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Comment by psykovsky | Hacker News Reader

Unity is really user-friendly and easy to use for first-time computer users, doesn't matter what people say. Individual apps, not so much...

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There are two things I never liked about Unity, the Amazon thing, and the super shallowness when pressing the "windows" button to launch apps. It only works reasonable well on super fast machines with a really good graphics card. I don't understand why it takes up to a second before I can start typing on almost any machine I use. And it is only a overlay which could almost be static.

Gnome on the other hand does the whole live animation thing for every window on every desktop and it is still mega fast even on my oldest machines. I press the button and basically instantly I am able to start typing and launching the app I need.

The Amazon thing can be turned off. Unity2D is acceptable on slower machines. My experience, of course. You have valid points, nonetheless.

If that is like you describe it, it isn't very intuitive to do so. It seemed easier to me to change the distribution instead trying to find out how to make it faster.

You can disable all online features of the dash on System Settings-->Security and Privacy. As for Unity2d it was just sudo apt-get install unity-2d

but it was removed after 12.04 if I'm not mistaken. That is why I still use 12.04 on a couple laptops. I think the time is running out for 12.04 updates, so I will need to change to something else. There is always gnome-session-flashback, I guess. Not sure if the kids will like it/want it, as they're used to Unity and it's their laptops...

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