Getting rid of Unity?

[Liam Proven]

On 30 April 2011 16:10, Pongo Pan <pongo_pan at fastmail.us> wrote:
> 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.

Apparently, GNOME3 has a "legacy" mode, much as Unity does in Ubuntu 11.04.

Here are some references:
http://www.ainer.org/news/linux-mint-11-katya-with-gnome-3-announced
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2011030202535NWRL

& from the horse's mouth:
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1665

>> 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.

:¬)

I like the thought that "only" 900px vertically is short of space. I'm
typing on a 1024×768 screen.

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

I have noy (yet) found a way to do thatwith Unity 2D.

>> 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.

I think you're right.

The WIMP was a good model for a long time, but as we get computers
with directly-interactive multitouch interfaces that can take
dictation, I think that touch interfaces will take over and "desktop"
interfaces will fade away except for power users.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508