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Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#81

Post by jokermatt999 »

kami8844 wrote: post #61
metabrew wrote: post #5

I'm running unity since yesterday - feels like they compromised massively on the full desktop experience for the sake of compatibility with touch-based and netbook devices. I'll give it a week or so though; no-one likes change, and it's impossible to make any significant UI change without hoares of angry and confused users foaming at the mouth until they get their bearings.

I just signed up to upvote this comment :D Loving this website

Welcome to Hacker News! :-) FYI, comments like that tend to get downvoted swiftly on Hacker News. You may want to read the guidelines if you haven't already.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#82

Post by fader »

rubergly wrote: post #57
hasenj wrote: post #16

Completely disagree. I've been using Unity for a while now, it's pretty awesome and much much better than anything (classical) gnome could ever be. This article sounds like "I've just used OS X for the first time and there's no start menu, instead it has a weird thing that's like a dock or something." So, no more gnome-panel applets. What's the big deal? Most of them were useless and ugly anyway. And yes, there is a…

How is the Unity Launcher like Gnome-Do on steroids? Maybe things have improved, but the Launcher of the Unity that's included in Ubuntu 10.10's repositories is really limited. It doesn't have any keyboard shortcut to load the launcher (at least as far as I can tell; it seems like super is the shortcut in current releases, but that does nothing for me in Unity 2.46), and opening things is _nowhere_ near as snappy as…

I agree that it's a fraction of a second slower, as the box populates a bit slower than Gnome-Do. (Though I suspect that's just an area for optimization rather than an intent of the design.)

However, for frequently-used applications, you can also pin them to the launcher allowing you to launch them with one key combination. Super-1 will launch the first application penned to the launcher, Super-2 will launch the second, etc. In effect this gives you 10 'hotkey' slots for launching applications.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#83

Post by fader »

dman wrote: post #21
hasenj wrote: post #16

Completely disagree. I've been using Unity for a while now, it's pretty awesome and much much better than anything (classical) gnome could ever be. This article sounds like "I've just used OS X for the first time and there's no start menu, instead it has a weird thing that's like a dock or something." So, no more gnome-panel applets. What's the big deal? Most of them were useless and ugly anyway. And yes, there is a…

One thing that threw me off in Unity was the lack of a hierarchical menu for launching applications. Is there someway to create a button that shows the hierarchical menu? btw this isnt a criticism of unity, just me trying to pick the brains of a power unity user.

Right-clicking on the 'Applications' lens presents an organized list of application types. It's only one-level deep rather than truly hierarchical but it works quite well.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#84

Post by fader »

dman wrote: post #26

One thing I wish for is that they would show the Unity panel if I move the mouse past the left edge of the screen.

Currently the panel will display if you mouse to the upper-left of the screen. It took me a day or so to get used to but I strongly prefer it over the entire left edge of the screen being a hotspot -- on other OSes I waste a lot of time waiting for the panel/dock to go away when I mistakenly mouse just a little too far to the edge of the screen when trying to interact with a window.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#85

Post by windsurfer »

androith wrote: post #56
vacri wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that's so often overlooked. If you want a stable desktop for production use, use an LTS version of ubuntu. If you want 'close to the edge', get the last version or two, they come with 18 months support. If you want to fool around on the edge, well, that's where they do crazy stuff like this. Early adopters are beta testers, always have been, always will be.

Of course, the problem is that LTS releases are horribly outdated (the packages in the repos), that it becomes hard to be productive. I needed a new version of a library (actually not THAT new) to compile something, and it just wasn't there! LTS for the lose.

The whole idea of LTS is to leave outdated versions of the repo and only port bugfixes and critical security stuff backwards while leaving a direct upgrade path to the next LTS open.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#86

Post by mdwrigh2 »

owaislone wrote: post #80
mdwrigh2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I've used it for more than a week, and I don't love it. In fact, it's my biggest complaint about 11.04... like I said above. I didn't come in with any preconceived notions about Unity. In fact, coming in, I thought it might be an interesting change and I largely like it, but I really don't like Dash at the moment. Also, I didn't say Launchpad and Gnome-Shell were better. I haven't used them, I wouldn't know. Taki…

Fair enough, but the whole Dash is used once you search for something or click a category. Filling up empty space just for the sake of filling up empty space isn't such a good idea after all.

No, it is entirely filled up when I click on it, but the text is >30px and each icon is gigantic. I'm not talking about filling whitespace, I'm talking about making items reasonable sizes. I've already set my font sizes, just adhere to that or give me another config option. Similarly, let me adjust the size of the icons and either put more icons in there or shrink the size of dash.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#87

Post by kami8844 »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #81
kami8844 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just signed up to upvote this comment :D Loving this website

Welcome to Hacker News! :-) FYI, comments like that tend to get downvoted swiftly on Hacker News. You may want to read the guidelines if you haven't already. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well ... the welcome page says

>Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."

Seems kind of weird that you'd instantly downvote such a comment, but eh, who gives a damn about karma

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#88

Post by hasenj »

dman wrote: post #68
nnutter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a hierarchical menu is needed. What purpose would that help with? I think instead they should focus on making it easy to search in the launcher. One cool feature they have is that it can listed installed apps as expected but also apps available in Software Center. Hopefully, someone can search for "draw" and get appropriate apps listed. Or for "GIMP" and either launch of install the app.

Hierarchical menus help with app discoverability by showing all the apps the system has to offer.

I've always found such menus more confusing than anything.

Can you guess under which menu is the termina/command line program is hidden? No, unless you know in advance that it's under "Accessories". I mean, why isn't it under "system" or "programming"? It's too hard to guess what the menu author(s) were thinking so it's always hard to guess where a certain program is.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#89

Post by dman »

hasenj wrote: post #88
dman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hierarchical menus help with app discoverability by showing all the apps the system has to offer.

I've always found such menus more confusing than anything. Can you guess under which menu is the termina/command line program is hidden? No, unless you know in advance that it's under "Accessories". I mean, why isn't it under "system" or "programming"? It's too hard to guess what the menu author(s) were thinking so it's always hard to guess where a certain program is.

Think of the first time you ever used a computer. I agree that once you know that there is a app called terminal, using the Hierarchical menu might not be the best way to launch/use it. But the very first time you use a computer, its useful to see "Ahh - I can do Graphics, Programming, System Administration, Games. Oh wow it even has Solitaire!". So a hybrid approach with something like Gnome-Do for power users while retaining the hierarchical menu for regular users is optimal imo. Heck a lot of power users even create application sessions and do most of their app launching automatically at startup.

Re: Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

#90

Post by andybak »

sjs wrote: post #64
andybak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years back I switched from Windows to Mac and I can't say I really noticed any downside to the single fixed application menu. The gains due to Fitt's Law however are noticable and I when using a Windows box I find the menus to be annoyingly small click targets. I do miss the discoverability of Windows ALT+letter menu accelerator key presses though.

The default shortcut to focus the menu bar is Ctrl-F2. I change it to Ctrl-2 and frequently do things like "Ctrl-2 F O " to open recent files. For leaf menu items I set per-app keyboard shortcuts in the Keyboard pref pane so I don't have to do the Ctrl-2 song and dance to find things I use all the time. There are some undiscoverable ways to use the keyboard on OS X. In many alert dialogs you can hit Cmd-[first letter…

Your first point is very useful. Still way slower than the Windows way but way quicker than mousing it.

I already knew the alert dialog trick. It doesn't work consistently though which is rather annoying (Apple's own apps rarely seem to support it)

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