Unity Desktop Possibly Coming To Fedora

[Remco]

Well, I tried alpha versions of both Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity and Fedora 15 with gnome-shell. And I must say I've found gnome-shell to not only give a better user experience than Unity but it also has a much better look than Unity. And I'm certainly not the only Ubuntu user who is not pleased with the Unity experience. I think the Canonical "usability experts" really screwed things up with Unity.

Funny, considering that GNOME Shell basically threw out their design and copied Unity.

[lolren]

Funny, considering that GNOME Shell basically threw out their design and copied Unity.

but, no right click on desktop? no maximize and minimize buttons? no taskbar (in gnome-shell)? no desktop shortcuts(unity)? this sucks ....i always loved ubuntu (till now). i hope they will come around, the ubuntu devs, and the gnome devs.

[monraaf]

Funny, considering that GNOME Shell basically threw out their design and copied Unity.

Yeah they revamped gnome-shell for the better. But I don't agree with you that they just copied Unity. That sounds like typical Canonical spin.

[Remco]

Yeah they revamped gnome-shell for the better. But I don't agree with you that they just copied Unity. That sounds like typical Canonical spin.

Regardless of who copied what, when and where, GNOME Shell and Unity are practically the same thing now. What exactly are the big design failures you were talking about? (I can think of one: starting applications that are not in the dock is really frustrating now. But that's the case with both new desktops.)

[monraaf]

A couple of things.

• The dock (or whatever Canonical calls it) on the left side is just a mixed bag of everything, icons for running applications, application launchers, drives, desktop switcher, application chooser. That maybe okay for very familiar icons such as Firefox icon, but most icons just look like a big mystery to me with no descriptive text.
  
• In the application list (or whatever Canonical calls it) you cannot even use the mousewheel to scroll through your list of installed applications, you have to position your mouse on the tiny scrollbar and drag it.
  
• You can go to the desktop switcher mode (or whatever Canonical calls it) with a click on one of those non-descriptive icons in the dock, but you cannot leave it this way, you have to double click in one of your desktops.
  
• Although not part of Unity but part of Ubuntu 11.04 is the global menu, perhaps nice for netbooks, but I don't like this at all on the desktop. I find that this 'feature' requires too much mouse movement on normal sized desktop.

And this was only a couple of issues I found after using it for a very short time.

[Remco]

A couple of things.

• The dock (or whatever Canonical calls it) on the left side is just a mixed bag of everything, icons for running applications, application launchers, drives, desktop switcher, application chooser. That maybe okay for very familiar icons such as Firefox icon, but most icons just look like a big mystery to me with no descriptive text.
• In the application list (or whatever Canonical calls it) you cannot even use the mousewheel to scroll through your list of installed applications, you have to position your mouse on the tiny scrollbar and drag it.
• You can go to the desktop switcher mode (or whatever Canonical calls it) with a click on one of those non-descriptive icons in the dock, but you cannot leave it this way, you have to double click in one of your desktops.
• Although not part of Unity but part of Ubuntu 11.04 is the global menu, perhaps nice for netbooks, but I don't like this at all on the desktop. I find that this 'feature' requires too much mouse movement on normal sized desktop.

And this was only a couple of issues I found after using it for a very short time.

Some of them are bugs, some of them are design failures. I don't believe icons are bad. People tend to recognize icons regardless of language. If there was no text at all, it could be quite mysterious what some of those icons would mean. But as soon as you put your mouse on an icon, a description appears next to it. Precisely the same as panel launchers in gnome-panel.

The scrolling thing is a bug, not a design issue. Remember that this is not even beta software. Same for the desktop switcher click behaviour. That one has been fixed.

I won't argue with you on the global menu thing. It's perfect for netbooks, and I'm reluctantly getting used to it on my 1920x1200 laptop. But it becomes disastrous with multiple monitors. I'm going to have to disable it on my workstation, unless they solve the multimonitor case.

[yogi_berra]

The FSF also requires copyright assignment, as does Novell, as do many other open-source companies. People who disagree are free to not contribute code.

The adverse is also true, those companies and organizations are free to not get bug fixes.