
I take it back. Unity is cool. - swah
http://lunduke.com/?p=1985
======
taken11
Sadly, it still does not work with 2 monitors. i.e. attaching a projector for
a presentation, all your windows get moved to the projector. can be quite a
problem if you are in a meeting. in addition external monitor can only be to
the right, since the dash is fixed on the left.

If you want to drag something inside an application to the left side, the dash
shows up and blocks the left side of the application. no way to move the dash.

Just two major bugs in terms of usability. ignored for a long time.

~~~
nevinera
>Sadly, it still does not work with 2 monitors.

I've been using it with two monitors both at home and at work since launch,
with zero configuration.

The second issue is certainly annoying, but 'it does not work with two
monitors' is a pretty strong claim.

~~~
va_coder
What kind of graphics card do you have?

~~~
nevinera
One nVidia and one intel, not that it matters. I'm arguing with his blanket
claim that 'it still does not work with 2 monitors', not that there are no
driver issues on ubuntu.

------
rufugee
I can't go back to Unity until it supports three monitors (with Xinerama). I
know compiz won't support this, but even Unity2d doesn't work well at the
moment, and 11.10 broke basic functionality in Gnome Classic. I switched to
KDE a few weeks ago and it worked across the three monitors with zero extra
configuration. I've also been very impressed with the polish the environment
seems to have gotten since I first tried 4 years ago. What was once riddled
with bugs is now slick and very pragmatic.

When three monitor support comes along, I'll give Unity another shot, but for
now, I'm on KDE.

~~~
rocha
Do you know if it works with two monitors? That is my standard setup, and
haven't tried unity because so far it seems to only support one.

~~~
rufugee
Yes, it works fine with two (I use Nvidia's twinview for that). It's when you
hit three that there's a problem.

~~~
rocha
Good to know, thanks!

------
alperakgun
I find it the right thing that canonical focus on the user interface, so unity
is a good idea for them to focus on what matters the most, the end users. as a
developer I don't care much about desktops, I find them all interesting.

~~~
Rusky
That's an interesting point of view- in the past, I have been annoyed with
what I saw as Canonical's over-modification of everything.

However, seeing a nice desktop ui as their main product (as opposed to just
another repackaging of Debian) makes that all make much more sense- you want
to build your _main product_ yourself.

------
mynameishere
I used this for 5 minutes a while ago, realized you couldn't get rid of that
odious sidebar and wrote it off permanently. Why on earth designers would
prevent users from reconfiguring their screen is beyond me. Even if they fixed
it, you still have to wonder about their overall judgement.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Yes, even more annoying is that the sidebar _can_ autohide, like when you open
a full-screen window. They just disable that ability otherwise and provide no
way to enable it. I'm not a Mac user, but I was under the impression you could
even hide the dock in OS X?

~~~
wiredfool
It's autohiding for me, and I don't think I did anything to it. Though, it
might just be a bug, I've run into a handful of near showstoppers in the last
few days.

edit: Though, now that I think about it, when I first installed, I got the
sidebar not autohiding with fullscreen apps, so that it blocked the left inch
of whatever was up. Annoying as hell.

------
gldalmaso
Unity is going to be Ubuntu's killer app that will have people leaving Windows
and Mac behind for a different desktop experience that can better blend itself
with different modern devices.

