Apr 25, 2011

Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity - dislikes

After some days of using Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity on my main machine I present a list of the things I don't like so far.
  • The Trash as well as the Applications and Files lenses are featured to prominently in Unity. I don't event remember when I last used the Trash. Its more than enough for it to be somewhere within the filemanager. The lenses can easily be accessed over the top left ubuntu logo with just one additional click. Removing these would give more space to more important things like the apps I really use often and have pinned because of that.
  • If you set the virtual desktop size to just one desktop the Workspace Switcher should disappear automagically. Its of no use there and wastes just space. I also would like to see the switcher where the trash is now. IF the two lenses are removed and the switcher is the last part which is "mixed" with my pinned apps it would be better to separate that like the trash is now. (UPDATE: seems to disappear after a restart, nice)
  • I still think that the global menu approach is flawed by design. This is, for me at least, the case on OSX as well as in this similar approach. This just introduces new interaction problems as well as problems with different UI toolkits.
  • From time to time I still get some graphical glitches. Mostly some images missing (or are for some reason not rendered) here and there. Nothing that makes anything unusable but it looks weird and sometimes even funny. E.g. there are sometimes lines missing in the dash. Or there are sometimes white rectangles over some icons.
  • I still need to manually edit the Pulseaudio config file and set "enable-lfe-remixing = yes" for my subwoofer to work with normal stereo sound (like music playback). This is annoying and the only thing I need to edit a config file for (which I hate to do). Normal users will just wonder why the subwoofer doesn't work when they listen to music. This always gives the feel that something is broken and if you don't know what it is it's hard to find this simple fix for it. There are a lot of bug reports on this, problem seems that this is broken on some systems and enabling it by default would cause trouble for these people. There should be a checkbox in the audio preferences to simply enable and disable it.
  • Unity itself feels a bit "early". I would like it to feel more like "rock solid" just like gnome did in the past. But I guess thats expected for a first version :). This is not a "bad" point, it's more a "needs to improve" point. And I'm sure it will in future versions ...
  • As a developer I dislike that development tools are not as up-to-date as I'd like it. Mono for example or Eclipse. I keep my own copy of eclipse and just don't use mono as a result. Not a situation I like.
  • Right now I'm asked three times after each login to unlock my keyring. Don't really know why that happens. But it's annoying .. 
Thats all I can think of right now. I'm getting more and more used to Unity. With that I have to say I even like it more and more. The problems are sometimes a bit annoying but nothing that I would consider a show-stopper. 

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