unity compiz issues

[cybergalvez]

I installed 11.04 last night, and so far the experience is not bad, and I am almost a believer. My main complaint, and I hope its only grown-pains is that after installing ccsm and trying to turn on / add some of the setting I used to have and like, it was very easy to kill unity!. At the moment it seems that because unity is tied so closely with compiz making almost any change kills the entire system.

For example in the standard interface, I had a compiz plugin that brought up a thumbnail of the app if you hovered over the task. I hope that something like that can be added back.

I hope, and my question is that as unity matures, I hope the ability to customize via compiz will not be taken away!.

Any thoughts on this from the Unity devs would be appreciated.

[cybergalvez]

Wow doing almost anything with ccsm completely breaks unity! I like the idea and I like the interface, but the fragility makes me think its just not ready fro prime time

Hope it gets better with some age would really like to see this work

[ted_rmt]

Noticed the same thing using CCSM. Tried toggling Unity to make it redraw which was a huge mistake. You can easily end up with a blank descktop with nothing but wallpaper and no options to get into the filesystem or anything else.

Lost Alt+F2 as an option to open the terminal as well

Have a flashdrive handy. It will mount and give you a folder to open so you can navigate your way back to CCSM :)

[kevinharper]

I did this... twice! Got the the point where I couldn't launch a terminal and I have the autologin set.

There were other things I had broken before that so I figured it would be easier to reinstall on each occasion.

Reading around to figure out a fix for those problems, seems the main issue people have w/ Unity is it's rigidness - it doesn't allow for too much customization.

I decided to disable Unity altogether (log out, select classic gnome look, log in). Maybe I'll give Unity a shot in the next release (we'll see how it behaves when I try to tweak it).

[cybergalvez]

Well I am going to take the plunge with Unity. I have been missing around with an extra partition just to see what I can and can't do. Unity is pretty fragile but overall I like the interface enough that I will make the transition.

[ted_rmt]

I have managed to customise unity a little. I still don't like the interface but I can see where others would. You can reduce the size of the icons and turn off their backlighting using CCSM/Unity. That makes it much more attractive IMO.

Playing Neverwinter Nights and had my first ever in game crash on a Ubuntu system. I will log on in gnome classic mode from now on and treat Unity as a novelty distro that just resides on my machine.

If the classic interface starts to give me the same problems (lost time on boot up, slower to open firefox, gui instability) I will reinstall an earlier version of Ubuntu.

I loved Ubuntu because everything just worked. This is supposed to be an alpha release and there are fundamental problems here. If the decision behind Unity is to appeal to a wider market, stability has to be addressed.

[wilee-nilee]

Is this sort of what your looking for.
191349

Take a look here, read carefully, and follow the advice on having a launcher like docky, I just made a synapse launcher. Synapse is like gnome-do, a key prompt gui for finding stuff. It will look like a horrible accident while doing this, lol just keep the faith.
http://reformedmusings.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/howto-get-the-compiz-desktop-cube-in-ubuntu-11-04-natty-and-unity/

[pmorton]

Just joined the Compiz broke my Unity club. It's kinda frustrating that major manglings like this are allowed to exist in a release. It's the sort of thing that gets Linux a bad name.

[bootedguy]

I am not seeing the problems in these posts. I did install ccsm, minimized size of icons as much as possible (would like even smaller), and turned on auto hide. I use Ctrl-Alt-t to a open terminal or two. My experience with Unity has been good. My wish list would be some kind of back-button when searching through applications to find the right one, and an easy way to display two (or more) windows side-by-side.

[cybergalvez]

I am not seeing the problems in these posts. I did install ccsm, minimized size of icons as much as possible (would like even smaller), and turned on auto hide. I use Ctrl-Alt-t to a open terminal or two. My experience with Unity has been good. My wish list would be some kind of back-button when searching through applications to find the right one, and an easy way to display two (or more) windows side-by-side.

I think the issue with ccsm is that it is pretty fragile, some things work great while others, just break everything

[bsucrese]

I installed natty 11.04 and then installed compiz and went to set up the cube in it and i lost all control of the system. how do i fix this?