Soon enough Ubuntu will be pluggable to our tablets and smarts or whatever
hybrids will come forth in the next years.

~~~
nirvana
Unity is a nice ripoff of the Mac UI circa 2003 or so. That puts it way ahead
of Windows which was a poor copy in 1990 and has been going the wrong way
since.

But I see no reason a Mac user would find Unity more attractive than the Mac
UI.

If they'd copied the Mac UI _exactly_ then they'd have achieved parity.

If they'd done their own UI research and come up with something new, they
might have been able to come up with something better than the Mac UI.
Certainly there is some room for this, given Apple's need to support old
paradigms. But if you've noticed, Apple isn't exactly nostalgic.

But by copying the obvious ideas, but not thinking thru why Apple made the
choices they did, they miss the mark... which seems to happen with everybody
who tries to copy Apple's innovations. They end up with something that on the
surface looks the same, but doesn't actually work the same.

I think this is because its too easy to "improve" what Apple did based on
their preferences, without understanding why what Apple did the first time was
the right way.

Given that linux has a much higher cost[1] than OS X, to gain a lot of market
share, it will need a much better UI. We saw how things went for Apple for
many years, despite having a much better UI (and cheaper machines, actually)
than Windows...it wasn't until the iPod lowered the awareness cost that people
started switching to Macs in droves.

[1] Not all economic costs are measured in dollars. Lack of awareness of a
product creates a barrier of entry, and while many people have heard of Linux,
few are aware of it as a Desktop operating system. This lack of awareness is a
cost that needs to be overcome, or reduced, to get a lot of switchers.

~~~
SimHacker
Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for
anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the
previous state of the art.

~~~
wmf
The problem faced by Ubuntu and other open source projects is that they can't
afford to do that.

------
mukyu
It annoys me that I cannot make the top panel (I have no idea what to call it)
either go away or have windows be drawn over it.

The only way to get rid of it is when an application has an actual full-screen
mode, but then half of the time it reverts back if I move the mouse to a
different screen with synergy.

It does not make sense to make hard and fast UI decisions based upon some
idealistic vision of how people will use things (such as not being able to
move the top bar or whatever) that get in the way of how people _actually_
want to do things.

------
nextparadigms
I hope Unity will attract that kind of app designers to Linux, like the ones
that use Macs. I've tried using Linux several times in the past, and one of
the reasons I didn't like using it, is that the apps (programs) looked so ugly
and rough compared even with the ones on XP. For me, at least, that's kind of
a deal breaker.

~~~
SimHacker
Most user interface designers and programmers gave up on the Linux desktop and
moved over to Macs years ago. The Linux desktop is like Perl 6. Don't hold
your breath. And if it finally arrives, hold your breath and don't breath in,
because it stinks.

Even if good user interface designers attempted to contribute to projects like
Gimp, they would quickly be driven away because of politics and NIH.

~~~
darreld
True and I have no idea why you were downvoted.

------
jlyke
1) Open Firefox, browse to <http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/> 2) Open another
Firefox. Isn't happy about browsing to <http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/> :(

Looking forward to installing and checking out the improvements!

~~~
otaku888
If you google "ubuntu tour" with the fake firefox, you can get there, and then
go deeper and deeper within each instance.

Well I thought it was fun anyway.

------
wiredfool
After working with unity in beta2 over the last week, I'm not a fan. (And I
realize this is beta, and things may have changed. But... We'll see tonight
when I get a chance to muck with it)

My current project is to put together a little machine for the kids (2,4,7).
So, I need to limit options, and generally not put in anything that's going to
confuse them. For reference, I've got a 10.04 desktop and 10.04 Netbook remix,
as well as various OSX and IOS devices around. Ideally, I'd like something
like 10.04 NBR, but with current flash/web stuff, and works with the wifi
dongle I have. (This is replacing a 1st gen ppc mini that's got hardware
issues. Yay for kids flash games turning off the machine)

For a machine that's got constrained purposes, for lack of a better word, I
find the netbook launcher interface is really good. There are a bunch of
categories on the side, there are a handful of apps for each category, and
everything launches full screen. I can cut back on most of the clutter, so
that they don't accidentally click on something that's going to lead them
astray.

Unfortunately, the netbook launcher is end of lifed at 10.04 with gnome 2, and
unity is the way forward. In my brief time with unity I've:

* had the dock not autohide, and had firefox launch fullscreen, with the left half inch under the dock.

* gotten all the windows to launch behind dash. Only visible blurred. Had to ssh in and restart.

