Brief thoughts on Unity
- From: MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 09:54:09 -0700
I recently acquired a laptop and put Natty on it as an experiment.
At first, the 64-bit CD wouldn't boot, so I tried the 32-bit CD. When
that came up, I re-tried the 64-bit CD and this time it worked. (Huh?
Oh well....)
The first time I brought Natty up, it refused to run Unity because it
said the video wouldn't support it. It's an NVidia 4600 I think (not
looking right now - foo), but I figured the latest proprietary driver
would probably fix that, and it did.
After about 30-seconds or so poking around the Unity interface, I came
to dislike it intensely. It is not configurable, I have no control
over the panels or the dock (dashboard?), and I'm stuck with a reduced
size screen that I find offensive - laptops screens are small enough
that the thick bars for the dashboard just eat way too much horizontal
space, and I don't even use top panels on my desktop with the 25"
screen - I like my vertical space in a widescreen format. I switched
back to GNOME and am already much happier with it.
However, I have been in this business for over 31 years now and I have
this thing about being in control of my computer, not it in control of
me. Even when I was running MSDOS, I used the 4DOS shell because it
let me do things that MSDOS couldn't. I waited until Windows 98 came
out before I tried 95, and I fought with Windows for control of my
machine for ages. As you all probably know, that's a war you can't
win, so when I jumped to CentOS and more recently Ubuntu, my issues
were resolved. (The ones I couldn't resolve right away I dug into
until I could. It's in the nature of my beast.)
So, while Unity might be a flashy, attractive (except I hate the
colors, too, and I didn't see how to change them, either - in fact, I
don't much care for any of the "stock" themes because I like genuine
blue colors, not all that grayed in stuff) and fancy new interface for
netbooks and new users, I'll stick with GNOME 2 until something better
comes along. (I've had my battles with KDE, too, and it's sort of
like the vi-emacs religious war - I like one and not the other, and no
one's going to change my mind on that unless I see an advantage in
it.)
Unity has features that might lure in some Windows users and some MAC
users, but it is far from the complete, fully-implemented,
developer-friendly universe that GNOME and KDE provide. (FTR, I tried
xcf (?) once and didn't like it at all - small yes but way too
underpowered for me.) I still enjoy the power of the command line
interface, so having configurable terminal windows that start up in
the size I want (without having to massage them after startup) is also
important to me.
That's my $0.02. No need to argue anything - others will agree or
not, and that's fine.
:-)
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