Unity MEGA Thread

[slackthumbz]

I finally got round to upgrading my netbook to 10.10 and I have to say I'm fairly unimpressed by the Unity desktop.

First up, it feels kinda clunky, you have to wait for menus to load and I can't honestly see any advantage to the way it does things. It turns what could be a very small laptop into an appliancey consumer device and to me that just ruins a netbook.

Second, screen real estate, what a waste. Unity takes up a lot of space with that silly sidepane on the left and surely on a netbook you want to maximise your use of all available space? You could get rid of everything in the unity desktop and just provide a basic dock such as AWN or docky to act as the gnome-panel usually would or hell, just use a single gnome-panel at the top of the screen.

I know it's only two issues but they're annoying enough to make me use the normal gnome-session (oh yeah, in the netbook edition I had to manually install gnome-compiz and the various compiz fusion plugins just to get compositing working with desktop effects. WTF).

Finally, and as far as I know this occurs in the normal desktop edition as well, you can't disable bluetooth via the panel without killing your wireless simultaneously. I've tested this on my netbook and my main machine (AMD64 box) and it occurs on both of them. Seriously annoying.

OK rant over

[Chris1274]

Second, screen real estate, what a waste. Unity takes up a lot of space with that silly sidepane on the left and surely on a netbook you want to maximise your use of all available space?

Most screens these days are 16:9, so they're a lot wider than they are tall. The purpose of the side panel was to utilize the extra horizontal space in order to maximize vertical space.

That said, I don't really like the netbook edition either, whether the old one or the new one. I use the desktop edition on my netbook.

[andymorton]

I finally got round to upgrading my netbook to 10.10 and I have to say I'm fairly unimpressed by the Unity desktop.

First up, it feels kinda clunky, you have to wait for menus to load and I can't honestly see any advantage to the way it does things. It turns what could be a very small laptop into an appliancey consumer device and to me that just ruins a netbook.

Second, screen real estate, what a waste. Unity takes up a lot of space with that silly sidepane on the left and surely on a netbook you want to maximise your use of all available space? You could get rid of everything in the unity desktop and just provide a basic dock such as AWN or docky to act as the gnome-panel usually would or hell, just use a single gnome-panel at the top of the screen.

I know it's only two issues but they're annoying enough to make me use the normal gnome-session (oh yeah, in the netbook edition I had to manually install gnome-compiz and the various compiz fusion plugins just to get compositing working with desktop effects. WTF).

Finally, and as far as I know this occurs in the normal desktop edition as well, you can't disable bluetooth via the panel without killing your wireless simultaneously. I've tested this on my netbook and my main machine (AMD64 box) and it occurs on both of them. Seriously annoying.

OK rant over

I ran it on a Live USB this morning and I wasn't impressed either. I agree with everything you've said about the Unity interface, plus wireless wouldn't work out of the box (it does on the desktop edition), which is kind of annoying.
I've never really been a fan of the netbook edition anyway. The lack of simple customisation options really put me off, e.g. you can't even move the panel from the top to the bottom of the screen.
I'd much rather use the desktop edition on my netbook. It runs just as quickly and it can be modified in just about anyway imaginable.

andy

[slackthumbz]

Most screens these days are 16:9, so they're a lot wider than they are tall. The purpose of the side panel was to utilize the extra horizontal space in order to maximize vertical space.

That said, I don't really like the netbook edition either, whether the old one or the new one. I use the desktop edition on my netbook.

I think I may install a plain desktop edition, but just to illustrate, here's what I mean about the Unity sidepane. It just seems rather pointless when compared to a cleaner desktop.

[Zlatan]

I've decided to use gnome-do in docky option, autohiding, without any panels on my netbook:
link

good for space saving

[slackthumbz]

I've decided to use gnome-do in docky option, autohiding, without any panels on my netbook:
link

It's interesting to note that a lot of users don't realise that you can completely remove the gnome-panel altogether, I haven't tried docky in years so I don't know how good it is these days. I should really give it a go and see how it compares to AWN

[Zlatan]

It's interesting to note that a lot of users don't realise that you can completely remove the gnome-panel altogether, I haven't tried docky in years so I don't know how good it is these days. I should really give it a go and see how it compares to AWN

looks great with orientation on top

[Naiki Muliaina]

I quite like sidepane's but I have a 1920 x 1080 screen.

[FuturePilot]

I'm pretty sure I heard somewhere that they would be adding an autohide feature for the launcher next release.

[flukeairwalker]

I don't see why they don't have an auto hide feature for the side panel *now*. Unity looks like fail right now. I'm skipping Maverick on my netbook and hoping Unity does something impressive next release.