[ubuntu-uk] Unity launcher ....

[Avi Greenbury]

Liam Proven wrote:

> Unity is getting quite mature now. None of what I'm proposing is new
> code - this is all either restoring features that were one present, or
> things that have been accomplished by hacks, config tweaks and so on.
> It's all doable. But it's not getting any more configurable - in fact,
> options are /disappearing./ This is a very serious error of judgement,
> I think.

I do maintain that Gnome3 is what happened when the Gnome developers
decided that Gnome 2 was too configurable by half, which wasn't long
after everyone else decided it was nicely customisable.

In more seriousness, I think Unity's likely to go down the route of
Gnome 3, where the customisability and features that people want and
expect are provided by extensions and plugins[0] rather than the core
product itself. That frees up the Unity developers to focus completely
on the functionality that Canonical regard as important and means that
they don't need to support other people's daft ideas, and gets the DE
back towards the modular approach that's so invaluable for the rest of
the OS. 

This does, of course, completely break the assumption that every
Unity/Gnome3 install is roughly the same (which, apparently, is one of
the plus sides of making it hard to customise), but I suspect that in
environments where that's desirable it's trivial to simply prevent the
installation of these extensions to force people to maintain a normal
UI.

-- 
Avi

[0] I have no idea about Unity's architecture here, though I've heard
mention of plugins and add-ons for it.