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Comment by daliusd | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself power user. I am developer, I have experience with Windows, Mac OS X, BSD OSes and Linuxes. I have actually tried various desktop environments and WMs (including several tiling managers, I have used awesome WM for half a year). Overall I really love experimenting with software to the very deep level.

I have tried Unity and I really like it. It is simple and it does what I need. It respects my screen estate without taking functionality and clarity. I really don't understand what other power users are missing.

P.S. I don't like that Unity has some bugs but those are minor problems.

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Thirded,

Geeks are coding away at some application feature, managing servers, updating designs, watching some TV show, browsing the web, discussing project goals over skype with team members and other mundane things – all this on a slow day.

I disagree. I have three windows open. Google Chrome (with, unfortunately for my productivity, Hacker News open), Emacs, and a Gnome Terminal (I X forward my Emacs session from my home machine to my work machine).

Even if I did have skype open rather than an IRC session (in ERC/irssi), I don't see how Unity is better or worse than the normal Gnome set-up. Alt-Tab still works. Same goes for other applications that are distracting me from my editor.

What part of alt-tabing and application launching does Unity do so terribly compared to the old Gnome interface + Gnome-Do (I hated the menus, I tab-complete in the terminal, why can't I tab-complete in my application launcher?).

Alt-tab works, but alt-shift-tab does not - or at least did not work for me when I upgraded. Not wanting to waste time looking for a workaround, I just reverted to my backup and forgot about Unity.

What Alt-Shift-Tab did?

if we define alt tab as moving forward through windows, alt-shift-tab moves backwards

I kind of solved it with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3280187

In the end, it feels much more natural and "spacial" - rather than having a small desktop with things piled on it, I have a context-dependent desktop.

Alt-shift-tab cycles backwards through the window stack for me. What did you want it to do that it is not?

With Unity you can press Win+1, Win+2 ... Win+N to directly jump to an specific open window. Much faster than alt+tab.

After I discovered this feature/shortcut I started not caring anymore about Unity bugs. Navigating applications this way is much faster than alt+tabbing. Another useful shortcut is alt+` (backtick). It cycles through open windows of the same application. If you have 10 PDFs open, you can cycle through them with alt+`.

I typically have Chromium, a urxvt running tmux with 5-15 "windows" (a couple of which go to remote machines), two workspaces of Emacs, and half a dozen open pdfs of journal articles that I may be looking back at. When debugging parallel jobs, I may have a few more tmux instances. I find that Xmonad offers the most efficient window management in this scenario. I currently run it with Gnome3 in legacy mode because all I want from Gnome is the toolbar and session management.

I don't think the debate is between xmonad and some WM. The debate is between Ubuntu's Gnome set-up before Unity and Ubuntu's set-up with Unity.

Ubuntu's Gnome set-up was never been like xmonad or even a tiling window manager and neither is Unity. It seems to me that, as far as you're concerned, Ubuntu's default set-up sucks just as much as it always has.

edit: fixed mis-wording in second paragraph.

I concur, I'm using a few applications - Yakuake Terminal, Chrome, Thunderbird, Eclipse+viPlugin, Empathy and Skype.

Unity took me a while to get used to, but I've found it to be fantastic and look forward to seeing the production release with Ubuntu 12.04.

Well for one example: I use 2 large monitors to work with and run allot of applications at the same time.

With gnome 2 I can put a seperate taskbar on each monitor and switch quickly between tasks with the keyboard or mouse. I also have another panel with buttons to launch my most common apps. Small amount of mouse movement and 1 click.

With unity I have to drag the mouse right to the far left or my furthest left monitor , possibly scroll through the icons , select the app I want, click it and then I have to select the window I want. Lots of mouse movement and 2-3 clicks.

Another problem I get is when launching a GUI app from a shell script , I load the app but then cannot dock it because it doesn't understand the relationship between the shell script and the app. This means I need seperate icons on my desktop to launch some apps.

OK. I see how it can be problem with two monitors but aren't shortcuts like (Start+1) helping in this case? While I still see problem with eyes movement. Lastly I'm against idea using multiple monitors so I don't feel competent enough to comment.

Problem with GUI apps from shell script is bug in my opinion but I was not affected by it yet.

I imagine allot of power users do use 2 monitors , especially now that they are so cheap. And I don't just mean developers either, I've seen plenty of estate agents , accountants , lawyers etc using 2 monitors with perhaps a large spreadsheet open on 1 and their email correspondence or web browser open on another.

