Is Unity less/same/more "efficent" for the user than "normal" panel

[woodsmoke]

I've fiddled with Unity some, and now that I've installed it for my lab assistant, I thought I'd give it some use so I could be kinda knowedgable about it.

The question is:

a) whether or not: Unity is more or less efficient in terms of the number of mouse clicks necessary to do common tasks.
b) whether or not: the going to "laucher" and then to the (x number of more applications) in the file system is more efficient that the old gnome system.

b) dash home/ more apps / see 124 results, and mouse down.

a) Please consider the following images. they are two "views" of three documents that are open and the "icon" that indicates such.

Below is one view of three documents, notice that they are "cascaded"



Below is one view of three documents, notice that they are "seperated".


Below is an image of the icon that is in the left "panel" , notice that there is a little fuzzy white triangle on the right side of the icon.

Actually, on the left, not shown in the screeny are three distinct little white lines and on the right is one little white line.

The clicking of either side produces, depending on which little white line one clicks, one of the document views.



To get to document,

a) one has to go to the document icon and click it, and one will get THREE documents.
b) one then has to click the desired document and the three documents go back to the panel and one works on that document.

Notice one does not see the icon for "a document" in the panel, one sees the icon for "word processor", I would "assume" that the reasoning for this is the "activity" mindset.

In the old gnome panel one could click the individual document that was desired, meaning one click to get to the document.

So.... the question that I am posing to the folks of Kubu is whether they think that, in these two instances, the Unity interface is "more efficient" in terms of the number of clicks necessary to do something....

OR are the number of clicks "elsewhere" reduced by the interface so that the "average number of clicks" at the end of several hours of use of the Unity interface is the "same" as the old gnome interface.

Or, is the number of clicks a meaningless exercise in whether it is "good" or "bad".

What say you?

woodsmoke

[woodsmoke]

well, I just answered my own question as far as I'm concerned.

I started banshee to listen to some music.

There is no sound app for the panel that I could find.

EDIT: it is in dashboard go to customization on the right panel, go to installed apps and then way down to sound. The sound thing can be pinned to the left panel.

Banshee played the music and I controlled volume from the controller in Banshee, which, I admit, is logical. Why does one need two volume controllers?

But, I then closed Banshee, it disappeared from the panel on the left, one has to purposly sticky it to the panel if one wants to do so.

And guess what....Banshee is still playing....

And, it is not to be found anyplace on the desktop.

I had to go through Dash home and back to banshee to get at banshee, when it would normally be in "the panel" unless

I closed it, but it would not then have still been playing.

That left panel is going to fill up very quickly with those big icons. and the upper panel is mostly empty.


Methinks that I'll stick with KDE and Kubu.

woodsmoke

[NickStone]

After reading your comments about Unity, I think it is quite obvious you don't really kn ow how to use Unity. I believe one of Unity's strengths is that you can use the keyboard to run applications rather than use the mouse all the time.

The Dash - By hitting the Windows key on your keyboard will bring up the HUD (or what ever it is called) then simply type the whole name or part of the name of the application you want to run and if installed will display the icon on the screen then you can use one click of the mouse to run that application.

Task bar - If you have several instances of an application running and you want to jump from one to the other, you can do this easily bu right-clicking on the icon on the task-bar and selecting from one of the options that comes up. Two clicks, to display the document you want to view.

From what you wrote, it appears to me that your still thinking the Windows or KDE way of using a desktop not the Unity or Gnome-shell way.

[woodsmoke]

Hi nickstonefan

I had not thought of it that way...use the keyboard...ok....

But....if one of the big reasons for going to Unity by Canonical was "vertical integration" through platforms...

The phone and the tablet do not have native keyboard capability(yes one can attach a usb keyboard to a tablet or use the onscreen keyboard on the phone or tablet)....

so how is one to use Unity on those two platforms in an "easy way" which is what the new to Ubu user would expect without a keyboard?

again, you brought up something that I had not considered and thanks!

woodsmoke

[NickStone]

I don't have any answers to using Unity on a tablet or any touchscreen device as I don't have anything like that. I've only used it on a laptop. The best thing I like about Unity is its Dash (or HUD whatever you call it). There is something very similar to that in Mandriva 2011 (for KDE) and Rosa 2012 (for KDE) and I am thinking of installing Rosa next (when I get fed up of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu).

[woodsmoke]

Highly customized KDE desktop.... hmm....appearance-wise, I like the way that the icons in the panel kind of "float" above it".

Thanks for the mention, I had not looked at it before!

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rosa

woodsmoke

woodsmoke

[NickStone]

I made a mistake. I mentioned that you can switch between more than one instance of an application by right-clicing on the icon in the taskbar then clicking on the instance you want displayed. You cannot, instead you use the ALT-TAB key combo to cycle through the apps running in the workspace.

My apologies.

[woodsmoke]

thankee thankee thankee.

woodsmoke

[vw72]

Hi nickstonefan

I had not thought of it that way...use the keyboard...ok....

But....if one of the big reasons for going to Unity by Canonical was "vertical integration" through platforms...

The phone and the tablet do not have native keyboard capability(yes one can attach a usb keyboard to a tablet or use the onscreen keyboard on the phone or tablet)....

so how is one to use Unity on those two platforms in an "easy way" which is what the new to Ubu user would expect without a keyboard?

again, you brought up something that I had not considered and thanks!

woodsmoke

Canonical/Ubuntu has never said Unity was a tablet interface or any other interface than standard desktop. Same thing for Gnome 3. It was disgruntled users/reviewers who labeled it a tablet interface.

