[lysol]

Have you used it? The principal thing is that it's different and offers less customization than gnome2 and even gnome3 with gnome-shell. Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done. These sorts of things are self-evident when you've attempted to use Unity for any length of time.

[adabsurdo]

>> Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done.

like what? again, i'm not challenging you, i'm genuinely wondering.

[quanticle]

The author is referring to the fact that the taskbar/dock in Unity doesn't offer the same affordances as the old Gnome2 taskbar. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, there was no way to open a new terminal from the dock. You had to click on the terminal icon, then click File->New Terminal. As someone who routinely opens a number of terminals for various tasks, that one regression was a source of significant slowdowns.

In addition, Unity is slow on any system that doesn't have a separate graphics card or the latest generation of integrated graphics. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the graphical effects to speed it up. Combine that with the usability regressions, and Unity was a definite no-go for me.

That's not to say that I "hate" Unity or will never use it as my desktop environment. I think Unity has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like all too much software out there, it was released before it had been fully finished. I look forward to trying Unity again when the next Ubuntu LTS (12.04, I believe) is released. Hopefully it'll be far more usable and "finished" by then.

[whiskers]

Can't you just middle click the icon in the dock? Middle click launches a new instance of the app instead of bringing the current instance to the foreground.

[starwed]

I always launched the terminal using the keyboard, and I think they improved that with Unity -- so it was a speed-up for me.

[And if you're opening a terminal, we can be pretty sure that your hands are heading for the keyboard anyway! :) ]

[adabsurdo]

for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.

personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.

[tikhonj]

You should probably also try KDE. I've personally had bad experiences with Kubuntu, but the Fedora KDE spin and OpenSUSE have been very nice.