blnchflr: Remus/Ghost!Sirius (Ubuntu)
practice being a zebra ([personal profile] blnchflr) wrote in [community profile] linux4all2012-04-14 12:21 pm

Initial Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 2/Unity thoughts (x-posted from own journal)

When was Unity first offered in Ubuntu? Well, I spent the time since then worried about when I could no longer avoid it, and then it's easy-peasy to get a long with! I don't know if it's because:

1. It was always easy to use.
2. The usability of Unity has come along way since everyone hated it.
3. I needed the time to get used to the thought of something radically different from Gnome.
4. Having an iPhone and using a touchscreen part of the time at work, I've adapted to the idea of a touchscreen-aimed OS/UI.
5. I'm an incredibly open-minded and adabtable kind of person!

Either way, I like it! It works fine, I can find things easily enough so far. And? I can see this on a tablet! In fact, I really want a tablet with a Linux OS. Now.

Biggest complaint so far: Firefox seems slow, even though I have hardly any add-ons installed. You're not the fast thing you once were, Firefox. But you still do everything I want you to, and exactly how I want you to do it (only, a bit slow), so I'm not quite ready to give you up yet.

Oh, and I may look into whether it's at all possible to shift the Close/Minimize/Maximize buttons to the right in Unity, because they're even more far away now, all the way over there above the Dash.

I still have some files to transfer, settings to change, and keyboard shortcuts to set up, but I'll get to them, when things start annoying me too much, *g*. I have my most important files transferred, though, and consider this my primary OS now, even though I know you're not supposed to with Betas. But I'm biased because of how well the Lucid Beta worked, which I kept running for months after the final release came out, so… Eh, whatever.</Famous last words>

[personal profile] jewelfox 2012-04-14 09:51 pm (UTC)(link)
GNOME 3 and Unity are "similar" in that they both change things around a lot. But Unity, to me, feels shiny and like it gives a good impression at first, but then that darned sidebar gets in the way for the twentieth time while you're trying to browse the web. Or you realize bringing up the menu takes a million times longer after your computer's been turned on for awhile, and was never faster than GNOME Do / Synapse to begin with. Or you get commercial apps that you haven't bought yet in your search results. Or you realize you're not using the top-level Unity menu with stuff like "Web Browser" and "Email" at all, and it's only there for newbs who don't even know how to bring it up.

They're changing some of this, yeah, but still. >.o

I guess I like GNOME 3 because when I gave it a chance, it was a lot like what I was already used to. Except shinier, easier, faster, and with a more tablet-like future.

[personal profile] dragonwolf 2012-04-15 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I was one of those that hated Unity, but for some weird reason, absolutely loved Gnome 3. I guess it just seemed more user-friendly right out of the gate, not the least of which because it was extensible/customizable where Unity was not (even if the extensions were/are "use at your own risk, because we haven't stablized the API yet").