Ayatana Design

Bug #882274
Comment #68

Comment 68 for bug 882274

Revision history for this message

Jon Brase (jonathan-brase) wrote on 2011-11-08:

#68

@ Tal Liron
>In their rush to hate on Unity, people are forgetting how keyboard-centric Unity is.

Not me. For me, the fact that that keyboard centrism comes at the cost of huge regressions in mouse-centric usability is what kills it for me (that and some configurability issues, but many of those come from GNOME 3 and weren't in the GNOME 2 based Unity in 11.04, and thus aren't Canonical's fault).

I'm used to being able to switch windows (or minimize a window) with a single click to a screen-edge target (the edges of the screen are the fastest to access because you don't have to worry about overshooting with the mouse. You can thus slam the mouse in the general direction of the screen edge to get it there as quickly as possible). Window management is the most common task I perform on my desktop, so it's important that I be able to do it quickly. Having multiple windows of the same program be smashed into one icon on the launcher means that accessing any window that's not the only window running for its program requires an extra click (this may be mitigated if the window isn't minimized or covered by another, but it's still not a screen-edge target in that case). It's made worse by the fact that the size of the launcher icons along the screen edge is a good deal smaller than taskbar buttons were (which makes them a smaller target that I have to aim more carefully to hit, which slows me down).

Then there's the fact that the launcher's merging of quick-launch and window management functionality interferes greatly with its functionality as a launcher: Linus famously complained about similar problems in GNOME Shell: When he had a terminal open and clicked on the icon he'd used to launch it, his original terminal window got brought into focus, rather than a new one being launched. But it doesn't just apply to the terminal: It can apply to Nautilus, or gcalctool, or gedit, or OpenOffice. (Come to think of it, this goes straight against Mark's assertion that "clicking twice on an icon should generally do one thing twice"). Even with an option in a context menu that allows opening another copy of the program associated with the icon, it's still two clicks instead of one.

@ Tal Liron
>In their rush to hate on Unity, people are forgetting how keyboard-centric Unity is.

Not me. For me, the fact that that keyboard centrism comes at the cost of huge regressions in  mouse-centric usability is what kills it for me (that and some configurability issues, but many of those come from GNOME 3 and weren't in the GNOME 2 based Unity in 11.04, and thus aren't Canonical's fault).

I'm used to being able to switch windows (or minimize a window) with a single click to a screen-edge target (the edges of the screen are the fastest to access because you don't have to worry about overshooting with the mouse. You can thus slam the mouse in the general direction of the screen edge to get it there as quickly as possible). Window management is the most common task I perform on my desktop, so it's important that I be able to do it quickly. Having multiple windows of the same program be smashed into one icon on the launcher means that accessing any window that's not the only window running for its program requires an extra click (this may be mitigated if the window isn't minimized or covered by another, but it's still not a screen-edge target in that case).  It's made worse by the fact that the size of the launcher icons along the screen edge is a good deal smaller than taskbar buttons were (which makes them a smaller target that I have to aim more carefully to hit,  which slows me down).

Then there's the fact that the launcher's merging of quick-launch and window management functionality interferes greatly with its functionality as a launcher: Linus famously complained about similar problems in GNOME Shell: When he had a terminal open and clicked on the icon he'd used to launch it, his original terminal window got brought into focus, rather than a new one being launched. But it doesn't just apply to the terminal: It can apply to Nautilus, or gcalctool, or gedit, or  OpenOffice.  (Come to think of it, this goes straight against  Mark's assertion that "clicking twice on an icon should generally do one thing twice"). Even with an option in a context menu that allows opening another copy of the program associated with the icon, it's still two clicks instead of one.