I gave Unity a good chance, but it was simply torture. Maybe it’s the over 3 years old hardware I’m running Ubuntu on, or maybe it’s the servers I’m running on my machine for the project I’m working on, but the hard drive kept thrashing to a point where it was unbearable. Sometimes just clicking a top menu or switching to a different window would take over a minute while the hard drive was grinding as if it was being benchmarked.
So I decided to go back to Gnome classic. The computer is way more responsive now and works considerably faster. My guess is that either Unity’s memory requirements are so high that I ran out (of 2 GB) and the memory had to be constantly swapped or it’s my relatively old 3D accelerated nVidia video card or Unity is doing too much disk access. Whatever it is, Unity does not work well on my machine.
I’m not so happy about reverting back to Gnome because I don’t like to be the kind of person who doesn’t accept change. But for the sake of productivity – I have to forget about Unity for now.
Is unity convenient (if it’d run fast)?
One thing that’s good about it is that if you want an application to be full screen, it’s really full screen. It also makes you work more with the keyboard because it’s easier to hold down the logo key (i.e. Windows Logo key) and choose a window by using one of the numbers, just like in Windows 7 (a feature which I really like). That’s because using the mouse to bring up the launcher takes half a second and is pretty annoying.
Something I didn’t like is that there are no categories for applications, so if I want to start an app I have to remember its name and find it through search. Again, this is because the other option, looking for the app in the list of _all_ installed apps, is too tedious.
Unity is basically a mix of the Apple Dock and the Windows 7 taskbar, so it’s not that ground breaking. Gnome is also going on a similar way with Gnome 3, but for some reason Canonical decided to do their own implementation.
Oh well.
אהלן עמית
מנסה לקרוא וזה ממש סינית בשבילי…
מה עם זה פוסט חוויות ותמונות? :)
היי :)
טוב לשמוע ממך
יש חוויות פה ושם, אבל אין זמן לכתוב עליהן או מה להראות כל כך. מאז שאני מובטל אני כל כך בתוך העבודה שאני מתקשה לכתוב דברים משמעותיים. את הדברים הטכניים האלה קל לכתוב
מבינה..תיזהר לא לשקוע יותר מדי בעבודה
החיים בחוץ כל כך יפים!
מקווה שמצאת קצת זמן להנות מפריחת האביב
Amit, I love unity and there are some “hidden features”.
For example, there is a simple way to see the application categories. Just press super+a (stands for applications) and you can see just the applications with the categories on the top right as a drop-down filter.
Another example is: super+f – searches files.
Regarding the delay, they have a memory leak problem with the compiz (http://goo.gl/8Qu3A) – perhaps that’s what causing the delay in the launcher popping out?
It is solved in the next kernel update (didn’t do it myself).
You can restart the UI by typing unity in the command line – it will flicker and redraw the windows.
Regarding the memory, while writing this post, I use 1.1GB, so 2GB should be enough.
Thanks! I didn’t know about the shortcuts
In general I appreciate the fact the Unity kind of forces you to use the keyboard, but I would still like the mouse to be functionally easy to use.
As for the thrashing issue – this is why I won’t go back in the near future. I leave my computer on for months at a time and can’t mess with this. I just want something that works generally well. In this regard, Unity was a mess on my machine.
I was never so adamant about the UI as long as I could get work done. In Windows 7 I’m very happy with the new start menu search functionality (it finds stuff even if you don’t use the exact name of what you’re looking for) and with the new super key shortcuts. It is an incremental change, which you could adopt if you wanted or completely ignore.
I’m addicted to Launchy, which solves a lot of issues of umm… launching stuff :)
A long time ago, when I was still supporting people with their computers, I decided that using “helpers” on my own computer made me unable to help others. You get to a computer that doesn’t have your favorite launcher and you’re kind of lost. Not to mention trying to do over-the-phone support.
For no apparent reason, I stuck to using default OS installations ever since :S
I dumped Ubuntu altogether because they wanted to force me to use Unity. Sure, I could have installed Gnome classic, but then every Ubuntu upgrade thereafter would be another opportunity for Ubuntu to break my system and force me back to their crappy Unity. I hate Unity because I will not use any system which prevents me from defining (and redefining) my own menu with my own application categories at will. I want to do actual work on my computer and that requires control over where things are and how I access them.
BTW, you can switch between apss using Alt-Tab under every Linux system and via Ctrl-Alt-Arrow move from workspace to workspace. I often have seven or more programs open at once divided into task-oriented workspaces. You don’t need Ubuntu for that.