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

[blnchflr]

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>

Comments

[jewelfox]

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 ...

1. 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.)


2. 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.