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by rubinelli 5398 days ago
Looks like most of this release is about tweaking Unity. I was really excited about it at first, but I switched back to classic Gnome after three months. The extra screen space is nice, but it was too easy to lose my bearings.
4 comments

I got used to it after a couple days. My home computer runs Unity while my desktop at work runs classic Gnome (with 10.10 - I'm waiting for 11.10)

My biggest complaint is that Unity took all my super bindings from Emacs. I had to do a lot of remapping for it to work on both machines.

That was the deal breaker, Ubuntu is just a library that Emacs use to communicate with the hardware.
Just change the hotkey for the Unity panel - in the compiz plugin configuration, the Unity plugin.
But then I'd have to manage custom bindings for both Emacs and Unity. It was easier to avoid collisions in Emacs and let Unity use Super for whatever it wants (which is useful, BTW)
I found that Unity doesn't like Super+R or whatever other combination you enter. It doesn't always seem to "catch" the combination.
I really like Unity, but neither it nor Compiz play well with Xinerama (at least on 11.04). So while I was using Twinview with two monitors, Unity was great. However, as soon as I switched to three monitors across two vid cards, I had to drop Unity/Compiz and switch back to vanilla gnome. I'm hoping this release will resolve that issue.
Well, that and the sorta crazy window behavior. I think Unity is more intuitive than OS X regarding window management except for one "feature"...when you have multiple windows of the same application and then click the Launcher to restore one, it restores and brings to the front all of the windows. This is really bad design...I often have many terminals open and want to view a browser beside one of those terminals, but Unity makes it a real pain to do so, because every time I bring one term to the front, they all come along.
A better sensible default would be to bring to the front only the ones that are in _that_ workspace, a second click (in case you didn't find what you are looking for with the first one) would bring to the front all the windows belonging to that app (current behaviour).
Hm, for me it did not work well even on two monitors.

I'll give this one a try, hopefully they fixed it.

For me there was an issue with the fact that most of my work apps aren't standard and didn't cooperate with the hijacked toolbar. If I'm going to use a distro that prides itself on ease of use, I'm not going to bother with any additional configuration just to have a toolbar in Intellij and Spring Tool Suite. No clue if this has been remedied at all yet. My dance with Unity lasted only a week before I just removed it and went to Linux Mint.
I use Ubuntu Unity daily (both at work and at home), and still find myself lost when trying to navigate between open windows.