There's Little Love For Ubuntu's Unity Desktop

[benmoran]

With Shuttlesworth "active" role (I'll kindly leave it at that) in notify-osd and subsequent refusal to admit the idea is utterly broken I have no faith in Unity unless it changes beyond recognition.

I disagree. The new notification system is one of my favorite parts of the desktop. From a users perspective it's polished, clean and consistent. It doesn't have interactive elements, but I don't miss those.

[virtualspectre8]

Most of us understand that. However, Unity in the current netbook form is a usability nightmare, a major regression over the previous netbook edition. It doesn't inspire a lot of faith in their plans to apply the same broad concepts to the larger desktop.

This is a very crappy article by Phoronix, they didn't mention the key aspects of Desktop Unity. 1. It will be different than the Netbook Edition. 2. The current Unity build is slow thank's to Mutter, they'll fix it using Compiz instead. 3. The left launcher will autohide if the user wishes so. 4. Ubuntu will fallback to the old Gnome Desktop if your computer can't handle Unity.

[virtualspectre8]

I can't say much about Unity, but in my experience Compiz clearly is still superior when it comes to performance, driver compatibility and reliability. Mutter developers have been promising improvements for a long time, but we've yet to see it perform as well as Compiz.

Mutter makes no sense. I'm a Compiz hardcore fan, I'm glad Unity will drop Mutter and use Compiz instead!

[virtualspectre8]

Unity 11.04 will require accelerated OpenGL: http://njpatel.blogspot.com/2010/10/...ut-one-of.html

Unity will, if your hardware doesn't support 3d hardware acceleration it will fallback to old Gnome.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/31/unity-some-further-clarification-points/

[virtualspectre8]

I disagree. The new notification system is one of my favorite parts of the desktop. From a users perspective it's polished, clean and consistent. It doesn't have interactive elements, but I don't miss those.

A computer desktop without Notify-OSD feels obsolete in my eyes. I can't live without those bubbles telling me someone just tweeted something, or someone posted something at facebook or a new post on Google Reader just arrived.

Ubuntu's Gnome desktop is way better than vanilla Gnome.

[liam]

I disagree. The new notification system is one of my favorite parts of the desktop. From a users perspective it's polished, clean and consistent. It doesn't have interactive elements, but I don't miss those.

Yes, it's polished, clean and consistent, but it's not well designed. It was supposed to draw users attention when needed and be easy to ignore when not, but it isn't good at either of those things. I invariably miss it when I should've seen it and can't get rid of it when I don't care. The hover state is just bad design.
1. it's not dismissable - this is obvious, especially when something is as obtrusive as these bubbles popping up in front of my work - G-S has a better solution
2. it doesn't distinguish between things of high and low priority - I've been using Ubuntu for the on and off since around Gibbon but consistently for the last two releases (though I'm probably switching to Fedora when it's released) and I can't tell the difference between system notifications and app notifications - G-S fixes this
3. it doesn't theme well - the damned thing is always translucent black - G-S allows easy theming with CSS

Gnome Shell has 2 different notifications, but the one we see most often, hopefully, is app stuff. It animates a nice little icon with message at the bottom of the screen. Now you can either make it go away immediately or ignore it. If you do the later it disappears and in the app notification area at the bottom of the screen (off screen unless you mouse down to the bottom of the screen) the unanswered notifications build up so you can see if you missed something. The system notification is being worked on. Check-out Planet Gnome currently to see ideas he has.

Ubuntu has done some good things, but this just isn't one of them. Many things are open for opinion but notifications that irretrievably disappear or that you can't dismiss? That is simply a bad thing. If you don't believe me, Google "notify-osd".

Honestly, what;s worse is that I can't change it out for notification-daemon. I disabled notify-osd in dbus directory, but that didn't do a thing.

[liam]

A computer desktop without Notify-OSD feels obsolete in my eyes. I can't live without those bubbles telling me someone just tweeted something, or someone posted something at facebook or a new post on Google Reader just arrived.

Ubuntu's Gnome desktop is way better than vanilla Gnome.

G-S gives you the same info but actually lets you do inline responses without having to go to a client.
Jhbuild gnome-shell to see for your self. There are several branches. Currently I'm using overview-relayout2 which has begun the process of implementing the gui changes that have been talked about for awhile now (for those of you worried that nothing was happening -- the devs have been building the tools along with the house -- the decorating comes last).

[NoEffex]

I like Unity far more than I like GNOME Shell. The only news you ever hear is people complaining so no point in reporting it.

[DanaG]

About the only positive direct benefit being expressed right now is that Ubuntu's Unity interface may be better than the GNOME Shell for those with pen or touch-screen interfaces...

Say, how is Unity at all usable for pen-based computers, when it's quite literally impossible to click (with a pen) on any of the icons on the left-side dock?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/658787

[lukem33p]

A fallback after Hardware Acceleration? Good Luck!

Are you sure about that? I would assume the desktop will default to something usable with no 3D accel.

Anyways, I am not so surprised about this, and I really think a simple, consistent interface may be a good thing. Android did that: a simple API on top of the kernel, easy to write apps ... and it has exploded!

I kind of wish for a simple interface where you can run GNOME apps, KDE apps, etc, and have them doc properly, etc.

No, it tends not to on my computer. If I run any sort of windowed game, either one or the other slows down. Even with Compiz as the Window manager. No, it's pretty ugly without acceleration. Ubuntu needs to send some of their people to ATi and NVidia and get their drivers improved before they attempt this.

My question is why did Ubuntu choose to make their own? KDE would have made a nice base, or they could have not even gone that extreme and used QT as the toolkit and gone and gone weird with their DE anyway. Which would have clearly been better than this.

OpenSuSe, here I come!