The Taming of the Unity (a recommendations)

This is for those humans who want to use an operating system, rather than spend their lives studying one. And an unstable one at that.

First, there are alternatives to Alt+F2 functionality, that will open up a small window to invoke an executable. Gnome-do is the most famous, there are others with a much smaller footprint.

Second, a collection of panel indicators that actually work (calendar, classic menu launcher, load and sensor indicator, etc..

Last, The Taming of the Unity, a qhick "how-to," to maintain your sanity, including using a panel/taskbar, for those of us too dumb to be content with a launcher/dash.

Best line: "Make [the launcher] automatically hide till summoned (lol, seriously, dude. You’re not going to be summoned EVER AGAIN.)"

I've tested all of these in 13.04 Ubuntu default session (no "fallbacks") - Except for one app for which the tar.gz is no longer available, and one of the indicators (weather) that kept crashing on my end, they all work fairly well).
[FWIF, my launcher behaved quite nicely, stable, the auto-hide worked well, then it stopped showing up no matter how far I try to "push" against the left edge of the screen. CCSM fixes work, until they don't, about 3 minutes later. So comforting to know this entire unity concept was created for the sake of having a single mobile and desktop environment for future Ubutu-Edge users. All 31 of them.]

This doesn't appear to be a support request. Moving to the Cafe.

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Originally Posted by r_avital

First, there are alternatives to Alt+F2 functionality, that will open up a small window to invoke an executable. Gnome-do is the most famous, there are others with a much smaller footprint.

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Actually, ALT+F2 works just fine. That particular post you are linking to is really old when, corrent me if I'm wrong, unity lacked the launch program combo functionality.

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Originally Posted by r_avital

Second, a collection of panel indicators that actually work (calendar, classic menu launcher, load and sensor indicator, etc..

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Another, maybe more comprehensive, list is being kept here on askubuntu.

Unity's pretty unwild to begin with.
Except for some indicators, which seem interesting, everything else mentioned feels like it would be adding gasoline to the fire.
Making the system more bloated than it should be.
An easier fix would be to just use a different desktop interface.
One that suits ones preferences.

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Originally Posted by deadflowr

An easier fix would be to just use a different desktop interface.
One that suits ones preferences.

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This is true and variety is the spice of life after all!
\(\
(='.')
o(_”)”)

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Originally Posted by kostkon

Actually, ALT+F2 works just fine. That particular post you are linking to is really old when, corrent me if I'm wrong, unity lacked the launch program combo functionality.

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Well, I went directly from Lucid to Raring (two separate machines), skipped over everything in between, so you might have a point there, as I never saw the earlier versions of unity. However, the grun that I'm using now is a small, simple, powerful enough for me, clean little window with memory and auto-completion, not the big, take-up-half-the-screen deal that unity gave me by default on Alt+F2.

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Originally Posted by kostkon

Another, maybe more comprehensive, list is being kept here on askubuntu.

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Ah, thank you for that link! Bookmarked!

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Originally Posted by deadflowr

An easier fix would be to just use a different desktop interface.
One that suits ones preferences.

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Absolutely true. If one existed.

The only thing that comes close (other than alternatives like xubuntu or mint, which have their own issues), is Gnome-Fallback. And fallback is, after all, fallback. No one knows how much longer it will be supported. No one has been able to tell me if it will even be included in the next LTS.

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Originally Posted by r_avital

Absolutely true. If one existed.

The only thing that comes close (other than alternatives like xubuntu or mint, which have their own issues), is Gnome-Fallback. And fallback is, after all, fallback. No one knows how much longer it will be supported. No one has been able to tell me if it will even be included in the next LTS.

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Yeah, but in the same sense, we don't know how long the above methods will be supported either.
And it could be one bad library file away from another cinnamon and gnome3.8 debacle, borking up anyone who has chosen to go one of those routes.

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

I am, though, in no real hurry to get there.

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

I am, though, in no real hurry to get there.

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It isn't better, but they seem to think it is ;)

What's that old expression...oh yeah...Same Difference :D

Here's the deal for me.

It borked the use of *Compiz Negative*, (the functions you used to have for Gnome2 and still have for MATE DE).

Is that function back and working in Unity DE?

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

I am, though, in no real hurry to get there.

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Personal preference, but the vertical dock is ugly. And there's no good way to get rid of it.

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Originally Posted by r_avital

Absolutely true. If one existed.

The only thing that comes close (other than alternatives like xubuntu or mint, which have their own issues), is Gnome-Fallback. And fallback is, after all, fallback. No one knows how much longer it will be supported. No one has been able to tell me if it will even be included in the next LTS.

