Dear sweet lordy lord. I’ve become rather fond of linux in recent weeks. Using it exculisvely at work, I’ve spent more time on it than Windows, so much so that now in Windows I look for the close, minimise, maximise buttons on the wrong side of the window… Whoops. But I’m here to complain, as per usual, since as far as I can tell, they are ruining Ubuntu. Unity. Why? Let’s take a look…
One of the key features of Linux over Windows is that is flexible, customisable and generally all about the user. Not any more. Unity is all about opposing one vision for the operating system. Canonical, the driving force behind Ubuntu seem to have a vision. A vision which pisses off (Well, everyone in my small sample of 5, including myself, but that is still 100%…). Ubuntu is “exclusively” using Unity now, in the sense that if you prefered gnome, you can use gnome 3 (which is equally unejoyable), but if you want to use something like you had before, namely gnome 2 you *can* except that because gnome 2 was heavily adapted for Ubuntu, it looks like ass. So basically, you’re stuck. Unless it seems you decide to use Kbunutu, which means ditching G in favour of K. Not what I had in mind.
So were stuck with Unity, why is it so bad? Well. A handful of the problems right now can probably be attributed to bugs, and as it’s pretty new, this is to be expected… Fixes? Not yet it seems. An example? All the apps that used G system tray may or may not work with the unity tray… The VOIP app we use at work, is not compatible, which means I can’t use the tray feature, so I can accidentally close the program. Yay… Then there is the phantom highlight half the screen orange bug (this is to do with attempting to highlight snapping a window to half the screen, but sometimes it leaves that box on the screen, randomly…). Oh and sometimes Apps load, in the background. So need to be terminated an reloaded to actually have a GUI. Handy.
Ok. So, time can fix the bugs, so we’re over them for the time being, and we can get used to the new Unity interface, if we must… But this is Linux, and if we can’t change the UI, let’s exploit the famous linux customisablity! WRONG. Unity is fixed in its ways… they’ve decided it has to live on the left hand side. I thought as the Unity bar looks rather like the Windows 7 taskbar, why not whip it down to the bottom of the screen, like Windows! Would look just as nice, and could work exactly the same way. Except Canonical in their infnite wisdom have decided to not support this. Why? I’m all for them having their default settings that is inline with their vision, but enforcing it on everyone? Way to annoy your userbase…
I can’t help but fear that Ubuntu may lose out here. 10.04 is better. Much better. Unity is not the worst looking thing in the world, but in it’s current state it is sucking the life out of the OS. I’d love to love it, but it just makes doing *everything* harder. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d upgrade back to 10.04… It’s so annoying I’m finding an all new love of Windows. Though I do miss my terminal ninja potential… If Windows 7 and Ubuntu had a baby, that would be interesting… A cool OS that can play games? Yes please… Likely? No… I’ll settle for them fixing Unity. Likely? No…
