[ubuntu-us-in] So, reviews of Unity?

[Simón Ruiz]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:00 PM, David Ernst
<david.ernst at davidernst.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:15:20AM -0400, Simón Ruiz wrote:
>>My experience with Unity 3D has been pretty good.
>>
>>Hardware-wise, I have a beefy video card in a System76 workstation
>>with twin 22" wide screen monitors at work, and 3D graphics "Just
>>Work" on it pretty excellently.
>
> Cool.  I definitely do not have impressive video card.  lspci says
> that it's a "GeForce 6150SE", seems like that should be enough to get
> window manager eye candy, but... shrug.  I had a lot of problems with
> both gnome and unity in 3d modes.  And I don't care.  :)

Yeah, I've had issues with driver support since I got this machine; It
came well-set-up from System76, but I've re-installed from scratch a
few times, and the video card has been the one thing that screws up
from time to time; sometimes to the point of making my machine
painfully unusable (sometimes as a result of a normal driver/kernel
update).

I tended to try to run all the eye-candy, but had to scale back just
to avoid the random driver crashes. Recently, though, running Unity on
Natty it's worked fairly well.

>>Working with terminals is pretty nice, with all the extra screen real estate.
>
> Agreed, that was my favorite thing about unity.  Browsers too.

Yeah, I don't F11 into "full fullscreen" mode anymore, because it's
just a slight gain in vertical real estate now.

>>When an icon pops out to wave at me, the whole dock bar doesn't come
>>out to cover anything, only when I invoke it with my mouse or the
>>"Super" button (Alt-F2 works similarly enough to before to not have
>>bothered me too much, so far.
>
> so, just the icon covers things up, rather than the whole bar, eh?
> That would be much nicer.

The icon itself pops in from the left, jiggles for a quarter to a half
a second, then pops back out. I often don't even notice it.

>>If I didn't already know all the applications I want to work with,
>>it's a lot less intuitive/organized/pretty to browse your installed
>>programs than it was in GNOME 2. However, I've adapted quickly to
>>hitting the Super key, then beginning to type the app's name, and
>>selecting it as it comes up, and find that I don't really miss the
>>applications menu.
>
> For things I know and love, I agree, I could get to them pretty
> quickly by typing.  Synaptic is again a good example: I don't use it
> often enough that it was in my quick list, but it was easy to find
> when I needed it.  Things like system settings were annoying to deal
> with, though.

There's a difference between the Alt-F2 launcher, and the Super key
launcher, FWIW. I find Synaptic pop up immediately as the one and only
choice when I Super, and begin typing 'syn'.

But, yeah, trying to remember which settings/preferences dialog a
particular option is/should be in, is more annoying when you can't
just easily pull up a menu of all available preference dialogs.

>>I chose to try out Unity knowing there'd be a little overhead to
>>learning a new environment, and I was actually surprised at how
>>minimal that overhead has been.
>
> I made the same choice, and was surprised in the other direction.  :)
> Might be a question of 2d support not being as strong, though.  Idk.

I wouldn't doubt it.

Unity was envisioned as a Compiz-based window manager, and the 2D
version seems/feels like it's doing it's very best to match the
features using a different framework.

I can't help but doubt the 2D version will ever really catch up to the
flagship 3D Unity.

>>Just some random thoughts.
>
> I appreciate your thoughts, and those of everyone else who replied to
> my query.  Thank you!

My pleasure.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Unity evolves.

> David

Simón