* completely killed the unity system, no sidebar, no top bar, only nautilus running. This persists through logout/login. Or rather, restart, since I can't figure out how to logout without finding terminal in the filesystem and rebooting.

There are also some design head scratchers:

* There are categories of apps when you look at internet apps in dashboard, but not when you look for more apps.

* How do I change the big three apps on the dash screen?

* unity keeps offering to install apps. I don't want that. Maybe it's cause I'm a sudoer, but I don't really want this for the other users. And it's really confusing to be looking for something to change a setting, but having the wrong name for which there are no hits, and have the top line be things to install, and not things that are on the drive already.

* why does the menu bar sometimes appear, and sometimes it's the name of the app?

And then, there's probably a hardware issue: for some reason, my desktop
thinks that it has a laptop panel mirroring at 1024x768, so the 20" lcd starts
up at that resolution. I know about xrandr, It can't do anything about the
phantom panel.

Some of this can be traced to "It's not the netbook launcher", some to "It's
not even as well thought out as the nbl", and some to "It looks like you have
grand designs on my desktop, and you're not telling me what they are, so the
decisions look really strange right about now".

Sometimes, I think I should have just spent the extra $500 for a mini. It
would have been smaller, quieter, lower power, and it would have worked out of
the box.

------
fossuser
Looks like it'll be interesting to play with in this version. I also thought
unity in 11.04 was far too buggy to be usable as a daily environment. I guess
it's time to check out this new release.

------
kleim
"In fact every piece of hardware on this rig worked perfect without no
fiddling around." Holy crap! Where is the fun now?

------
username_
"Let’s face it, most applications don’t need to be 64bit. How much ram does a
calculator really need?"

This passage shocked me. This guy seems to think that 64bits is only useful
for using more ram. Who is using 4G of RAM on Linux, seriously?

------
bluedanieru
To rehash a tired argument:

Removing the menu from the window to a common location is still a big
usability fail. Not because it's worse than having the functionality bound to
the window itself (personally I believe it is, but I could get used to it) but
because it's the only major Linux desktop that does this, and as such most of
the apps anyone is going to run, are going to be built with that in mind. It's
usually not such a big deal to overload the menus with Gnome and KDE, but with
Unity it is.

And having it double as a title bar is just stupid. Screen real estate isn't
at the premium they think it is.

I tried Unity with 11.04 and hated it. The bugs didn't bother me but the
design did. I'll be sticking with KDE.

~~~
nirvana
Apple studied this back in the 1980s. This is why the menubar is at the top of
the screen. What they found was, people were able to, much more quickly and
accurately, pick the menu item they wanted, because they didn't have to be as
precise in their targeting when the menu was at the top of the screen than on
the window.

If you've grown up with poor copies of the Mac UI (like Windows) then you're
used to targeting menu items on a window, and you don't realize that you're
slower at it.

But you are.

It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when
they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice.

~~~
Androsynth
Can you explain why the one button mouse is better than the 2 button mouse?
One of my pet peeves with Mac is that my magic mouse takes 2 clicks and a
mouse movement to open a new tab in my browser, as opposed to 1 click of the
scroll wheel on a pc. (Plus I have to waste a mental thread wondering if its
going to register it as a primary or secondary click.)

Usually when I find something on the mac annoying unusable, I blame it on
Industrial Design. As in, 'boy the magic mouse really hurts my hand after a
while and the secondary click is difficult to use, but it really looks great
(the finger scroll is really why I use it fyi)' or 'boy my macbook cuts
sharply into my wrists in a just-about-but-not-quite painful way, but damn
that unibody is sleek'.

I always just assumed the 1 button mouse (specifically the magic mouse) came
about because it just looks so good.

~~~
ovi256
You can configure a Magic Mouse to emulate middle buttons using MagicPrefs.
It's a pretty useful add-on.

~~~
gcb
i will still take the tactile feedback of real buttons.

