You missed out half the stats which show 64bit for a start. There are ~6x more hits from Ubuntu 12.04 than for all Mint distros put together, and 12.04 has only been out a month in those stats. The number of people using anything but the default install are a minority, and I think it’s safe to assume the bulk of people have stuck with Unity, or why switch. Therefore - what mass exodus?
Yeah, you see. Now I get why I was seriously confused reading this thread.
I thought this was about Unity Linux and I was really wondering how a distribution would make any difference when it comes to a GUI. But in fact, it is about the Unity window manager built into Ubuntu. Finally, I get it. Darned confusing naming conflicts! Perhaps I should just blame myself for never having much of an interest in Ubuntu. (tech geek eh, I’m more the Gentoo Linux dork).
I can see that taken as a one-off my comment was misleading. I’ve been using 12 for quite awhile and have zero complaints for my use-case which is 100% programming mode. Let me that a step back and give you some background. I must have a windows box available for a wide range of reasons. My windows installations are on a new machine and remain in-place for the lifetime of the machine. On the linux side I tend to wipe and update from scratch regularly. Due to this model, my windows boxes have the vast majority of programs that I need to run (including lots of stuff that’s normally unix-a-like). On the flip side, my linux boxes are minimal, as there’s no reason to have any GUI programs installed outside of IDEs & emacs. This is simply pragmatic, as installing stuff take time. So for my linux boxes, I install the OS, grab the few programs I need, dock stuff like shell, emacs & IDEs and then I’m virtually done interfacing the window manager. So, although I’ve been using 12 for quite awhile, the “unity” thing (I didn’t even know its name prior to this thread) hasn’t even entered into my consciousness, much less my workflow. I just tinkered around with it last night out of boredom after reading Cas’ comment.
Since most of the time I’m programming, my time is pretty much evenly divided by windows & linux. As my programming mode tools are set-up virtually identically on both machines…I don’t notice what OS I’m runnning (as I mentioned before). As I keep saying…these things are toasters.
WRT: newbie interface. I found that very disappointing (granted I only took a quick look). I don’t really see the point of yet-another-os-targeting-joe-average.
Great. Reliability, availability of needed programs and impact on workflow are the only rational reasons to make the choice.
One great thing about being old (not quite 70 BTW) and having worked prior to GUIs is having spent the year needed to become familiar with the basics of emacs. My fingers starting doing their thing before I’ve completed my thought about what I want to do next and it’s completely independent of OS & window managers. As I stated previously, I’m usually doing what I wanted to do in less time it would have taken to move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse or touchpad. Don’t take this as me saying that everyone should run out and learn emacs. Some unwashed heathens disagree with me on its usefulness. And if I were hit on the head with a brick and the only effect was that I forgot all the emacs keystrokes and I knew that it would take me a year to re-learn them…I’m not sure if I would or not, because that’s a really big time commitment and a huge opportunity cost.
I disagree with that - the easier something is to start learning the better. As long as there’s more there for the power user, should they need it.
Actually, shortcuts are not the only thing I’m talking about. I like the power of the textual search in Unity (which I had before with Gnome Do, etc.) Simply press and start typing what you want (application name, file name, etc.) or press in any program and be able to search through menus for what you want. And it includes fuzzy search and learning what you use most. Far better than esoteric shortcuts.
Actually the whole HUD and menu thing in Unity promises quite a lot and I can see it being really good in another couple of iterations. What I really don’t like is that dock thing on the left, the system wide menu bar thing at the top, the window resizing feel, and scrollbars. It’s in the tiny details that it is let down. Even such wretchedly simple things as a few pixels of “whitespace” around certain GUI elements on the menu bar, and toolbar/font sizes/whitespace being just too big in Nautilus and many other UIs. It reminds me of the Sirius Cybernetics NutriMatic Drinks Dispenser giving Arthur Dent a drink that is almost entirely but not quite unlike tea. The UI people seem to almost know what they’re doing. Almost.
Cas 
HAHAHAHAHA! ;D
Next there will be classes on it.
I explained it already. It because all the modern screens have the 16:9 aspect ratio, often with a low resolution like 1366x768. I makes more sense on the left.
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What’s wrong with it?
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They work and they save some space. I don’t see a problem there.
This is a bug.
- It’s not the position I don’t like, it’s how it works. IMHO the best UI yet developed in this regard is still the Windows XP taskbar. Go on, kill me. Nothing’s come close for utility, aesthetic or usefulness yet. You can see exactly what’s running all the time and instantly switch to it with a click; and you can have a little resizable panel of mini icons for all the stuff you use constantly; and on the right it’s got all the little system daemons and the clock & calendar; and you can drag the whole thing wherever you like. It’s great (shame they broke it in Win7).
- See earlier in thread why Mac screen menu sucks. Plus it’s broken for various apps, randomly, though that’s hearsay because I’ve never hung around long enough to find out.
- I don’t want scrollbars to save space; I’ve always got lots of space and scrollbars are only there when there’s far more stuff than space anyway. I use always visible scrollbars to indicate that there is, indeed, more stuff, and to show always how much of that stuff you can see, approximately. I also like them being inside the window because to my mind a window is the absolute border of a thing. I don’t like things extending outside the rectangle; again, it simply upsets my sense of aesthetics. Maybe I’m just bonkers though.
- And finally - I didn’t mean “white” space; I just meant “too much space”. Which grates massively with the areas where there is too little, like the top or bottom bar, which always seems like everything’s crammed together. It’s not a bug - just ugly.
Cas
This sounds to like you were talking about almost every desktop environment. You can have the XP look with KDE or LXDE… You see, choice is good.
It works only for GTK and Qt plus some other apps. And it doesn’t work with apps started as root. I know, it’s inconsistent, but Unity developers can’t do anything to fix it.
Then deactivate it. You can also deactivate the global menu.
Hehe: Zoom to the bottom left – those are all windows 7 screenshot.
I know, they are also too old and some of DEs are modified. In my link the desktop environments are mostly vanilla (or they come with themes of Ubuntu derivates). There are also a description and some numbers.
My favorite OS is JavaOS circa 1996. :-X
I remember that OS! I ran it in VirtualBox a couple years ago and it was actually not that bad! ;D
You can use Java to WRITE OS?! :o
@Riven
But I see JavaOS has GUI (swing), not ASCII like that. I mean, how the hell you create partition table, MBR, etc with Java.
They have a minimal layer of assembler (not C)
Let me guess, that layer will serve for JVM and execute the very first main class that chaining to perform an OS functions.