To be honest I don't know what the Start + 1 shortcut does, so perhaps it would help or perhaps not. If you have to use keyboard shortcuts though I don't really see how this is simpler than the taskbar where I have a clear list of everything I'm doing on the most spacious axis of my monitor.

I use two monitors at work, and I can't imagine using just one. The productivity boost is great.

Even better than 2 monitors is a single 2560x1600 30".

I'd rather take two 24" monitors at 1920x1080 each = 3840x1080 combined. That would give me a similar number of pixels at a significantly lower cost than a single 30" monitor of similar quality.

I use two monitors and I solved this problem by using multiple desktops. Every desktop has one of my "tasks". When I want to see what other window is doing, I move to that given desktop. This way, each desktop has one "context" - Emacs and a development server, a browser and another window to the same development server (screen is your friend), one with various "social" things - IM, Skype, IRC, Twitter - and others with assorted activities (managing servers on Amazon, remote upgrading my mom's computer (Unity is very grandma-friendly) and so on. If I'm ever lost, Super-S brings me everything up in a simple and easy way.

My two problems with Unity: It's too easy to get to get to the launcher when I want to hit the browser's back button and all my Super-related Emacs shortcuts had to be relocated. Now I need a Hyper key.

This is an approach that could work for sure, but then you need to be disciplined and remember what is open on each desktop. I love the simplicity of just having a list of windows at the bottom of each monitor, requires no memory or keyboard shortcuts to switch between things.

I tend to keep things consistent. The browser is usually on the top-left desktop, emacs on center-top, twitter and pidgin, on lower-left.

I have 2 24 inchers and what I do to get my "set up" in the morning is I have all the applications I need arranged in my launcher:

From top to bottom I have file manager and browser, then all my apps that I need to have open on my launcher, so I just hold down my winkey then hit 3,4,5,6 and my mail, irc, trello, calendar all launch, then I'm done.

Count me in. When developing, I usually have no more than three applications opened: GVim, a terminal window and a browser. All of them are easily accessible through Super + 1..3. In addition to that, I can move them around the screen using Ctrl+Alt+Numblock. These features work extremely reliable and fit very well in my workflow.

I agree, I don't understand the hatred for Unity. I've used Linux since Slackware 3.0 or so...

My girl friend, who is an Apple user, was pretty impressed by the user interface after I installed 11.10 on my Thinkpad.

On my work laptop I will typically have around three workspaces (everything about a given task/goal in one space), with around three Safari windows open in each, each with 1-6 tabs and a couple of Inspector sheets; some Finder windows thrown in here and there, a couple of Terminal windows per space (some with split screens or multiple splits open in vim), some Vico windows here and there. iChat, Skype, iTunes, Mail and Things follow me around when I move spaces -- they stay hidden most of the time. I will mostly move around with swipes between spaces, Cmd-Tab between three of the most recent apps, and Cmd-` between a given app's windows (or ^W^W from split to split in Vico). When a window is more than a couple of strokes away I'll tile all of the apps windows, or right-click it in the Dock to choose a window from a menu. When an app is more than a couple of keystrokes away I'll summon Spotlight and just move to it by name (or hold Cmd-Tab and trackpad over it).

Thanks to the SSD I don't ever have to wait, or stop to think what to do next.

I wouldn't call this ideal, but I will call the above _the_minimal_ viable windowing environment control scheme, for what I'm after.

How is it that you're so at peace with that glitchy simpleton? (Or am I over-doing it?)

(edit) formatting

"I really don't understand what other power users are missing."

With Unity, if I am on a workspace with no terminal, and I click on the terminal to open it, I am warped back to a workspace that already has a terminal open, and I have to open a new window from there, and move it back (with several more clicks) to the workspace I really want to be on. Much different than just clicking on the terminal icon, which worked before.

I'd like unity to work out, and if they could get past the awkwardness of task-switching and workspaces, then I'll go back to it. Maybe it would be best to just treat a new workspace as though there are no applications open at all, and if you want an application on another workspace you have to switch to that workspace first.

Also, it would be nice if I had a way to go directly to, say, the third instance of the terminal that I have open, rather than trying to choose it from a picture.

Middle-click the terminal button in the dock.

or press ctrl-alt-t.

Perfect, thank you!

Selecting the right terminal if I have a bunch open is still a little awkward, because I can't just cycle through the ones on a single workspace. I'll switch to unity for a little while and see how much that actually bothers me.

Middle-click on the terminal icon, or right-click and select "New terminal" to create a new one.

I agree. Especially on my 13" laptop, Unity gives me by far the most screen space of any other desktop environment out there (including OS X), especially vertical.

It has a few bugs, but they're not that big a deal.

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