There's Little Love For Ubuntu's Unity Desktop

[squirrl]

Mirrior Mirror on the Wall Just look at how fast I draw

apt-get install blackbox wicd openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us
sudo chmod -x /etc/init.d/gdm

[liam]

I'll definitely try a live cd out, but I'm not sure I want to take that route if ATi support is what I've heard. The one thing I liked about Ubuntu was the fantastic ATi support . I have never successfully installed the ATi proprietary driver, only the Catalyst one available through a repository. So does ATi have a repo on Fedora? If not, then I end up with a post at some point through the experience with this:

Thanks for the suggestion!

Although I don't own an AMD card, keep in mind who pays for the open source development in Linux for ATI cards. Was that Fedora 11/12? I read about some problems with Xserver versions with those systems and AMD not having supported to newest releases. Though I haven't heard of any problems with 14 it would probably be best to run a livecd and install the catalyst drivers there to see the results.
For extra repos in Fedora try rpmfusion.com

Best/LIam

[lukem33p]

Have you tried Fedora? In my experience since Constantine, it has been rock solid, plus nice repos.

I'll definitely try a live cd out, but I'm not sure I want to take that route if ATi support is what I've heard. The one thing I liked about Ubuntu was the fantastic ATi support . I have never successfully installed the ATi proprietary driver, only the Catalyst one available through a repository. So does ATi have a repo on Fedora? If not, then I end up with a post at some point through the experience with this:

Thanks for the suggestion!

[V!NCENT]

Okay.

Here's a week.

Go do it. Blog it, and submit the blog entry as a story to Phoronix. I'm sure they'll print it.

So I went ahead and mailed it to Mark Shuttleworth's secretary and this is the reply I got:

Hi Vincent,

Thank you for your email.

I have shared your work with Mark and he says that is an excellent weeks work and he strongly supports your concept of the netbook as a bridge between the traditional desktop and the new mobile world.

Kind regards,
Claire

You can download the PDF here:

http://www.4shared.com/document/FbOHLLyt/Unity.html

[liam]

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!

Have you tried Fedora? In my experience since Constantine, it has been rock solid, plus nice repos.

[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!

[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

[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.

[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).

[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.