[ubuntu-uk] unity & gimp

[Avi Greenbury]

gazz wrote:
> It has some really nice features, it's true - but it's the stubborn
> fixity of it that drives me nuts.

This is what's getting me. Gnome used to (quite rightly) get told off
for not being configurable. In the past few years it's come on leaps and
bounds and is now rather useful. I really don't see the problem that 
unity is setting out to solve which makes putting up with it until it's 
finished rather difficult. But I am something of a luddite, perhaps the 
problem is that it's not changed enough recently.

> I can't have my usual widgets

Yeah, I'm currently being inordinately irritated by the lack of an
Inhibit App on the panel. I think that it's a combination of that and
alt+f2's silence-on-error that's currently most making me want to be 
using something else.

> 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 don't think I've ever used my middle-mouse button (which you're
emulating with the both-buttons-at-the-same-time thing) for anything
other than pasting; what feature am I missing out on here?

Is this just the sending a window to the bottom of the pile by
middle-clicking on its title bar? Doesn't the single-click on the
minimise button have roughly the same effect?

> 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).

I've long since stopped finding the way nautilus deals with removable
volumes amusing and now find it downright infuriating.
I've put all my removable volumes in fstab and just ignore the errors
now, it's way easier than navigating the several different abstractions
that've been thrown at the non-problem.

> 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.

Ah, I think most of the reason I've not had issues with it is because I
rarely do the mouse things. Most of what's changed are the menus and the 
launcher and I use neither. And I'm sure there's some fancy new
keyboard shortcuts in there, too.

-- 
Avi.