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Have you tried KDE? You can probably install one your current system with the package kubuntu-desktop.

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Originally Posted by montag dp

Personal preference, but the vertical dock is ugly. And there's no good way to get rid of it.

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Looks a LOT nicer (to my eye...anyway) if you reduce it's size to 38 pixels...that is what i have mine set on (and to autohide of course) and i think it looks rather cool like that...
I didn't like the way it looks at the default size, either...

I set sensitivity up about 2 notches and it seems pretty smooth to bring it out of auto hide and i use radiance instead of the default ambiance, for more of a "mac" like look...
For me...perfect! ;)

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Originally Posted by craig10x

Looks a LOT nicer (to my eye...anyway) if you reduce it's size to 38 pixels...that is what i have mine set on (and to autohide of course) and i think it looks rather cool like that...
I didn't like the way it looks at the default size, either...

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Maybe so. Personally, I think Unity would benefit if there were some more basic configuration options for the dock. For instance, an "Intellihide" option like Docky has, where it only hides if the current window is covering it, or an option to always be hidden unless Super is pressed (the way Gnome Shell's dock behaves), or to remove it completely if someone prefers to use a different dock. I would like Unity a lot more if you could do those things. That, and I'd also have to get rid of the ugly orange theme, lol.

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Originally Posted by montag dp

Maybe so. Personally, I think Unity would benefit if there were some more basic configuration options for the dock. For instance, an "Intellihide" option like Docky has, where it only hides if the current window is covering it, or an option to always be hidden unless Super is pressed (the way Gnome Shell's dock behaves),.

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Actually the intelhide option used to exist (dodge window) and it was removed because "it will be confusing to the average user". IMO anyone who would be "confused" is definitely not "average". I think it was a really nice feature, for a while there was a hack to get it back from a ppa but it has stopped working for newer versions of Unity. Strange thing is I watched a recent demo of the Unity phone, and the launcher bar does have this feature. Incidentally this option is available to gnome-shell from an addon. The Unity bar can be made to always hidden, it is exposed by moving the mouse to the left edge.

Overall I like Unity, my only problem is the global menu. this is quite stupid on a reasonably large screen. You can remove it, but in 13.04 that would remove Nautilus' file menu as well, it may be a bug or maybe gnome's doing.

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

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In this particular case:

1. Because the horizontal row of icons, which is what a panel used to be, could be at the top, or bottom, or, believe it or not, vertical, on the left, or the right -- will miracles ever cease??? But the new "improved" dock -- it's Henry Ford's Model T, you can have it in any color you want as long as it's black. Left edge. Only. Nowhere else. And you, the community of users responsible for making the OS so popular, can go pound sand.
2. Because the panel -- now that we know it's not exclusively horizontal -- could contain icons for launching apps, or for a menu that was 90% configurable by a reasonably intelligent newbie, or status notirications, or an indicator section with a bunch of applet/indicators, or a windows-list, or any/all of the above. But the dock -- you have to paint your nose and edit files to put what you want in it, or supidly launch one app after the other and right-click on the icon that magically appears, and select "lock to launcher" which is really, really lame, and forget it if it's something you launched from a terminal.
3. Because the panel, you could have one, two three, eight, as many as you wanted. You could set them up as you pleased, each with its individual size, background color, background image, transparency and hiding/unhiding settins, if you were inclined to do all that work. But the dock? Nada. It is what it is. Color, hide/unhide, and transparency, That's it. Go pound sand.

And that's when this Earth-shattering, world-changing walk-on-water, feed-the-hungry, cancer-curing dock actually works, because on this end, it doesn't unhide when I want it to, and it doesn't stay transparent when it's supposed to.

Well, you asked :)

So no, it's not Same Difference. It's almost enough to drive someone back to @$%#@in' Windows 7, or even XP. There's more, but you get the idea.

The point is, less options/functionality != upgrade.

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Originally Posted by whatthefunk

Have you tried KDE? You can probably install one your current system with the package kubuntu-desktop.

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Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, I have, on a full-blown kubuntu install rather than just kde desktop over ubuntu. It's very nice, but also very distracting, and very demanding in terms of resources and system footprint. This is not a put-down, it works well for many, more power to them.

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Originally Posted by montag dp

Personal preference, but the vertical dock is ugly. And there's no good way to get rid of it.

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Well, there is, you just disable the unity plugin in compiz, but then you also lose the top panel, and thereby you lose all your application menus, because under gnome3, you cannot activate application menus. They're all suppsed to be on the "unifying" top panel that is active only with Unity.

And yes, it looks a bit better with smaller icons.

