Preach it brother. I still use Gnome-Do (or Synapse sometimes) to launch apps via text search. I honestly think you could design an entire OS UX around that motif that would end up more efficient and more intuitive, even for new users. If the Start Menu and Google Instant had a baby, that would be the result.
Yes, desktop environments such as Unity seem to be designed with text search in mind. Instead of navigating a menu tree or filesystem tree, users are expected to "search" for whatever they're looking for.
Which works pretty well... until you realize that these desktop environments are also pretending to target the tablet market, where text entry is an order of magnitude less convenient than it is on a regular computer.
Yep, that definitely helps. But I have yet to see a Linux UI that would help me find anything other than most frequently used apps on a tablet nearly as easily as I can on a regular computer. We'd need a different sort of UI for that.
I doubt that the text-search paradigm is the right way to go about developing a tablet UI of the kind that we need. Anything based on mouse clicks would seem to be a much better starting point for the transition to tablets. Unfortunately, both Unity and GNOME 3 require a lot of clicks to get around, which is equal to a lot of screen-tapping on a tablet.
Yes, true. The only non-point-and-click UI I'd want to use for a tablet or smartphone would be voice-search, but the voice-recognition would have to be refined enough that it just works, rather than being an exercise in frustration.
The most popular touch screen GUIs, iOS and Android, default to a grid of icons, like most major desktop GUIs (Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE) have desktop icons. I don't see this as hurdle.
iOS is lovely. All the apps are represented by finger-sized icons.
In Ubuntu, neither Unity nor GNOME 3 have any desktop icons by default. Unity at least has a dock on the left, but GNOME 3 requires you to click "Activities" before you can do anything else.
In both, the only way to have desktop icons is by changing an obscure setting in an application that isn't installed by default.
Unity's dash is also far from a "grid of icons". You need to open the dash, click the "more apps" button, and finally click a relatively small target at the top of the list before you can see all of your installed apps in a grid.
