An idea/feature request for incorporating a "Classic" menu into Unity

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 01/12/2011 09:14, Mayank Rungta a écrit :
> I am not sure if this is the right forum but since this topic has been 
> touched I wanted to know how well the unity interface has been 
> received. I see a lot of posts on returning to the classic gnome. It 
> appears that there are just too many people out there missing the 
> classic features.
Unity has been received well by some users and less well by some others, 
you mostly read about the unhappy ones on the internet for several 
reasons (one being that happy users usually don't feel the need to start 
discussions about what is working fine for them, another ones is that 
the people who are interested in participating to online discussions 
about their computers are also the ones who like to be able to tweak 
things and the one that will got unhappy about lack of customization).

> Basic things like Alt Tab behave very differently killing the purpose 
> of virtual desktops (grouping as you roll through all the windows) and 
> grouping of similar windows again is a problem as I would have a 
> particular type of application (say Thunderbird) on the same Desktop. 
> I can't wait for Alt Tab expand - the older method was so much simpler 
> and faster. Any particular reason to change it? 

No reason, in fact the switcher will be working "by workspace" in the 
next version so that should address your issue.

> I can't customize any of the panels - can't add shortcuts to panels, 
> resize them, add panels, etc. The worst part is a lot of these things 
> I am not even able to revert back to. Why is the new interface so rigid?
Because adding options and customability takes time and efforts and 
makes the code harder to maintain and get working (you have complexity 
and cases to test every time you give an option), it's also not 
something most users care about tweaking (look at windows users or macos 
ones to see how many want to tweak their "panel and applets", most users 
are just fine with the default layout). Nobody forces you to use unity, 
if that sort of customization is important to you, you can try xfce or 
kde or gnome-panel for example.

> I am myself moving to StumpWM now to make things easier for myself - 
> at least predictable at a much better performance. A colleague is even 
> contemplating creating a light weight desktop based on StumpWM with 
> basic things in place as it is so much faster. Haven't tried xmonad 
> yet. At least StumpWM gives a good mix of using mouse and keyboard. 
> But for my newbie friends I was hoping the current interface was 
> simpler or behaved like the conventional desktop.

Great that you find something that works for you!

--
Sebastien Bacher