Unity or not Unity ?

Nizar Kerkeni

A little poll to know if Unity is used as default desktop for ubuntu users, one month after the launch of Ubuntu 11.04 and it’s new interface powered by Unity, so do you unity ?

My default desktop is :

  • Unity (48%, 659 Votes)
  • Gnome "classic desktop" (38%, 528 Votes)
  • None of them (KDE,XFCE, etc...) (14%, 193 Votes)

Total Voters: 1 380

Chargement ... Chargement ...

36 thoughts on “Unity or not Unity ?”

  1. As Unity came with the Netbook Edition, I thought that this surface is far away in handling, than the known Gnome. I didn’t found my programs and files so fast than in Gnome or KDE. An half year later I put also Gnome to my netbook.

  6. Unity works well for me. Give it some time before making conclusions. ofcourse its new , so things need to be fixed for perfection

  7. Ankur, that’s one of the problems. It’s too new to have been such a major part of the release.

  9. Well, I think Unity and GNOME-Shell give us a brand new way to work on our PCs/Laptops. Anyway, I believe they need to be improved for non touch screens.

    And they look cool. But I rather prefer GNOME-Shell instead of Unity.

    2. I haven’t installed 11.04 on my desktop yet but I have run it from a USB live image. I don’t know why people are complaining so much. What exactly is the problem with it on a dual screen? I didn’t notice anything major.

  11. The real terrible, terrible thing of Unity is the fixed Mac-like menu-on-top. It is horrible and unusable on Mac OS X, it is horrible and unusable the same on Unity. Fifteen minutes later, I was installing KDE.

  12. I’d be happy to give Unity a try but the behaviours it comes with rule it out. I use focus follows mouse so those appmenus are useless (and especially annoying with large dual screen monitors). You can’t trivially disable appmenus (there are many sites with conflicting hacks to disable them but no official « correct » way). I also need to move Unity on some of my systems which isn’t supported.

  14. Installed 11.04 with beta 1 and hated it, because it was radically different and very unstable. But I’ve always liked tinkering (probably the main reason I love linux) and making things work, stop after 2 weeks of fooling around with unity I got it to a relatively useful state. By that time it had become completely stable and I got used to all the keyboard shortcuts which helped me become more productive then ever.
    Unity is now on my main machine and I rather love it. Now I’m trying to figure out how to flip the whole menu to the right without breaking anything.

  15. Yea definitely the stupid menu w/e it’s called is awful. Even Gnome-shell’s is better.
    It is very difficult to browse.
    It looks like crap.
    It is really weird when you are trying to use it to execute a console command.
    All the lenses are really kinda confusing.

    I like the idea (gnome-do like) but I also like being able to browse through my applications without having to click though 3-4 different things first. I think that part of unity needs an interface overhaul/redo. Much of the rest is fine so long as it gets more configurable (for example we need to be able to theme/change the colors on the panel that comes out of the left side of the screen. (and actually everything including the launcher/dash thing w/e you all are calling it.

    So in short: fix the launcher interface, make everything themeable/customizable.

  16. I chose unity because I’m still trying to like it, but I’m really not, and will probably go back to classic gnome. Here are a few reasons:

    – As mentioned above, its dual monitor support leaves a lot to be desired.
    – Searching is -not- a good paradigm for an application menu, but a tree structure is. In order for search to work, you have to know what you’re looking for.. sometimes, you don’t. I know i downloaded a word processor, but I type ‘word processor’ into the search bar and nothing comes up. It’s a guaranteed way to install a program and then never find it again three months later when you can’t remember what its called. I would -seriously- request that the developers add the option to open a classic application menu when right clicking on the menu icon.
    – I miss having convenient access to my filesystem bookmarks without having to load up a nautilus window on my home folder just to open a new nautilus menu to my work project’s samba share.
    – Xterm crashes nouveau in natty, but that’s not a unity issue.
    – As mentioned above, the « we -really- want to ape apple and move out menus to the top » absolutely fails with focus follows mouse, since as you move up to the top menu, if you pass over another window, the menu changes to that window. Now, the solution to that is « you shouldn’t use focus follows mouse », which someone in some thesis somewhere decided that was « bad UI design ». This cocky « we know better than you » that always pervaded gnome, and now has seeped into ubuntu (starting with the anti-notification-area crusade in karmic) is really putting me off.
    – GVim is broken with the top menu when run from the command line, as a developer, that’s a HUGE problem.

    In short, i switched to ubuntu years ago because the defaults worked « well enough » for a power user like me out of the box, and I could spend my time working instead of tweaking my setup on every new machine. It was also simple enough my wie could sit down and use. Ubuntu’s practical approach contrasted with gnome’s « we just wont give people the option to do anything fancy ». Unity throws a lot of that out the window. After having used gnome shell this week on another work machine, it suffers from the same problems.

    1. Hi Clemej,
      Going through the same thoughts. I just installed xubuntu and so far I am enjoying it. The theme available in the iso is far better than the one available in tha basic install from repositories.

      I can use my netbook again, no more swap to disk.

  17. I left Ubuntu to use Gnome-Shell. I’m now using Opensuse with Gnome-shell and I really like it. But I do miss a lot of Ubuntu things: the software center, the installation wizard, the settings and some other things.

  19. I’m waiting for a way to run chrome without a title bar… I can’t do with with the app/global menu. Then I will use unity.. till then classic mode, and if it is still a problem later on, xfce maybe, or maybe gnome shell if it solves the same issue that exists with Unity right now.

  20. Unity work well for me, except for the lack of customisation features 🙁 … beside that, I really dislike global menu 🙁

  24. As since 6.10 – K-Ubuntu.

    And I advise people, which I know support with Ubuntu (GNome) switching to Kubuntu or Xubuntu, depending on their needs and computer..

    1. Same here. Used unity for half a day, before switching back to classic. After 2 days I gave kde4 a try,.. after 3 weeks, still using it.

      Couldn’t find anything in unity.

  26. I tried Unity for a month, before switching back to ordinary Gnome (although planning to install Martin Owen’s Netbook Launcher packages for Natty, because I really like that interface).

    Just tried Gnome Shell (via Fedora live CD) and it’s very nice and easy. I hope Ubuntu will have easy Gnome-Shell installation options in future.

  28. I voted « GNOME classic » but on second thought that’s wrong: I’m sticking to Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME 2.92 for as long as that will be supported.

    This all « GNOME Shell/Unity is good for you, it’s the future! » thing has led me to re-evaluate GNOME 2.92 and take note of its many problems, though: f.i. even on modern hardware Nautilus is horribly slow, menus are slow if you’re loading images, etc. Time to look around, I hear good things about KDE, the main hurdle is that I use GTK/GNOME apps like Evolution, I wonder how hard a migration would be.

    Rehdon

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