Today, for the first time ever, one of my computers was able to start Ubuntu Unity "standard." I guess it had to happen sometime - I only had to try 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04, with open source and AMD proprietary drivers, on four different computers before the magic happened and I actually got a functional desktop (that is, not just garbage graphics, crashes back to the login screen or a crash so bad even the Magic SysRq key sequence didn't work). I've no idea what they just updated to fix it, but let's see what's in the box...

Useful features:

  • Quick access to frequently used applications. Nice. Welcome to the 20th century.
  • The top panel. Straight out of GNOME.
  • Login screen with WM selector. Awesome!

Annoying features which I could fix/disable:

Annoying features which have no obvious way to disable them:

  • One keyboard click and two mouse clicks (with mystery meat navigation) to get to a list of all installed software.
  • No categorized list of installed software.
  • The format of the displayed date/time. One solution worked only halfway - It enabled display in my home country format, but not a custom format.
  • Top panel duplicated on every screen. I just want one main screen, please. No wasted space. According to one source this will not be fixed in 12.04.
  • Names for applications on the launcher.
  • Special folders which I never ever use, like ~/Desktop.
  • Really bad aliasing when showing application windows next to each other. Open up two windows of any app, then click on the icon in the launcher to see the result.
  • The Workspaces and media shortcuts in the launcher.
  • Minimize, maximize and close window buttons done even worse than OS X. OK, so you got the big hitboxes, tiny icons and ridiculous proximity, but making them visually almost completely indistinguishable (at least for a background window) was a stroke of ... Oh, forget it. It's too easy a target.

In summary, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making the first really user friendly and simple to configure desktop Linux (Ubuntu 8 through 10), and please, please, please, get your act together on this Unity monstrosity. Can't you see it's not even close to the usability of KDE or GNOME? Maybe those aren't "cool" anymore, but Unity is just bad. Well, Unity 2D is stable and gets the job done, but the 3D one should be labeled "bleeding edge." I get the feeling complaints like this are rejected as signs that users are shy of change, but does anyone need to be reminded of the practically universally approved Compiz and GNOME 2, even though both introduced massive changes?