On Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:53 -0500, "Scott Thatcher" <thatc...@truman.edu> wrote: > I'm curious to hear opinions on the new Unity desktop.
I think the Unity desktop is another step toward the wrong direction for Ubuntu. Specifically, the top menu bar is a disaster: they wanted Ubuntu to have the OS X hip-feeling, but they chose exactly the worst things to copy, and did it even worse than Mac OS X. There are several reasons for that: - The top menu will not scale well with windows placed on the bottom of the screen (for example, people who wants to use/see 4 program windows at a time), as users will have to reach all the way to the top, select a function, and move all the way back to the window to further interact with the main interface. This is counter-intuitive. With multi-monitor setups, I really don't know how do I feel if I have to reach all the way to the monitor with the bar to click on a menu entry. I can understand why Mac had that design: the interface was invented when a computer has only one screen that is 640x480, and is single-tasking so most of the time you have one maximized window. However that concept is bad nowadays. Stacking monitors is hard to do with that too. - The menu *hides* when not hovered on. Two bad things: 1, How I am supposed to see what the Alt+shortcut key it is when I'm with my keyboard? 2, Even if I use my mouse, I have to concentrate again to read *every time* when my mouse is over the menu region, because there is no concrete way to know or remember the location of each meny entry. This is even worse than Mac OS: at least OS X has a persistent menu bar. - Same to the bar on the left side. There is no concrete way to remember the "position" of a program. Also I have to hover the mouse over the Ubuntu logo until the bar shows. Why the delay? - It is officially hard to close a program now. I can't flick the mouse to close it, hit the ubuntu button instead. If the OS is designed to run on netbooks and older computers, it should better encourage users to close programs (or at least close before launching a new one) instead of launching new stuff all the time. At least in the past I could move the "Ubuntu bar" to the bottom of the screen, now if you do that the whole menu bar AND the window control will get moved with it too. The worst part is that this is not an implementation problem. I don't see how they could fix this in the future. - Huan. -- Huan Truong 600-988-9066 http://tnhh.net/
