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I like Unity quite a lot and find it very attractive, same for the most commonly used apps. GNOME Terminal looks great with dimmed transparency, Firefox looks t

I like Unity quite a lot and find it very attractive, same for the most commonly used apps. GNOME Terminal looks great with dimmed transparency, Firefox looks the same as everywhere else but integrates with Unity nicely, Rhytmbox is OK, and all the other GNOME apps -- gPodder, gedit, nautilus -- while not stunning, look fairly modern and, most importantly, don't get in the way too much. > I discovered alt+~ yesterday Press and hold Super (Windows) key for a list of most useful Unity keyboard shortcuts. Even that list is pretty!

tomrod 14y ago
I think that's the problem I have. I don't care about a pretty desktop, I care more about functionality. Ingrained muscle memory is hard to change -- if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted? Similar little issues plague my Unity usage, not even to mention the lack of default configurability. If I want the right side or bottom of my screen to be the dock, it should be so. Instead I'm stuck with having the left side of my right screen being where I make an attempt to find the dock. Unacceptable, in my view. Shifting paradigms require buy-in, and Unity just doesn't have it from me yet.
- spindritf 14y ago
  > if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted? Alt+tab works as expected -- which is to say, as I always expected it to -- on Unity, what do you mean by "shifted"?
  - tomrod 14y ago
    Before Unity, iirc, alt+tab default behavior switched between windows, regardless of program groupings (e.g. Thunderbird compose message and main windows).
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I just wanted to say that I appreciate you acknowledging the need to buy-in and being almost completely unjudgemental of things that are preferences. I think your condemnation of Unity's configurability is pretty spot on, though I'm not sure how much of that is deficit vs intentional. For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though. Also, I know in GNOME at least you can configure it. I only say because if that's a big issue stopping you from like Gnome-shell or unity, you might check it out. I know I was blown away at: one, how offensive the Amazon results were in Unity and two, once that was remove, how really, really, really good they've managed to get Unity to me. Compiz will never not be crashy for me... we just have too much history... but Unity itself, I was pretty surprised. Polish (not the people) helps, a lot.
  - tomrod 14y ago
    > For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though. Fair enough. For now I run OpenBox with Tint2. It's quite minimal, but it does everything I need for a GUI at present. My poor wife on our home computer though... :D She's pretty techie but still Unity is a hard sell for her. Perhaps Ubuntu could have a "Developer's Build" that includes Unity and other goodies as default, and a "Consumer Build" that defaults to Gnome Classic with many configurability options. Just throwing that out there.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

tomrod 14y ago

I think that's the problem I have. I don't care about a pretty desktop, I care more about functionality. Ingrained muscle memory is hard to change -- if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted? Similar little issues plague my Unity usage, not even to mention the lack of default configurability. If I want the right side or bottom of my screen to be the dock, it should be so. Instead I'm stuck with having the left side of my right screen being where I make an attempt to find the dock. Unacceptable, in my view. Shifting paradigms require buy-in, and Unity just doesn't have it from me yet.

spindritf 14y ago
> if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted? Alt+tab works as expected -- which is to say, as I always expected it to -- on Unity, what do you mean by "shifted"?
- tomrod 14y ago
  Before Unity, iirc, alt+tab default behavior switched between windows, regardless of program groupings (e.g. Thunderbird compose message and main windows).
drivebyacct2 14y ago
I just wanted to say that I appreciate you acknowledging the need to buy-in and being almost completely unjudgemental of things that are preferences. I think your condemnation of Unity's configurability is pretty spot on, though I'm not sure how much of that is deficit vs intentional. For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though. Also, I know in GNOME at least you can configure it. I only say because if that's a big issue stopping you from like Gnome-shell or unity, you might check it out. I know I was blown away at: one, how offensive the Amazon results were in Unity and two, once that was remove, how really, really, really good they've managed to get Unity to me. Compiz will never not be crashy for me... we just have too much history... but Unity itself, I was pretty surprised. Polish (not the people) helps, a lot.
- tomrod 14y ago
  > For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though. Fair enough. For now I run OpenBox with Tint2. It's quite minimal, but it does everything I need for a GUI at present. My poor wife on our home computer though... :D She's pretty techie but still Unity is a hard sell for her. Perhaps Ubuntu could have a "Developer's Build" that includes Unity and other goodies as default, and a "Consumer Build" that defaults to Gnome Classic with many configurability options. Just throwing that out there.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]