One of Unity's goals is to maximize screen real estate. With modern panels being wider than they are tall, it makes sense to use the sides, unlike, for instance with the icon bar on the bottom of the screen. Remember, before it was called Unity, it was called Ubuntu Netbook Interface.

One of the delays in having an Ubuntu tablet is precisely because Unity doesn't work well in that environment and is going to take some work to make it work well.

Unity is pretty productive if you do use all of the keyboard features. However, that is assuming you actually have a keyboard. A virtual keyboard on a television or tablet or phone would not be nearly as useful as a real keyboard with a computer. It appears that Gnome 3 has a leg up on Unity on that aspect as it is much more mouse and theorectically touch friendly (touch is still a work in progress).

[SteveRiley]

Canonical/Ubuntu has never said Unity was a tablet interface or any other interface than standard desktop. Same thing for Gnome 3. It was disgruntled users/reviewers who labeled it a tablet interface... One of the delays in having an Ubuntu tablet is precisely because Unity doesn't work well in that environment and is going to take some work to make it work well... (touch is still a work in progress).

Our smartphones have trained us. Icons in squares mean "Press here." Unity has few other visible working controls, so the assumption that it's a tablet UI is reasonable. But yet the underlying stack -- X, mostly -- has taken so long to acquire touch capabilities. Thus, expectation <> reality, and people become upset.

[Shimapan]

Unity isn't that bad, better still than using "pure" Gnome 3, which is just a pain to use, even much more so than Gnome 2. This is mostly due to that absolutely pathetic Dash Hud thingie. That might be nice on a touchscreen only, but is *extremely* displaced on a desktop OS.
It's way beyond stupid to put this Dash nonsense in a regular desktop distro. Unity makes Gnome 3 at least a little bit more usable, but it still has a clearly worse usability than Gnome 2, and it's a *huge* deal worse than Kde.

[pauly]

Ahhh I was hoping for a Unity bashing thread. This Sucks! jk

[woodsmoke]

Unity on a wide screen television t.v. screen

Since I'm just a hardware and applications kinda guy, I've been testing Unity on a wide screen LCD t.v. using an "airmouse" and associated keyboard.

I've also tested using a regular mouse, wireless.

Fundamentally, I think that Canonical has a very "workable" interface for using Unity on a television.

The caveat is, that one cannot really think of replacing a regular monitor with the telly.

There are several "things" about using the telly as a monitor.

a) the "angular relationships" are just waaay different from using a monitor and if one does what might be called "intensive work" with the telly one gets various neck and arm "strains".

b) There are several functions which just plain will not "work" with an airmouse, at least for me. One of them is the simple dragging of the side of a window to make it wider or smaller. Hooking into the lower right corner to "resize diagonally" does work easily however.

c) Getting the cursor on the right spot works fine for things like buttons, sliders, etc. However, other things, like moving around in the text of a document, for me, is easier using the arrow keys.

d) The use of different themes provides wider "sliders", or narrower, and that makes using sliders easier.

However, given that.

The stock Unity interface does "work" in terms of "snapping" the cursor to things like sliders, buttons, etc.

e) Stock Unity does not come with screensavers, although gnome screensavers is "there", but the devs for Ubu have decided that just a "blank screen" is ...."optimal"...

Don't cha just LOVE bureaucrats that decide WHICH things are "optimal" for ....YOU....the AVERAGE user! lol

If one is going to have Unity running on a telly screen, one "probably" would like to have a nice screensaver running so when one gets up to go to the loo one can come back to the sight of that doofus dolphin swimming WAAAAYYYY too fast across the screen.

If the developer had provided the option of just NOT HAVING THAT THING on the saver or had provided a speed setting for it, this user, for one would be WAAAAY happier! lol

g) The "large garish" icons work very well using an airmouse.

h) The 12.04 version of Unity has the "sidebar" only there when one does the "launcher" thing....

THAT IS A REALLY GOOD THING.... because having the sidelauncher there all the time caused "at least" a "temporary" "burn-in image" on that side of the telly screen.

That does not seem to occur on a "monitor" but then, a television screen is not....a.....monitor! lol

i) the "slider" is much WIDER when one is viewing applications in 12.04 so the the slider is easily used with the scroll wheel.

j) Whereas the "large garish" icons AND HAVING TO SCROLL DOWN THROUGH THEM.. for the apps on a regular monitor with a mouse seems like a big waste of time, the setup works very well when using the wheel on an airmouse with a television.

Soooooo cutting to the chase...

If one accepts that one should use Unity on the telly in terms of watching, say, Netflix, or listening to streaming music, doing e-mail or the odd post at a forum, reading news, or news feeds, then Unity is a well designed interface for that kind of situation.

HOWEVER< I would REALLY like to get a crack at the Kubu interface for tablets, using a mouse of course, to try IT on a television.

woodsmoke

[Jonas]

I tried unity for 6-10 months when it was new(I've til just recent always had a sub-partition with Ubuntu, sign. isn't up to date- I have mint-cinnamon now). I didn't hate it as much as most Ubuntu people seemed to do. My biggest concern was however that there was a lack of customization (without installing a great deal of compiz tweaks).

By the time I got bored with unity I realized that everything that was "hot" with unity already were implemented in KDE, with more features that I enjoyed. To be fair I haven't tried it in a while so it may be more mature atm.

I don't see why typing the name of the app is a better choice of starting a application, once in a while I do that with krunner, but for everyday applications I one-click on a panel icon.

I think that canonical should have kudos for implementing it and have stuck with and believe in Unity, in the long run their rethinking the workspace will benefit all DE's - even though unity doesn't appeal to me.

Sum of it, is that unity is a flavour of KDE - to me.

b.r

Jonas