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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

I've been using GNOME 3 for a few months, and I actually am on board with this decision; it feels better, and looks fine. It takes some getting used to, but a button press (win key) or mouse flick is a lot faster than "mouse mouse to the corner, position it over the start button, click".

Does make me wonder how it'll work in multi-monitor setups, though. Presumably you can change the hot corner, but if that's not a launch feature there are going to be some severely annoyed users.

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Hot corners are also a terrible experience when you're running the OS inside a non-fullscreen virtual machine. Sorry, your mouse just left the window instead of triggering the smart corner.

But then, if you're targeting the tablet market, none of this would matter.

Yeah, that was my thought, too. Actually, I have a second monitor on that side, so trying to hit the corner would be a pain.

Ever since MS removed the ability to dock toolbars to the left side of the screen (Vista/7) I've been using pinned start menu items and the Windows key to quickly access them. It didn't take long to get used to it and now I prefer having that tactile control. I won't miss the start button on screen. To me, it functions the same as the home button on the iPhone.

You don't have to position it onto the button. The button extends all the way to the corner. So it's a flick followed by a click. A flick alone will trigger the menu accidentally pretty often, and a flick followed by a hover is slower than a flick followed by a click.

I know, but psychologically, you end up aiming for the button, rather than hitting the "infinite margin" that is the corner.

I honestly don't think it's going to be a bad thing for me or the people that I know, but do I ever feel bad for tech support crews that already had issues getting old people to find the start button. :)

this is what ruined unity for me the launcher bar basically was stuck in the middle between screens the hack that makes it so you can move it somewhere else was only for x86 systems or something like that (found that out after it killed my X server). As for Gnome: on of my monitors is "2 larger and therefore I can trigger the shell by hovering over the left corner without "slipping" to the other one or click the icon. There is also a second hot corner on my other monitor (by default).

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