Brief thoughts on Unity

[Tony Pursell]

On Sun, 2011-06-12 at 09:54 -0700, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> 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.
> 
> :-)
> 

Having persevered with Unity I am now OK with it, although I do have a
few issue with it. 

There is quite a bit of configuration that you can do, and there are
lots of keyboard short cuts which make for slick operating.
Unfortunately, it is not well documented yet, but there are discussions
about how to tackle that problem.

Here are some links that may help you to understand Unity better,

http://ubuntu-news.org/2011/04/21/the-power-user%E2%80%
99s-guide-to-unity/

and a video

http://castrojo.blip.tv/file/4997614/