Now that the Unity hate has cooled down, how do you feel about the WM?

[philinux]

Don't forget to hold down the win key for an overlay of the keyboard shortcuts.

[the-edge]

^ Yeah, that's great! I told her about it, and also about HUD.

[montag dp]

I don't really like it. I prefer something more customizable. I've been using Cinnamon.

[Copper Bezel]

HUD is great. I like customization (and there's a lot to customize in Unity if you know where to look, particularly the Dash,) but a system that remembers how you've used it and doesn't need to be customized is even better.

[monkeybrain20122]

HUD doesn't work with many gnome applications anymore because of gnome changes. e.g evince in 13.10.

When I look at people's supposedly more customizable DEs Most of them look the same to be honest: they change the wall paper, change the themes put icons all over the places, install some indicator applets in the panel and otherwise all look like Windows XP There are more far out things like conky but you can do it in Unity anyway. So I conclude that when folks complain that Unity is not 'customizable' mostly they are saying they can't make it look ugly like WinXP.

[mc4man]

Which plugin is that? I've used Scale bound to the upper left hotcorner since Jaunty.

I've been won over, gradually over the past couple years. The final thing that did it for me was the really cool thing that happens when I press SHIFT-ALT-[up arrow]. Woo-hoo! I can easily find any window and go right to it, whenever ALT-TAB isn't quite enough for me. I don't understand why this important feature has been kept a secret.

shift+alt+up is/was the default for window picker > all workspaces (super+w for current ws)
At times it's been default enabled, currently isn't though can be set to whatever one wants

( the one mia is window picker for window group from all ws's, that can only be done thru dbus & a compiz command

[Copper Bezel]

HUD doesn't work with many gnome applications anymore because of gnome changes. e.g evince in 13.10.

Yeah, I've pretty much taken a side in the desktop war, there. Stuffing Gnome. It's the same as the appindicators all over again; just agree on a spec that's modular and that you can dress up however you like. If that happens to be Ayatana's, so be it. Arglebah.

I'm using one machine on each DE at the moment, but I know which one I'd rather work with in a pinch.

When I look at people's supposedly more customizable DEs Most of them look the same to be honest: they change the wall paper, change the themes put icons all over the places, install some indicator applets in the panel and otherwise all look like Windows XP There are more far out things like conky but you can do it in Unity anyway. So I conclude that when folks complain that Unity is not 'customizable' mostly they are saying they can't make it look ugly like WinXP.

Agreed. Beyond theming, you can't change how Unity looks, but you can change every darned thing about how it works, and that's what matters.

[Paddy Landau]

… She liked it instantly and didn't need any practice or training.

That's been my experience with new users. They tend to need hardly any training to use Unity, whereas the old-fashioned style menus did need training.

I used to spend hours a month helping friends and family using Windows. Now that my family and some friends have converted to Ubuntu (Unity), I spend mere minutes a month with them, and even then only occasionally; only those still on Windows need hours of my time. Lubuntu (for low-spec and old machines) is also much better these days.

[montag dp]

HUD doesn't work with many gnome applications anymore because of gnome changes. e.g evince in 13.10.

When I look at people's supposedly more customizable DEs Most of them look the same to be honest: they change the wall paper, change the themes put icons all over the places, install some indicator applets in the panel and otherwise all look like Windows XP There are more far out things like conky but you can do it in Unity anyway. So I conclude that when folks complain that Unity is not 'customizable' mostly they are saying they can't make it look ugly like WinXP.

You're painting with a broad brush there. Why can't I move the dock or the top bar to a different screen edge? Why can't I make the dock "window dodge" like any decent third-party dock? Why can't I easily get rid of the dock altogether, and use Docky or Plank instead? Why can't I have a traditional menu and a good search functionality, for the best of both worlds (Cinnamon and KDE do this by default, and Gnome Shell does it with an officially supported extension)?

Don't get me wrong, Unity isn't horrible - I could get used to it if I had to. But there are other options out there that I like better because they let me do what I want. Just because someone doesn't like the Ubuntu way of doing things doesn't mean they want to throw icons all over their desktop and make it look like Windows XP. My Cinnamon desktop is much closer to Mac OSX than Windows, and I've never even owned a Mac. It's just the way I happen to like it. With Unity I can't make it work the way I like it.

[monkeybrain20122]

You're painting with a broad brush there. Why can't I move the dock or the top bar to a different screen edge? Why can't I make the dock "window dodge" like any decent third-party dock? Why can't I easily get rid of the dock altogether, and use Docky or Plank instead? Why can't I have a traditional menu and a good search functionality, for the best of both worlds (Cinnamon and KDE do this by default, and Gnome Shell does it with an officially supported extension)?

Yeah I agree that the dock could be more flexible, I like dodge Windows myself and quite miss it, but its absence is not a show stopper for me. Other than the position of the dock everything else is pretty flexible.

The dash is a great search functionality. I think it is orders of magnitude better than the menu (actually menu + icons all over the desktop). But if you really want a traditional menu there is http://www.florian-diesch.de/softwar...enu-indicator/ It is one "sudo apt-get install classicmenu-indicator" away and is in the official repo (ppa only for 12.04)

Let's think about it this way, you can have a menu in Unity if you wish, but I can't have anything comparable to dash search in other DEs no matter how I "configure" them.

The closest thing is gnome-shell but gs's file search is clumsy or non existent (only shows recent files or it is the terminal or third party apps, search-tool has been removed and it was not integrated with the dash anyway) There were some extensions but none of them work any more with gs3.8 and above. In KDE there are homerun and rosa-launcher which look like the dash but have none of the search functionalities. In "traditional DEs" like xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE, Mate etc you can't even find anything remotely like that unless you count synapse, which is text based only.

So on a feature for feature trade off, one gains something basically cosmetic in nature (where to place the dock or not having a dock) by using a 'traditional DE' and lose something very functional (dash). It doesn't follow that other DE's are "more configurable", they just go for different trade offs. Some people think those are good trade offs, others may not. It boils down to personal preferences.