Comment 101 for bug 682788

Apple sells iMacs with screen sizes 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, and the Thunderbolt display at 2560x1440. It is not the case that a global menu bar is not ergonomic on large screens.

It is the case that it is not well implemented in Ubuntu, for a few reasons already mentioned:

1) The menu is not visible until the mouse is there, so I don't know where I'm going. Also, the change to a menu on mouse-over is jarring.

2) The top-left corner is now a dead space. I can't aim for the corner, click, and move right through the menus.

3) Most non-MacOS apps are too menu driven. Developers on other platforms have for years had menus in the application windows and thus relied on them too heavily.

4) The difference between the active or focused window and the other windows is too slight. (This is something of a problem on MacOS now too, I believe.)

(It's late here. I think I forgot a couple.)

I'm happy the design team has been intransigent on this matter. It's one reason I'm sticking with Unity even though I like Gnome Shell's code more. (I would love to see Unity implemented as Gnome Shell "extensions" instead.) That Apple menu bar is not only right ergonomically, but culturally too: it encourages better application design by pushing development away from menus and toward direct manipulation. As unpopular as it may seem here with almost 100 comments against it and with various web pages devoted to how to disable the menu bar, the system that has always had it has the fastest growing user base of all.