Here's what I just found out on that:

sudo apt-get purge unity-tweak-tool, and the unity plugin in compiz will let you reduce the icons all the way to 8 pixles (24 pixels would be reasonable for me). But if you need to use the unity-tweak-tool for other configurations that have little or nothing to do with unity, it will force them back to the minimum size unity accepts in the "launcher" configuration, which is 32.

This is not a tragedy, but just indicates that one development team or developer doesn't know what the other is doing. Par for the course, I suppose.

I thought about checkin out Unity, but it has always seemed to be marketed at relative morons or at best would be better suited to a tablet. I'd rather wade through the process of getting to know a different distro (fedora, arch, even gentoo) than try to adapt to Unity. Thankfully, my personal favorite DE, LXDE, is a fully supported official flavor of Ubuntu. All the perks of the Ubuntu support and massive repository with the lighweight, straightforward greatness that is LXDE.

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

I am, though, in no real hurry to get there.

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Perhaps I have an answer for you, provided we only talk about Unity.

I'm one of those who like a super clean desktop. I want nothing showing except my wallpaper. However, I also need to do things so I need a way of accessing programs etc. The developers have, in their wisdom, provided me a top panel that is difficult to modify and does little except contain a shutdown/logoff/restart button, and a Launcher on the side that launches... itself, applications and Dash. All well and good, but now I have two things cluttering my desktop... just because one of these things can hide itself makes never no mind to me. My OCD is telling me that sucker is hiding, waiting.

So here's a radical thought. Why doesn't Dash/Launcher do its thing from the top panel rather than bringing a new intrusion into the mix... Top (or anywhere else for that matter) panel/launcher/dash/applet combo. A one stop shop. I mean, if you're going to force something on me why not actually make it useful?

PJs Ronin,

I'm completely with you on that. Gave a detailed answer to the question, highlighting the many advantages of panels over the launcher and that other thing cluttering your desktop. I love a super-clean desktop myself, and Lucid (using gnome2) provided just that. Rock-solid, configurable nearly at will, useful panels, as many or as few as you wanted, doing exactly what you wanted, how you wanted..

The trouble with your suggestion, is that the top panel you speak of, is used by all open applications as the only part of the screen where any app's menu will be displayed. Cannot show an app's menu within the app's window within a unity session -- this is the meaning of "unity."

So fewer features + impaired functionality + cluttered desktop + frequent and obscure crash messages = "upgrade"

[Or the ACA. Take your pick]

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Originally Posted by r_avital

Well, there is, you just disable the unity plugin in compiz, but then you also lose the top panel, and thereby you lose all your application menus, because under gnome3, you cannot activate application menus. They're all suppsed to be on the "unifying" top panel that is active only with Unity.

And yes, it looks a bit better with smaller icons.

Here's what I just found out on that:

sudo apt-get purge unity-tweak-tool, and the unity plugin in compiz will let you reduce the icons all the way to 8 pixles (24 pixels would be reasonable for me). But if you need to use the unity-tweak-tool for other configurations that have little or nothing to do with unity, it will force them back to the minimum size unity accepts in the "launcher" configuration, which is 32.

This is not a tragedy, but just indicates that one development team or developer doesn't know what the other is doing. Par for the course, I suppose.

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Or personally, I just use a desktop environment more to my liking in the first place. No point forcing Unity to do something it's not made to do.

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Originally Posted by r_avital

In this particular case:

1. ...the new "improved" dock -- it's Henry Ford's Model T, you can have it in any color you want as long as it's black. Left edge. Only. Nowhere else. And you, the community of users responsible for making the OS so popular, can go pound sand.

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I'm one of those users and I never liked the Gnome 2 panel. There's no way of knowing how many Ubuntu users prefer the old Gnome 2 panel. People who pine for it online are self-selected and can't be taken as representing the majority of users. In any case, software development isn't something that can be led by polling users. Developers make choices, so do users. If someone wants the old Gnome 2 panel, I'd point them to MATE.

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Because the panel -- now that we know it's not exclusively horizontal -- could contain icons for launching apps...

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Here's what really annoyed me about the Gnome 2 panel: If you put icons in a panel to use as launchers, clicked and launched an app, moved to another work space, clicked on that same icon expecting to return to the running instance of the applications in its work space? Nah, wouldn't happen.

The easiest way for me to manage my desktop is to open one application per workspace by clicking on a dock icon and then moving between those applications by clicking on the same icon. Gnome 2's panel -- the one in old Ubuntu -- can't do that.

