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Comment by breakall | Hacker News Reader

You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.

While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.

Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???

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When apps are maximized in Gnome 3, the window title bar is supposed to hide/blend into the panel/menubar like in Unity. Lots of apps don't do it yet, though.

For Firefox, try this extension to hide the title bar when maximized: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/htitle/

While you're at it, if you're on Gnome, try the excellent Gnome 3 theme: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adwaita/

I wasn't a Unity fan but I have to agree with you, the screen space saving is amazing. Another thing that's cool about Unity is that the launcher is on the side which on the _modern_ screens which are vertically challenged for some odd reason, works really well.

Yes, that is actually the only feature I like about Unity. The rest bugs me too much though. That's why I love programs where I can hide the menu bar and toggle it via a shortcut (a lot of KDE programs can do this). This is especially useful in programs like image viewers and PDF readers (say Okular).

I'm in the same boat. While I've been using GNOME for the past few releases and really enjoying it, I switched to a Thinkpad X230 recently.

Unity really shines on the relatively low 1366x768 resolution and increases usability tremendously. Every vertical pixel counts, and it's surprisingly good at optimizing screen real estate. Now if they could only make it crash less... it's been abysmal in the stability department. GNOME has been pretty stable since about two releases ago.

Mac OS X only has one bar.

Yes, and I know Unity got this from OSX. I should have said, are there other Linux-based shells, etc. that have this feature.

Ahh, well it is a pretty sweet use of real estate. I use tiling wm's on linux so I really can't speak to that.

this actually annoyed me.

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