At first I thought Unity was a stupid idea. That in Canoncial's quest to compete with OS X's "elegance" they were copying one of its most hated features, The Do

At first I thought Unity was a stupid idea. That in Canoncial's quest to compete with OS X's "elegance" they were copying one of its most hated features, The Dock. However, after using Alpha 3 and Beta 1 a bit I feel like it is The Dock done right. It auto-hides but still reveals notifications. It does not abuse precious vertical screen real estate. It does not disconnect the act of finding apps to launch from apps that are running. It is definitely not perfect and as is so common in open source it lacks polish. It abuses glow effects and is a bit non-intuitive in its finer details. However, it solves far more problems than its creating and is definitely a good change. Whether it is a better change than Gnome Shell is another question and as I haven't used Gnome Shell I can only hope that one or both will push desktop usability ahead.