(Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

The sticking point for me with Unity was switching between multiple open windows. I typically have a dozen or so terminals and gedit and Chrome windows open across a half-dozen workspaces, but if I want to bring (let's say) a specific terminal on my current workspace to the foreground, I couldn't figure out a better way to do it than to open up Unity's display of all the many terminals I have running and try to pick out which one I mean.

I'm open to trying it again once it's had a bit more polish, but I'm sticking with Gnome classic for now.

Yes, the Gospel according to Mark. I've used Unity on the netbook for the past 6 months, and when 11.04 beta was released, switched to Kubuntu. It was just too slow, what with the 3d reliance and the idea that everytime you searched the launcher it polled the software center for matches. As for the desktop, I've no problem with it, just that make sure you don't try anything Gnome3 with it, as it will seriously break your system.

Actually, unity has that feature where if you drag a window towards the side of the monitor, it'll tile to one half instead of the full monitor.

What really bugs me is the dumb launch menu. I think it's pretty much the same idea as the one on macs. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to group applications together? Why is everyone (win7 also) following suit? It's dumb to extrapolate that just because two windows are from the same application that I'm using them for the same task and want them grouped together. It's also dumb that when I give one look at the bar I can't immediately tell what is open. I have to consciously scan all the way down. Finally, I hate the additional click it brings when I have to pick between two windows of the same app. Does anyone really know how anyone decided on this? I'll stop complaining when they let me disable it.

I went from wmii to gnome-shell after trying Fedora 15. How does Unity compare with gnome-shell, especially with regard to performance?

I liked Unity the UI itself but the fact that it was a Compiz plugin turned me off for my main desktop. My WM history goes FVWM2→Sawfish→Metacity. This means I've developed usage habits over the last 15 years that I expect the window manager to oblige with. Compiz is not... very coherent in that.

Compiz has tons of options but not all of them work yet there is only nearly everything that FVWM2 and Sawfish had. The transition to Metacity was a bit grumpy since it certainly didn't allow for all the things that Sawfish did, but eventually it was tolerable as I could configure the essentials right and it was much better integrated with Gnome than Sawfish.

Compiz, however, seems to be more concerned about cool effects than real adjustability and coherent configuration! I use the keyboard for most things, rarely the mouse, and thus I have a number of keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, do window operations, flip around virtual desktops etc. That means I need to carefully configure the keys to work with me, as well as take care of unbinding anything that I might need in an application. So here's an example.

I expect to be able to configure those in the Keyboard Shortcuts window but Compiz apparently pays not much attention to what's set up there. I then googled and tried the ``ccsm`` utility but using the Commands plugin to bind actions into keys didn't work either. For some reason, in Unity/Compiz the t brings up the fucking trashcan can no matter what I do while I think the same keyboard combination is just perfect for my terminal. I don't want to use Ctrl-Alt-t instead because control and alt are valid application modifiers, and it especially in Emacs translated to transpose-sexps. The super key is great for any of these meta or desktop-level bindings.

So here we are: the program insists on something and thinks it should win. It was after I realized Unity is based on Compiz that I had ditched Compiz before, pretty much for the same reasons. Enabling the desktop effects in earlier Ubuntus was tempting but I never got my keyboard bindings and desktop behaviour quite right wrt that.

A non-compiz Unity would probably be a killer: I like the dock and the Super key menu where you can just type the name of an application and find it in real-time.