Brief thoughts on Unity

[MR ZenWiz]

I recently acquired a laptop and put Natty on it as an experiment.

At first, the 64-bit CD wouldn't boot, so I tried the 32-bit CD.  When
that came up, I re-tried the 64-bit CD and this time it worked.  (Huh?
 Oh well....)

The first time I brought Natty up, it refused to run Unity because it
said the video wouldn't support it.  It's an NVidia 4600 I think (not
looking right now - foo), but I figured the latest proprietary driver
would probably fix that, and it did.

After about 30-seconds or so poking around the Unity interface, I came
to dislike it intensely.  It is not configurable, I have no control
over the panels or the dock (dashboard?), and I'm stuck with a reduced
size screen that I find offensive - laptops screens are small enough
that the thick bars for the dashboard just eat way too much horizontal
space, and I don't even use top panels on my desktop with the 25"
screen - I like my vertical space in a widescreen format.  I switched
back to GNOME and am already much happier with it.

However, I have been in this business for over 31 years now and I have
this thing about being in control of my computer, not it in control of
me.  Even when I was running MSDOS, I used the 4DOS shell because it
let me do things that MSDOS couldn't.  I waited until Windows 98 came
out before I tried 95, and I fought with Windows for control of my
machine for ages.  As you all probably know, that's a war you can't
win, so when I jumped to CentOS and more recently Ubuntu, my issues
were resolved.  (The ones I couldn't resolve right away I dug into
until I could.  It's in the nature of my beast.)

So, while Unity might be a flashy, attractive (except I hate the
colors, too, and I didn't see how to change them, either - in fact, I
don't much care for any of the "stock" themes because I like genuine
blue colors, not all that grayed in stuff) and fancy new interface for
netbooks and new users, I'll stick with GNOME 2 until something better
comes along.  (I've had my battles with KDE, too, and it's sort of
like the vi-emacs religious war - I like one and not the other, and no
one's going to change my mind on that unless I see an advantage in
it.)

Unity has features that might lure in some Windows users and some MAC
users, but it is far from the complete, fully-implemented,
developer-friendly universe that GNOME and KDE provide.  (FTR, I tried
xcf (?) once and didn't like it at all - small yes but way too
underpowered for me.)  I still enjoy the power of the command line
interface, so having configurable terminal windows that start up in
the size I want (without having to massage them after startup) is also
important to me.

That's my $0.02.  No need to argue anything - others will agree or
not, and that's fine.

:-)