
"Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash".  The Poem. - MisterLunduke
http://lunduke.com/2013/11/20/ode-to-ubuntus-unity-dash/
======
nisa
It's a shame that the dash is so slow - but there are some solutions:

    
    
        apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager 
    

and then apply
[http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873](http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873)

You should also disable window animations and other funky stuff:

[http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-
improv...](http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-improve-
unity-performance-ubuntu.html)

It sucks that I have to write this here and that countless others wasted their
time researching this.

~~~
csmuk
Seriously people need to stop working around crap and just vote with their
feet.

I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's
lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate,
SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished.

It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when
it comes out (this will be based on RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19).

I just _need_ stuff that works these days.

~~~
smithzvk
Two things here:

1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro
space to find one that works for you.

2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost
of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).

~~~
csmuk
Sometimes

1) doesn't scale well. The amount of work just to get Ubuntu into a usable
shape is increasing per release. I can't tell you the number of hours I've
pissed out of the window on it over the last few years. It's the equivalent
hack status of Windows now which removes every competitive advantage I have by
using it to start with.

2) There are no explicit benefits to using Ubuntu other than you probably
already have it. The benefits are disppearing faster as to be honest it's not
really a fairly compatible Linux distribution. There are Ubuntu-isms creeping
into other things and this is seriously bad news. Canonical just want their
slice like the Unix vendors in the 1990's.

------
voyou
Why _is_ the Unity dash so slow, and why does Canonical not seem to have any
interest in speeding it up? Is it faster on their testing machines? Is it
significantly faster on new hardware, if you're using an SSD, or if you have
more than 4GB of RAM, or something? I quite like Unity generally, but the
ridiculous slowness of the dash is a constant irritant.

~~~
vomitcuddle
it's a compiz plugin written in _python_. python is slow.

~~~
voyou
The dash itself is written in C++. It gets some of its data from python
plugins, but a) not when it's searching for local files or applications, for
which it uses services compiled to native code and b) there's no reason python
should be slow for stuff that isn't hugely computation intensive like, say,
searching a list of filenames. Whatever Unity's problem is, the choice of
implementation language is not it.

------
zecg
I have a feeling it might be the lenses that connect to servers. I removed all
unity-lens-* packages but unity-lens-applications and it's quite snappy.

------
jkldotio
I was using Gnome-Do and later Synapse before Unity arrived and it is much
slower which is one of the top UI felonies for new software.

~~~
DanTheManPR
Ditto for Launchy, which is cross-platform and replicates every feature of
Dash. There are a lot of these search-while-you-type launchers out there, and
none of them are as slow as Canonical's implementation.

------
CSDude
I once tried to run Unity under VirtualBox, and It was the fastest
uninstalaltion/purge I have made so far.

------
Piskvorrr
For me, the answer was as simple as "Ctrl+Alt+T; sudo apt-get install kubuntu-
desktop"

------
pcx66
Dash, sometimes, is horribly slow. Rest of Unity has gotten usable, but Dash
is a pain even now. Canonical should really focus on it's performance since
it's the most important part of Unity experience.

------
sp332
It doesn't bother me that much because it never misses what I type. I can hit
the Super key, then 't', then enter, and I know that it will eventually launch
a terminal.

~~~
lemieux
CTRL+ALT+T might be faster in your case.

~~~
sp332
True, but you get the idea... I don't have to wait for it to "launch" before I
start typing, so I don't feel like it's breaking my train of thought. This is
mostly true with typing an address in Firefox too, because the history pane
seems to ignore me at first which is much more annoying.

------
guidopallemans
If it wasn't for the HUD feature (tapping alt gives you a search bar to all
the program's menu items) I would've switched to another DE already

are there any other DE's that provide something like that?

------
mdellabitta
I use Kupfer in Xubuntu. It's sort of similar to Quicksilver on the Mac:
[http://engla.github.io/kupfer/](http://engla.github.io/kupfer/)

------
miloshadzic
Doing Crossfit would probably break the Dash even more.

------
kuchaguangjie
unity should go to hell, gnome-classic is so much better that it. I believe
the high level of ubuntu is stupid to start the unity project, after years
it's still a piece of shit.

