Gnome: Staring into the abyss

If you don't pay me, I will still contribute, but then I will work only to scratch my own itch. I will implement features, but only those I want to have myself; I will fix bugs, but only those that annoy me personally; I will write some documentation, sometimes.

If you don't pay me, and your project goals make it impossible for me to scratch my itch, then I will not contribute to it.

One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what I have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing search terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be difficult -- and lots of times, you don't know the name of the application, because they have clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Shotwell, Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function ("image," "photo," "web," "email") as a substring.

Discoverability is particularly important for "control panel" type system administration applets, which are often vital to making your system function acceptably, and whose name, number, hierarchy, and division of functionality seem to mutate with every release.

Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am with Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.

Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding because they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances, or the difference between launching an application and switching to an instance of that application.

I want multiple instances of certain applications -- terminals particularly -- and it's a major pain point with Unity. So not only do I have reduced productivity during the transition period, it seems like Unity is actually going to decrease my productivity once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of core features.

Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour of use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.

I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once when it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was released, and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few incidental times when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)

In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a nightmare.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...

What I find interesting in this article is the following:

"[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]"

"[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"