyed at this since I upgraded her computer to 11.10.

Interesting, what was throwing her off? The way the orange-circle-x close window button is now hidden until you mouse over the window title bar?

http://i.imgur.com/zKgJ0.png

You might find you'd like to change the "edge reveal timeout" which is actually the time it waits before the launcher reveals. The default is set to 150ms, but I like it much better at 300ms. You can also change the launcher edge to the right, but that probably has more issues with scrolling. All of that is set in CompizConfig Settings Manager.

True, and I personally find the default setting ok using Unity 2d (desktop with blacklisted graphics card) and Unity (netbook). However this same logic means that the Launcher position could be made optional without detriment.

12.04 is currently in an 'interesting' state, so I'm waiting for the repositories to update before exploring Unity 5 on the netbook.

Good, because that was not the case when they first took away my beloved Ubuntu Netbook Remix and replaced it with Unity.

Yes, what trotsky said - the default behavior (on 11.10 at least) is to auto-hide the sidebar launcher, so it doesn't get in the way of anything. And even when it unhides, it doesn't squash open windows, it just superimposes temporarily on top of them, until it hides again.

Did you change the default settings?

I don't really care that Unity is forcing this ridiculous vertical toolbar onto us since I don't use it anyway. What worries me more is the fact Gnome seems to follow this distasteful trend. As if my 27" high-resolution workstation display needs a bunch of massive icons on it.

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