Call for Natty Feedback!

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com> 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
> ubuntu-desktop at lists.ubuntu.com
> 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