[ubuntu-uk] unity & gimp

[gazz]

On Wed, 2011-06-08 at 21:30 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:

> On 6 June 2011 15:57, gazz <pmgazz at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Ah, dunno, haven't actually looked at Gnome 3 yet . . . if it's as bad as
> > Unity - eeek!
> 
> Unity is a /lot/ more like traditional GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is.
> 
> Put in the time to learn Unity. It is a pretty decent GUI, honestly. I
> don't understand why people are whinging so much about it. It's fine,
> it's just different.


Well, I spose this is the way things are going so I've bitten the bullet
and switched to Unity - in any case, I'll have to be able to train
people on it <sigh>

It has some really nice features, it's true - but it's the stubborn
fixity of it that drives me nuts. I can't have my usual widgets and it
really is very, very clunky having to cycle through all the open windows
constantly. It's clunky to click both buttons on a laptop touchpad,
don't wanna! It's much easier to point and tap). I want my weather
widget back waaaaaaah! And I mostly use tree view in Nautilus - but the
mountable nfs partitions I have in fstab only show under places view so
they can be mounted in the gui. I used to solve this by using the
disk-mounter widget on a panel but it's vanished. So now I'm endlessly
switching between tree and places view in nautilus - unless I want to
flip open a terminal every time I need to mount a network partition. (I
know you're going to ask why I don't automount them - well, cos they're
on a laptop and I don't want errors when they're not available). 

It's also annoyingly buggy - but, of course, that'll improve so not
really worth whinging about now - but doesn't exactly reduce my overall
annoyance. It has a very 'alpha' feel about it. Then there are niggly
little things - like I can't work out how to assign an icon to something
that I put on the launcher which clearly doesn't have a native launcher
icon (such as sync-ui which I use a lot - I have to tell several buttons
with just grey questionmarks on them apart by their position on the
launcher - not good). If someone knows how to do this, it'd be very
welcome. It took me a month of sundays to resize the launcher bar and
autohide it - trawling all over the compiz settings manager is no fun
either and the customisation rewards are small. 

On the good side - I especially like the feature where the super key
allocates numbers to application shortcuts (although it's a pity this
only goes up to 9 so if I want something lower down I have to start
again with the touchpad). I like the way all the windows will tile on
the desktop (not sure where I clicked to get it to do that though lol).
I also really like the way you can search quickly for an app, whose name
you know but isn't in the launcher, and launch it very fast. But if you
*don't* remember the name of the app, it'll take you all week to find
it . . . 

Overall, my feeling about it is that if you use your PC as an Ubuntu One
'toaster' it's great. If one of the things you loved about Linux/GNOME
was the enormous flexibility of the customisable desktop and widgets
you'll hate it. 

It feels like lego. I've been using Unity for a few days and I'm really
experiencing it as limited and clunky - I'm using keyboard shortcuts I
haven't bothered with for years and re-discovering the tedium of
endlessly cycling through windows. It feels retrogressive to me. 

I'm finding more stuff that it *does* do all the time though, and no
doubt I'll get more used to it - and it'll improve - but can't we have a
bit more customisation and control - widgets and stuff? Or am I missing
something? 

Paula
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