So the new Ubuntu has been released for a couple of days now long enough for people to get a taste on what they like, dislike and what needs to be improved in unity before they consider it a polished desktop experience.
Personally I think Unity has a lot of potential, but that doesn't mean that it is the bees knees in its current state. There are just a few little gripes I have with the desktop and although I am impressed with the amount of work they have done thus far it is still far from a finished product.
- Unity configuration tool, currently the closes thing that we have for configuration for the unity desktop is the unity plug-in settings in the compiz configuration manager in which you will need to install in order to get access to it.
- A non net-book/tablet styled applications menu, although the current way of getting to your applications works and I understand that it was designed for the more casual/new user who would have the few applications that they would use regularly in their dock. What about the power users? Users who would have an array of different applications they would use on any given day, there needs to be a menu layout similar to the 'applications', 'places', 'system' menu that we've all known and loved.
- Click minimize, this one is quite logical, now that the unity dock has also functions as the window lists when you click on the launcher icon that belongs to the said program it should minimize the application window. This is because this is the standard behavior that everyone will expect myself included.
- Always display the applications menu in the global menu, I'm not at all phased by the decision to have the Mac styled global menus however having the menu hidden till mouse over is unconventional and should be an option to enable instead of the default behavior.
- Always visible dock, there are many reason for this first one people may want to always see the dock which is a given preference. But more importantly for people using it on tables and touch interfaces how are they meant to get it back without troubles?
- A proper workspace switcher, the current method is only optimized for touch interfaces where they would have difficultly tapping the individual squares to each corresponding workspace. But the users whom have it installed on their desktop, laptop and even net-books this method is slow and en-cumbersome for something that we are so used to 'click the square switch!'
So my final thoughts on the unity desktop is that it is a good start and something that I can see a future in, so I can't wait to see how unity matures by the time the next long term release comes out.
