I used Unity for a few months, and I was impressed with it at first because it's like they copied OS X's good features and put an original spin on them. But ...
I don't think it makes a good tablet interface, because most of the touch targets are tiny and many are covered up/inaccessible depending on where you move the mouse. (I haven't tried it on a tablet, but it seems like a traditional menu hierarchy is the opposite of user-friendly for one, after using Android menu settings.)
I don't think it makes a good desktop interface, because a lot of its features are undiscoverable and others are annoying, like the Unity menu sliding into view every time I try to hit the browser back button and overshoot with the mouse.
On top of that, it's really slow on my system.
The more I use GNOME 3, though, the more attached I get to it. The "Activities" view is like the perfect hybrid of an object dock and the Compiz Scale plugin (OS X's Expose), and makes virtual desktops so easy to use that I actually started using them. Plus it's mapped to a screen corner by default, the way I prefer it, and it's so fast OMG. The icons are super-pretty, the buttons and menus are clean and spaced-out enough to be touch-friendly, and the way they have the app menus under each title bar right now is kinda retro but they're trying to move the essential features of each app (that they can) into the large button at the top of the screen that shows the name of the app.
The most user-unfriendly things I've noticed so far are that there's no option to have it display today's date in the clock, and that you have to hold down Alt for it to display the "Shut down" option instead of just "Suspend." I think there either are or can be GNOME Shell extensions that fix both problems though.
Sorry, I'm working on getting accepted to the GNOME Women's Outreach Initiative and I'm a bit of a fangirl. >.>; I liked some things about Unity but yeah, give GNOME Shell another try maybe if you haven't already.
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On top of that, it's really slow on my system.
The more I use GNOME 3, though, the more attached I get to it. The "Activities" view is like the perfect hybrid of an object dock and the Compiz Scale plugin (OS X's Expose), and makes virtual desktops so easy to use that I actually started using them. Plus it's mapped to a screen corner by default, the way I prefer it, and it's so fast OMG. The icons are super-pretty, the buttons and menus are clean and spaced-out enough to be touch-friendly, and the way they have the app menus under each title bar right now is kinda retro but they're trying to move the essential features of each app (that they can) into the large button at the top of the screen that shows the name of the app.
The most user-unfriendly things I've noticed so far are that there's no option to have it display today's date in the clock, and that you have to hold down Alt for it to display the "Shut down" option instead of just "Suspend." I think there either are or can be GNOME Shell extensions that fix both problems though.
Sorry, I'm working on getting accepted to the GNOME Women's Outreach Initiative and I'm a bit of a fangirl. >.>; I liked some things about Unity but yeah, give GNOME Shell another try maybe if you haven't already.