Comment 0 for bug 784343

I have to say, the Unity interface has definitely grown on me. I'm using the 2D variant right now on a netbook that lacks 3D acceleration or a whole lot of RAM. The issue I'm having is the dependencies on particular GNOME software such as Nautilus. Is it for the Places menu or what? I've installed Xfce4 packages and replaced the icon on the launcher with Thunar but every so often Nautilus jumps back into the list of running processes. Plus Unity comes with a whole host of GNOME applications such as GNOME's Appearance Editor - that makes no sense to me.

My idea for a solution is that a metapackage like ubuntu-desktop pull in Unity and also all of the GNOME stuff you want, ubuntu-desktop-2d to pull in 2d unity and all the gnome stuff you want, but packages like unity and unity-2d to only pull in the stuff required to get Unity and Unity-2D working.

The reason is that Unity-2D uses about 200 MB of RAM on this machine on average. Switching the browser to Chromium, Epiphany, or Midori over Firefox and Thunar, PCManFM, or Xfe means Unity-2D can actually serve as a great shell for legacy and low-RAM environments, much the way Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox, etc. do now.

I get that Unity is a "shell for GNOME" and I see that