Unity interface

[Alan Pope]

On 7 March 2011 01:24, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Well Alan, no I don't. If I find time I'll start next week.
>

Great! Many bugs seem to not actually be Unity ones, but Compiz bugs.
Of course it's a bit tricky to tell one from the other, but the good
news is that we do actually ship the classic GNOME 2-panel setup as an
alternate login option. So if a user does find a problem with the UI
in Unity, they could potentially help diagnose whether it's Unity or
Compiz by simply logging out and logging in again, but with "Classic
GNOME".

> IMO it's not getting better. The basic premise of swapping everyone over
> to Unity (modified Gnome3) as default is just plain wrong (IMO).

It's GNOME 2.x based, not GNOME 3.

>  I
> certainly wouldn't mind if 11.04 concentrated on fixing broken crap from
> 10.10

Such as?

> and offering Unity as an alternate. But to use 11.04 (a "LTS" btw)
> as a testing ground for showcasing Unity as default? Give it a rest.
>

It's not LTS. 12.04 is slated to be the next LTS release.

> You see Alan, I'm used to Gnome2 and have gotten to the point that I'm
> actually productive with a G2 desktop.

Me too, I really like the two-panel GNOME setup that I've been using
for 6 years.

> Switching to Unity would (for me)
> be like going from Win 3.1 to Win7 - or worse yet, going from G2 to OSX.

I find it more like going from Windows XP to Windows 7, or maybe XP to
OSX. There's certainly some learning to do, but the vast majority of
stuff isn't exactly alien. Clicking stuff to make it active, ALT+Tab,
drag and drop, that kind of stuff hasn't exactly been thrown away. It
might not all work perfectly yet, but it's absolutely getting there.

> Perhaps if Unity allowed me to create/control a taskbar, or
> simply use a mouse scroll wheel to look at all the exciting 99
> applications instead of having to use a side bar,

That's a known bug, being worked on by my friend Gord.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/721447 "Unable to scroll in
Applications/Files and Folders Place using mouse wheel"

> or tell me what one of
> the 99 apps were by positioning my mouse over one (let's see I have
> multiple versions of the same app installed - but can't tell which is
> which as they all just list the title), or... I *might* consider
> spending time with it. (how's that for a run on sentence?)
>

I have multiple versions of Firefox installed and the version number
is in the description of the icon.

http://www.mail-archive.com/ayatana-dev@lists.launchpad.net/msg00060.html

"We give the name of the application because, if you don't know the icon,
there's absolutely no way to know what it is otherwise. We dropped
tooltips elsewhere because they were by-and-large trying to convey
overly-detailed information."

> I can't help but wonder why Fedora & OpenSUSE dropped Unity:
> <http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/fedora-and-opensuse-linux-drop-unity-interface-efforts-125>
> <quote>
> Ubuntu stands alone
> Both developers did welcome the involvement of others interested in the
> effort, and Marques said he'd look into it again later, "once there's an
> official Compiz release from the branch that is required for Unity."
>

Nicely cherry picked quote. Here's another:-

"It's maybe wiser to wait for a bit more of development from upstream
before looking into this,"

i.e. "lets wait till its finished", not "lets never look at that
abomination again"

Also.

""Unity is still stuck on this bug that the upstream maintainer
promised to look at after Christmas " where the link is to an upstream
library that is not a direct part of Unity. That situation occurs with
all kinds of libraries and apps that we (and other distros) ship It
doesn't magically make Unity impossible to ship.

Whilst I appreciate the motivation levels for non-Ubuntu developers to
work on Unity will be low, I would be surprised if it doesn't make
itself into other distro repos at some point. The more the merrier.

> Or why Ubuntu didn't work with Gnome 3:
> http://gnome3.org/
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/
>

Different vision. Why would Mark/Canonical want to contribute to a
project where they fundamentally disagree on the direction?

"He [Mark] says that Canonical made an effort to participate in the
GNOME Shell design process and found that Ubuntu's vision for the
future of desktop interfaces was fundamentally different from that of
the upstream GNOME Shell developers. "

> No it's not. But I reckon that if we check the archives a year from now
> the Ubuntu user list will have more posts/issues regarding Unity than
> the past 6 releases.
>

To quote my daughter. "Well, duh!"

Brand new Unity, all new compiz, massive change to the desktop
look/feel/behaviour.

Of course there's going to be lots of support questions. What would
you rather we did? Minor incremental releases which show almost zero
difference from the previous release. *yawn* I'd prefer to shake
things up and get some exciting changes in the distro.

The good news is of course that 10.04 is an LTS release and is still
supported with your favourite 2-panel GNOME setup, and 10.10 is also
still supported. Even better, 11.04 will ship with both Unity _and_
2-panel GNOME on the CD. Winner.

Al.