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Because the panel, you could have one, two three, eight, as many as you wanted. You could set them up as you pleased, each with its individual size, background color, background image, transparency and hiding/unhiding settins, if you were inclined to do all that work.

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I am not inclined. Either it looks and works like I want out of the box, or at least with a few minutes effort, or I move on. When I run Unity, I add a background, shrink the dock to 32 pixels, and I'm done.

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

I'm one of those users and I never liked the Gnome 2 panel. There's no way of knowing how many Ubuntu users prefer the old Gnome 2 panel. People who pine for it online are self-selected and can't be taken as representing the majority of users. In any case, software development isn't something that can be led by polling users. Developers make choices, so do users. If someone wants the old Gnome 2 panel, I'd point them to MATE.

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Well, I'm one of those users as well, and a) yes there is a way to know, because b) as you mentioned yourself, there's MATE, so c) you could get a count of MATE downloads or activity on MATE-related forums, therefore d) they're not self-selected.

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Here's what really annoyed me about the Gnome 2 panel: If you put icons in a panel to use as launchers, clicked and launched an app, moved to another work space, clicked on that same icon expecting to return to the running instance of the applications in its work space? Nah, wouldn't happen.

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Good point. FYI, I've just checked on my Lucid machine (gnome2), the application switcher (not the static one, just plain application switcher) does have mouse and keyboard shortcut options for "next window (all windows)" and will happily switch you to the appropriate workspace when you Alt+Tab to the application you want. So Unity did not add anything new, it was already there, Unity just modified the look/feel.

The truth is that I would put up quite well with Unity, if it worked. But on my end, it simply doesn't. The launcher NEVER shows up from hiding when I need it if I don't set a keyboard shortcut just to make it slide out. Transparency settings are not respected. Oh, and every 30 minutes or so, without doing anything intensive like music/videos/gaming (not into that anyway), I get the lovely "System Program Problem Reported" box, A.K.A. Canonica's rename of the MS-Windows-2.x GPF. Even under MATE.

Sorry. Force something on me, AND it's buggy? Nope. Going back to Lucid where I still get security updates, until this nonsense at least stabilizes a bit better. There's folks on this forum still running productively on Hardy and Intrepid, so I'll be in good company :)

Downloads don't tell you how many peope use a distribution, or for how long.

Forum posters are the epitome of self-selected people. They choose themselves, usually to support some kind of agenda.

The workspace switcher in Gnome 2 is not the container for icons that launch apps. It's only populated after something is launched. Gnome 2 won't let me launch an app, launch an app in another workspace and create that workspace if needed, and switch betweeen apps regardless of workspace by clicking on the same icon that launched them.

Greetings,
My suggestion would be to just accept the fact that Gnome2 is about done in Ubuntu and move on. The fact that most of the complaints in this post are about worn out is proof enough that Unity is doing well. I too liked Lucid and Maverick but Ubuntu Raring is by far the best OS I have ever used since MSDOS 2.8 and I for one can't wait to see what comes next.

I'd suggest to r_avital, that his time may bet better spent, troubleshooting his problem, I've run Unity since it first came out as a netbook DE, and have never had the problems he says he has. I run development versions, as they are at the point now where they are almost boring to use, and Unity has changed quite a bit since 12.04 was released, and they don't even look similar, and certainly don't function the same.

Around and around we go...
Where it stops, nobody knows!

Simple solution: Find a Distro/DE that suits your tastes/needs,
and quit expecting people to change things to fit what you think is right.

Ubuntu/Unity just does not suit everyone, and I don't think it is expected to.
It's the direction that Ubuntu has chosen, if you don't like it, there are options!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

Someday, maybe, I'll understand why a panel -- a horizontal row of icons -- is so much better than a dock -- a vertical row of icons.

I am, though, in no real hurry to get there.

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it's horizontal

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Originally Posted by arpanaut

Around and around we go...
Where it stops, nobody knows!

Simple solution: Find a Distro/DE that suits your tastes/needs,
and quit expecting people to change things to fit what you think is right.

Ubuntu/Unity just does not suit everyone, and I don't think it is expected to.
It's the direction that Ubuntu has chosen, if you don't like it, there are options!

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LOL! Yep!

I like using Unity, and I don't really change it all that much. I'm fine with the Dash when I need it, and I have a nice Quicklist that contains launchers for about a dozen apps, but keeps the main launcher from being too cluttered. Between the Launcher, the Dash, and the quicklist, I've found that I don't have a need for a "normal" application menu.

But I also like using GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, Openbox, Fluxbox, whatever, and using any of them is no problem for me. If I didn't like Unity but still wanted to use Ubuntu, I'd simply add one of those and use that instead, problem solved.