After a solid week of usage...

[christopher.wortman]

I really dislike Unity as a whole. While I like the idea, I hate the bar. I hate hate hate it! It's auto-hiding feature gets in the way. I don't know how to disable it. When I click the "back" button in Firefox, it shows up and makes me click 'Home'. When changing things with CCSM, the top bar freaks out and glitches. Logging out and back in seems to fix it. The search menu thing is not the easiest thing to use, especially if you forget the name of what you want to do. I hate how the bar is anchored to the left, I want it on the bottom or the right, just out of my way or a way to disable the auto-hide feature. Everything feels sketchy and non-desktopish like I am using a giant cell phone UI on my computer that never works right. Unity needs a whole lot of work, until then I am going to stick with KDE or Gnome 2.x UI. This is my opinion of the experience I had. I did not like it.

[John-B]

That is also how I felt about Unity , thank goodness for the Classic setting on sign-up

[nomko]

Anyone here working for Canonical?? Hope they are here. So that they can see that they take Ubuntu to the wrong lane....

[christopher.wortman]

That is also how I felt about Unity , thank goodness for the Classic setting on sign-up+1
I hope they keep the "classic interface"


Anyone here working for Canonical?? Hope they are here. So that they can see that they take Ubuntu to the wrong lane....I have been using computers for quite some time, Linux specifically since 2003. I seen and played with Unity in a VM, but I decided to really give it a solid go as my desktop. I wanted to see if I could survive. It bothered me to the point of simply removing it.

http://linux-software-news-tutorials.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-remove-unity-in-ubuntu-1104.html

I suggest to anyone who wants to try Gnome 3 shell follow this first before installing it from repos.

While I don't exactly like Unity, I appreciate where it is going, and it needs a lot of work before becoming useful. I am sure Canonical will be working on it.

[walt.smith1960]

I really dislike Unity as a whole. While I like the idea, I hate the bar. I hate hate hate it! It's auto-hiding feature gets in the way. I don't know how to disable it. When I click the "back" button in Firefox, it shows up and makes me click 'Home'.
<snip>


I hated that too. I made a simple change that once i get used to it I think I'll like. In Firefox I did view-toolsbars-customize. Then drag each of the icons on the left into the open window. Then drag them to the right of the address bar. Done. I can now click the controls without invoking the Unity launcher.
196181
Another advantage is that if my mouse pointer is on the right side of the screen, there's less distance to travel. Something else that may make the Unity launcher less irritating is to go to "system settings"-launcher & menus - select the "touches the top left corner" radio button. That change helped me quite a lot. There are still things I'd change about Unity-having a clickable way to change between full screen windows chief among them like a bottom bar-but I can better tolerate Unity than when I first started using it.

[r14]

Had the same problem but fixed mine by going to Launcher & Menus and select "Touches the top left corner of the screen". Hope this help.

[zero244]

I tried Unity on a HP laptop.....the install was flawless and it covered all my hardware right out of the gate.
I used it for about 3 days and I thought it was ok. I could probably get used to it over time.

But really I prefer Gnome.

I just hope in future releases from Conanical they always give you the choice of using Gnome.
If you think about it.......with Windows and OSX you really have no choices.

I also hope Ubuntu and the linux community keeps on rocking, if they dont MS will achieve worldwide domination.
Not a pleasant thought.

[Ivor Grumble]

After trying Ubuntu for a few days on the live trial thing and using the 'classic' style I have decided to do a full install and now Vista is completely gone yay! I love the classic setup and really don't like that left panel thing on the regular set up. I hope we can retain that choice.

[kvv_1986]

Yep you can. But it will be Gnome3 classic, and you will have to install it from the repository.

[mastablasta]

If you think about it.......with Windows and OSX you really have no choices.
.

that's not true. at least for XP there was a classic menu style as well (that looked like Win2000 menu) ment for low resource usgae.

[lmsg2011]

I disliked Unity. I was going to give it a fair go and see if I could get used to it. I lasted 1 day and then it was off. I did find, however, that the classic UI choice caused me nothing but problems. It crashed all the time, would lock up for 5 - 10 seconds at a time. Might just have been my config etc.. has anyone else experienced that problem?

I don't like the way Unity and Gnome 3 seem to be going. I like the classic interface of Gnome 2, it seems cleaner, easier to use and faster.

[3rdalbum]

You can disable auto-hide using CCSM, or (better yet) change the settings so the launcher is revealed only when you throw the mouse into the top-left corner.

[Juan Largo]

As a KDE user, I don't think the Unity desktop is all that strange. The Unity menu bar is almost the same as KDE's panel, except that Unity's default location is along the left edge of the screen instead of at the bottom. Unity's auto-hide feature is kind of nice IMO. The KDE panel has an optional auto-hide feature too, but it works the opposite from Unity (the panel is hidden and you make it appear by mousing down to the bottom of the screen, whereas Unity's menu bar is visible unless you hide it behind a window). Overall, I prefer Unity over Gnome.

[XubuRoxMySox]

I don't ever try anything when it's brand brand new. I always give it time to get bugs worked out and stuff. I know all the cool kids want the latest and greatest, but I value stability and simplicity more.

That said, I like what I've seen (on the web) of Unity so far and I think it's going to be awesome someday soon. It's not really brand brand new since it's been on the Netbook Remix since 10.10, but it still sounds buggy enough for me to stay away from for now. But I am looking forward to seeing it in action, perhaps in the next LTS release. I always stick to the LTS releases as a rule anyway, though I did sneak a peek at Xubuntu 11.04 and it completely rocks! Just needs a little bit of time to fix a couple of things with the new Xfce... in the meantime Lucid rocks even more on my old Dell... Actually not mine anymore, but I'm borrowing it today and it still runs as quick and light as when I first installed Xubuntu Lucid.

I wonder if Unity will be even more "lightweight" than Xfce when it's all said and done!

-Robin

[christopher.wortman]

Thanks for all your non-trolled comments, you made me smile with well informed answers.

I tried CCSM and it did stop the bar from hiding, this fixed the most annoying issue I had, with it popping up at the worst of times. I am very sure, that if the community of developers stands behind what they believe, it will become more than a lack-luster OSX clone, however I think it is becoming white noise being just another desktop, rather than standing out like I think they hoped. I wish Canonical would work on more applications like Ubuntu One, and USC. Those are some prime applications. If they worked harder to make some more killer applications like these, we might see some more prospective users. Once they iron out the bugs and it becomes the de-facto of Ubuntu, (other distros aside) I think they could indeed work on branding more applications. I think they need to work on some paid for applications, leaving their desktop and OS open source. Like an audio editing program that is Ubuntu specific, or requiring Unity to run. Make them great, expand it as a business model, and really bring in some guns.

Ubuntu can be the next "Apple" but cloning the look and mildly changing it is not the way. I really feel like I am using a cheap OSX clone rather than using "Ubuntu". It is like having a fake pair of Nike shoes, and noticing a few splits along the seems and a few obvious changes while cloning what they think resembles Nike. Go ahead and be different, think outside the box, bring something new to the table. Don't make cheap knock offs of bigger names. Actually be a name brand, rather than being the store brand.