Hi, On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Jason Warner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello! > Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along > closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, complete with > Unity and classic Gnome. > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty > unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel > about: > * The look and feel > * Usability > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) > * Highlights and favorite features > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items > You can reply to this email if your feedback is general/conversational or > file a bug if you are experiencing a specific issue. Filing a bug with > 'ubuntu-bug unity' command would do the trick and would get seen by the > appropriate people for specific issues. > It will be fun to hear what everyone thinks! I look forward to seeing the > feedback. > Cheers, > Jason > PS. For those that like to navigate via keyboard (and who doesn't!), this > should be > helpful http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/keyboard-shortcuts-in-unity/28087#28087 > -- > ubuntu-desktop mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop > >
I'll gladly offer my feedback. I've been using (or trying to use) Unity since about Alpha 1 until the present. My overall experience with Unity is that it's too much, too soon. It doesn't feel ready. It isn't streamlined. Here are a few targeted examples. 1. It's too difficult to get the menu along the left to appear when I want it to, but it's all too easy to get it to stay when I want it to go away. I'm always fighting with it: sometimes I want to do something and it disappears for a reason I can't really understand. Other times I have done what I want to do, and it just stays on the screen until I actually left-click on the ubuntu symbol in the top left. Sometimes I have to click it multiple times. 2. Performance impact of using Unity vs. GNOME 2+Compiz is visibly measurable with Intel 965GM graphics. Now, 965GM isn't exactly the fastest chipset on the planet, but in a "full fat" laptop with 4GB of 800MHz memory and a Core 2 Duo, the plain old browsing/email/IM experience shouldn't lag. At all. But with Unity, I get substantial performance problems, especially scrolling the browser and task switching -- it's "jittery". Compiz seems fine when running with gnome2. 3. Many applications (especially Qt/KDE4 apps such as Quassel) have their menus stripped out by the global menus feature, but the menu doesn't appear at the top, either. IMHO this is unacceptable: there should be a strictly tested and enforced disjunction that if the menu cannot be rendered at the top for whatever reason, then it should be left alone in the app. Having the menu fail to appear at all is a showstopper, and asking all applications to change to be compatible is simply not going to be a solution. 4. Scrolling in the Applications overlay (the translucent one that is black and takes up most of the entire screen) is painfully slow, even slower than web browsing. Brings me back to 2007 when you could get about 1 FPS browser scrolling with EXA on the Intel drivers :) 5. Stability has been poor in my experience; I run into X crashes from time to time doing fairly mundane stuff that doesn't trigger a crash with Gnome2. 6. Multi-monitor seems totally broken somehow... on a 1024x768 laptop with a 1680x1050 VGA LCD attached, I get no menus and no indication that Unity is aware of windows on the large external LCD. And the left-side menu doesn't come up at all anymore. It seems like there is an empty space above the top of my laptop's screen where my mouse can go, but there is nothing up there -- I configured (using the xrandr-based Monitors applet) the big monitor to be to the right of the laptop LCD. 7. It isn't clear to me upon visual inspection as to how I can pull up a window that's open using the unity bar on the left. With Windows 7 or Mac OS X, there is a dedicated place and visual style to indicate that there's a window open and you can click it to get to that window. I don't see enough contrast (or something) for it to be obvious to my eyes which icons are "launch this application!" and which are "click me to get this application's window back!". So I end up using alt-tab a lot, which is slower than clicking a button. I really miss the Gnome2 window selector. I think I'd like Unity if it were much more polished, the bugs were fixed, robust support for multi-monitor, and less "fiddly" menu on the left. I think it needs at least another 6 months of development and testing. I have recently (in the past 2 days) reverted to Gnome 2 and uninstalled the indicator global menu stuff. I may try Unity and global menus again as things get more polished and bugs get fixed, but for now, it is not really usable, and causes too much frustration for me to even test it. I am much happier with the UI reverted to the way it was in 10.10. Just colloquially, btw, I've heard a lot of negative feedback in the community from other early Unity testers as well. The consensus seems to be that there are lots of things to polish and fix, but it goes further than that: even if it were functionally perfect, it's too radical a change for most users: a lot of people resist change for resistance's sake, because they like the way things are, and because they are already habituated on the existing Gnome 2 UI patterns. Asking users to learn something new (or worse, something new and buggy) is more than likely going to result in users switching distro to Kubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora. Regards, Sean -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
