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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

"...Unity is horribly inefficient with screen space, and getting anything done requires a ton of mouse clicks and waiting for menus to load."

Screen space: The launcher can be set to auto-hide, giving you the same amount of space you'd have on OS X with an auto-hidden dock.

Mouse clicks: Unity actually impressed me with the amount of attention they paid to keyboard use. Hold down the Super key and you'll see all of the shortcuts. It also makes application menu items searchable without a mouse.

Waiting for menus to load: 12.10 and earlier have been terrible about that. I'm running 13.04 (the next version in development) and they've made it much better.

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I have to take issue with your comment on keyboard use, because that single wart is dealbreaker keeping me from using Ubuntu.

I give Ubuntu another shot every X.10 release just to see if they've finally made the desktop environment satisfactory, and I must say they are getting really, really close. The Menu system is getting close to making sense in Unity, Pulseaudio throws fewer temper tantrums, significantly less hardware issues, and everything is much snappier (especially compared to memories of Unity from its Ubuntu Netbook Remix days).

But I can't customize my keybindings for crap.

And you're probably thinking "That's BS, of course you can! It's under [submenu] of [menu] of [option] of [settings application name]." And you'd be right. It's just that some subset of keybindings will reset to their defaults every time you do a full power-down of the computer. Rinse and repeat until they're all back to their defaults.

It varies which hotkeys will be reset. Sometimes Metacity ones will reset. Sometimes GNOME bindings will reset. Sometimes opening the Unity configuration will reset the Metacity keys. Sometimes it doesn't! I even wrote a shell script to run all the proper `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface [blah]` incantations upon login, but when that didn't work reliably (again: Metacity keybindings vs. Unity appeared to be the problem) I gave up.

This has been my experience in Ubuntu 11.10, some mid-2012 version of Mint (with Cinnamon) and Ubuntu 12.10, so it's not strictly Canonical's fault. However they haven't seen fit to address it in their user experience, and so I portion out a slice of the blame for them.

Great bug report :) Hopefully someone from Canonical will see this, and can send it to the appropriate people!

It is not a great bug report. The response will probably be "works for me".

A great bug report specifies exactly how to reproduce a certain behavior and also specifies the expected behavior, what should have happened.

It is not a great bug report. In fact, as qznc states, it's not a bug report at all. However, in my weeklong attempts to deal with the issue, I came across a few formal bug reports submitted to various projects.

If I recall correctly, and since the issue is a fight between two different application components that wish to manage keybindings, the bug reports had responses of the "It's not our fault, it's the other package!" variety.

I've been using Unity straight for about a month.

Some of it is OK but a lot of the time, it feels like being tied up in a pit somewhere while my computer floats elsewhere. Just I can't explore my own machine in any easy way - the "search" function is basically terribly broken.

I'm pretty sure you could search application menus via keyboard in Gnome2 and it was a whole lot easier when they were always visible.

Sorry I wasn't more clear. I wasn't trying to make this a Unity debate, and I'm sorry I started one by making that point.

Thanks for the tips, but that wasn't really meant to be the point of the post. I just wanted to point out gnome-settings-daemon if you want to run something other than Unity.

In 13.04, you can size the icons to whatever you want (currently there is a hard limit of 32px). They also added a window switching quicklist feature.

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