Comment 64 for bug 882274

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Tal Liron (emblem-parade) wrote :

@einhverfr

I think some people are interpreting Mark's announcement through their own bias.

Unity may be friendlier towards tablets than most desktop interfaces, but there's still a long way to go, and indeed that's why the Unity team is setting such a far-off date for tablet support. Try for yourself: install Unity on a tablet and see. I did it, and it's horrible. A lot of the problem is not Unity itself, so much as GTK and the mouse-oriented design of every important desktop application. You might be able to launch GIMP on a tablet, but you can forget about doing anything useful with it without connecting at least a mouse, and hopefully a keyboard, too. Indeed, there's a very good reason why both Apple and Google decided a fresh start was needed. Current apps are simply broken on tablets, and there's no meta-way to make them "just work." The whole free software community needs to make the shift. Standards need to be set. APIs. I have no doubt that Ubuntu will take the lead on this. (I just keep hoping they'll include more of the community of their supporters in the effort.)

In their rush to hate on Unity, people are forgetting how keyboard-centric Unity is. It's more keyboard-centric than GNOME 2, GNOME 3, and really almost every desktop shell out there. This came as a pleasant surprise to me when Unity first came out, and indeed Mark is entirely correct when he says that Unity very much takes "power users," who are CLI freaks, in mind. A great amount of effort has been put into making sure that Unity indeed would unify everything from keyboard to mouse to touch in the future, with the same exact base feature set, and it shows very well. Nobody has done so well in this task before, and Unity designers deserve the full credit for this breakthrough.

I keep emphasizing this: but I'm "nagging" on this bug so much because I really do love Unity, and would like to see it go the extra mile towards unifying all my computers. As of now, I have to do weird things on my multi-monitor desktop in order to use it. But, again, I'm willing to make the effort in order to stay as close to the Unity paradigm.