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Comment by lysol | Hacker News Reader

Have you used it? The principal thing is that it's different and offers less customization than gnome2 and even gnome3 with gnome-shell. Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done. These sorts of things are self-evident when you've attempted to use Unity for any length of time.

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>> Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done.

like what? again, i'm not challenging you, i'm genuinely wondering.

The author is referring to the fact that the taskbar/dock in Unity doesn't offer the same affordances as the old Gnome2 taskbar. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, there was no way to open a new terminal from the dock. You had to click on the terminal icon, then click File->New Terminal. As someone who routinely opens a number of terminals for various tasks, that one regression was a source of significant slowdowns.

In addition, Unity is slow on any system that doesn't have a separate graphics card or the latest generation of integrated graphics. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the graphical effects to speed it up. Combine that with the usability regressions, and Unity was a definite no-go for me.

That's not to say that I "hate" Unity or will never use it as my desktop environment. I think Unity has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like all too much software out there, it was released before it had been fully finished. I look forward to trying Unity again when the next Ubuntu LTS (12.04, I believe) is released. Hopefully it'll be far more usable and "finished" by then.

I always launched the terminal using the keyboard, and I think they improved that with Unity -- so it was a speed-up for me.

[And if you're opening a terminal, we can be pretty sure that your hands are heading for the keyboard anyway! :) ]

Can't you just middle click the icon in the dock? Middle click launches a new instance of the app instead of bringing the current instance to the foreground.

for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.

personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.

You should probably also try KDE. I've personally had bad experiences with Kubuntu, but the Fedora KDE spin and OpenSUSE have been very nice.

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