On 5/9/2011 9:36 PM, Tom Metro wrote: > Unity has approximately the same UI as GNOME 3, so I'm not sure why they > diverged from that project. The comments on the above article say > they'll be using GNOME 3 in 11.10. > > I think I could live with the side-bar dock. Most of us use wide screen > displays with horizontal pixels to spare. But the application menu > (perhaps good for a small screen or touch screen navigation) and the > Mac-style window menus in the top bar seem more problematic.
I like having things on the side rather than on the bottom; it's a much better use of the screen real estate on a widescreen display. I have a slight preference for the right side rather than the left; it seems less visually cluttered to me. One thing I've always found annoying about Gnome 2 is that you can't effectively move the taskbar to the side of the screen as you can in Windows -- yes you can put it there but it misbehaves in various annoying ways. So you're stuck with two vertical UI bars, which is two too many on a widescreen display. I HATE the Mac and Windows 7 style conflation of application shortcuts and icons for running applications; the separate taskbar and shortcut icons of older UIs like Gnome 2 (with shortcuts docked on the top bar) or the Windows Quick Launch toolbar work better for me. At least Windows 7 lets you put things back to the old way, though it's harder than it should be; on the Mac you're stuck, and you're also stuck with it on Ubuntu so long as you use Unity. (Gnome Classic, Kubuntu/KDE, and Xubuntu/XFCE are all possible alternatives.) I've also never liked the Mac-style menus on the top of the screen rather than in the window title bar. It strikes me as a UI decision that doesn't scale well. It was fine when the Mac meant the beige toaster with its 9" display, but when you're talking about 30" behemoths the menus are too far away from where you are working. Too much mouse movement, and too much confusion because they're so far away from the active window. And as somebody else pointed out, if you like focus follows mouse (I don't) it's completely broken if you move over another window on the way to the menu bar. Moving the window widgets over to the left (Mac style) instead of the right (Windows, KDE, older Gnome style) happened in Ubuntu 10.10 and it struck me as a gratuitous UI change then. (At least it's easy enough to undo in Gnome Classic; a bit harder in Unity.) Neither is inherently better but what you are used to is better than what you aren't used to. All in all, Canonical seems to be trying to make the UI more like the Mac and less like Windows. That strikes me as a poor move if they're trying to attract new users, because Windows is where the big pool of available people are and because the stability of Linux is less of a draw for people who are already on a Unix-based OS. Speaking of cool shortcuts -- I always like the KDE shortcuts of middle-click on the Maximize button to maximize only vertically and right-click to maximize only horizontally. They're just so useful (especially the vertical one; I often want my windows to be as tall as possible and getting it in one simple click is great); I never figured out why other window environments didn't copy them. Clearly that won't happen in Gnome 3, which has followed the recent fetish of "clean" UI and gotten rid of the Maximize button altogether. Another bad decision; I'd prefer to keep it and add the additional KDE capabilities. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss