So, a while back I upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the current 11.04, codename Natty Narwhal. This also meant upgrading the desktop away from my beloved Gnome 2.x to the new choice that Ubuntu introduced with some controversy – Unity. It’s mostly based on GTK but has a lot of differences.
It has yet to blow me away, although I’ve gotten somewhat used to it. The main problems with Unity if you ask me is that it’s fairly unstable and removes a lot of usability that I was used to in proper Gnome. I’m not quite certain why Unity is a good choice on a proper desktop – I can see some advantages on a netbook but as a proper desktop environment it has a long way to go.
Primarily I find it annoying because it interferes with how I use my computer. It’s quite obvious that Mark (Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and leader of the Ubuntu-project) really likes MacOS X, and Unity takes a lot of inspiration from MacOS X. My biggest niggle is that it dumbs things down unnecessarily, and removes and confuses a lot of things.
Such as the Unity-launcher. I don’t know if it wants to be a dock or a menu or whatever. There is no way of customizing it, it tends to get in the way a lot, and even though it autohides it still feels very clumsy and not particularly though-through. Adding items to it is confusing since there’s no integration with most of the rest of the OS. You can’t just drag anything on there. Using Nautilus to manage files has become a pain since the launcher only shows one icon for each application, which has multiplied the amount of clicking and dragging before finding the proper Nautilus-window. I usually have about five-six windows of Nautilus, handling files. Previously this was easy since each window had it’s own entry. Now, each window shares the same icon. Very annoying.
Also, there’s no way of adding quick launchers. I used to have a set of launchers back on Gnome for various often-used folders. This is no more. Now I have to open my home folder and then open a bunch of windows out of it instead of quickly and effortlessly going to my commonly used folders.
One thing I do like though is that Unity provides a somewhat decent application launcher. Previously I used Gnome Do, which was replaced by Synapse and now the Unity launcher has made Synapse obsolete. I like how I can get a similar experience simply by hitting the Super-button on my keyboard. However, it’s not nearly as powerful as it should be. For example, I can type in the name of a folder, but it only displays a few files inside that folder – not the folder itself. I want to be able to open folders quickly, and had this worked fine then my previous complaint about the launcher clustering application windows under one name would’ve been nullified.
But like I said, Unity removes a lot of functionality. For example, we now have a pseudo-Mac like menubar at the top of the screen. This mostly wastes screen real estate and is occasionally the home for application menus, again in a pseudo-Mac like fashion. I’m not a fan. Most of the time it just wastes space and currently there’s hardly anything that can be put there. Gone is the possibility to have system-meters to quickly gauge the system load and memory use, something I really liked under Gnome. A third-party weather app can be added, but it tends to disappear every so often.
And yes, there are lots of bugs. I’m one of the many people who suffer the jerky window-movements. Basically everything flies along, but whenever I try to move around a window, that movement is jerkier than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid. This is most likely a bug in Compiz. I have and ATI/AMD graphics-card, but have read about people with Nvidia-cards who suffer it as well. Numerous other minor bugs abound, such as Compiz using a lot of CPU when it shouldn’t, various visual defects occuring when you least want them and just generally weird behavior.
Unity could be great. But from a usability as well as technological standpoint it can’t be considered more than a rough beta, and it shouldn’t have been put into production this soon. Canonical and the devs behind Unity need to put a lot of work into it, and add back functionality that was removed.



