Getting rid of Unity?

[Pongo Pan]

On Sat, 2011-04-30 at 11:42 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:

<snippage>

> Mint 11 will be out soon - based on Ubuntu 11.04 - but it might still
> use GNOME 2.32, the last version of GNOME 2, which came out since
> Ubuntu 10.10. Mint 13 will be the Ubuntu 11.10 version and it will use
> GNOME 3 but configured with the classic GNOME 2 two-panel look.

This is a surprise to me.  Do you have any reference for it?  The Mint
developers (all four or five of them) are very closed-mouthed about
their future releases.  They use a single bottom panel by default in the
current release.  Making G3 look like G2 sounds like a terrible kludge.
> 
> Me, I am quite liking Unity 2D so far, and I think I'll stay with it.
> It's different and less flexible or customisable, but I was never
> /that/ enamoured of GNOME 2. I like vertical panels, for instance, and
> have them configured that way on Windows & MacOS. GNOME does not work
> well in that orientation at *all*.

+1.  The vertical launcher is one of the main attractions of Unity for
me.  We got a very good price on a case-load of Samsung SyncMaster 953
monitors a while back.  They're good tubes, but only 1440 x 900, so a
bit vertically challenged.  Using both a top and bottom panel with only
900 pixels isn't very smart, so I've always gone with a top and right
side one.  Converting myself to looking to the left with Unity has been
the hard part.  I miss all my convenient GNOME applets (weather in a
couple of places, power-save inhibit, xkill, etc.) on the right.  I
can't seem to break my Samsung monitor unfortunately.

Reducing the size of the launcher icons to 40 pixels makes the Unity
screen even better.


> I am wondering how long it will take for Unity 2D to catch up with the
> standard 3D Unity, and how long until it gets what I consider to be
> all the core functionality of the Mac OS X Dock - but it's interesting
> and fun.

Yes, and I find I can be just as productive with it too.  It's just
different; more work to do some things, less to do others.  This, or
something similar is where we're all going to end up anyway since the
vast majority of computer users do very little text entry, don't really
touch type, and could really do nearly all of what they do on the
computer with a smart phone or tablet. Outside salespeople here have
mostly abandoned laptops now; they all have tablets.  Nobody wants to
type (and most can't), they want to point and touch.  The future market
for conventional, Windows, GNOME style interfaces will be limited to
nerds, engineers, designers and writers.  A niche.

-- 
pongo pan
If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy...I should not
care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of
foxhounds and drink a bottle of wine a day.
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