Call for Natty Feedback!

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 06:28 +1030, Jason Warner wrote:
> 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:

So, now that the binary nVidia driver is working in Natty, I was able to
try Unity out. I've been playing with it for about 45 minutes now, and
here are my observations:

I like the overall look of things. The Unity launcher on the left is
neat. Not having menus in applications is weird at first glance,
especially when you don't see them by default in the top bar. I thought
the menus were broken until I put my mouse at the top of the screen and
they appeared. Discoverability is a little odd until you know about it,
and then it's fine. Having the menu appear half way over the name of the
applications looks bad though. It kind of looks like it's broken.

I haven't discovered where my applications are yet. I clicked on the big
button on the top left hand corner, which popped up a nice looking
dialog. Unfortunately the search bar doesn't seem to find anything, and
the find icons don't do anything when I click on them. I assume this is
unfinished, and is a known issue so I won't file a bug unless otherwise
told to. Since that wasn't working, I tried hitting Alt-F2 to start an
application, but that doesn't seem to work either. For now, I'll just
start my apps using the command line.

So, starting a terminal, the first thing I notice is it puts the
terminal underneath the launcher, and the launcher goes away. The only
way I've figured to get the launcher back is to move the terminal away
from the edge of the screen. This is kind of irritating. New windows
shouldn't get placed underneath the launcher, and there has to be some
way of getting the launcher back without moving stuff out of the way.

Second thing I notice, is there doesn't seem to be a way to start an
application more than once. How do I open more than one terminal? How do
I open more than one text editor? I seriously hope this will be
possible. I can understand that certain applications, such as Evolution,
should only be started once, but surely the terminal and the text editor
are exceptions to this. Especially when using multiple workspaces.

I am a heavy workspace user, and have been for years. Using multiple
workspaces is the way I deal with doing more than one task at a time. A
workspace for email and communications, a workspace for something I'm
working on, a workspace for another task, etc. I want to check something
out? Switch to an unused workspace and open a new browser. I used to
think only power-users used workspaces, but to my surprise, family
members who I've converted to Ubuntu have discovered workspaces by
themselves and use them regularly.

Unfortunately, workspaces are hard to use under Natty. The workspace
switcher icon doesn't have previews, so it's hard to figure out where my
stuff is. Clicking on the icon reveals a seasickness-inducing animation
of all my workspaces entering the screen. But, I can't select any. At
least, I _though_ I couldn't select any, until I finally noticed that I
need to click _once_ on the icon, and then _double-click_ on the window
I want to select.

Switching between windows in a current workspace is hard also, as the
launcher displays arrows beside applications that reside on different
workspaces. When I click on the Firefox launcher that has an arrow, am I
bringing up a firefox from this task, or will the launcher catapult me
into another workspace altogether and try and make me guess where I've
ended up?

In all, I really like Unity and am looking forward to the bugs and
usability issues to be cleared up.

Marc.