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Some information is important and should be on the screen at all times.
Sometimes this is simply because of convenience - like knowing what
time it is just by looking at the screen.
Sometimes this is to avoid annoyance. It is nice to have a dock
there, telling me which programs are open, and of the ones that are,
how many windows they have open. Again, all I need to do is *look at
the screen* to get this information - not go to some other part of the
OS, separate from the desktop, and only accessible if i hit the magic
keyboard combination or accidentally touch a "hot" corner.
I'm curious if your talking personally or your speaking about people in general. To know what apps are open is something that in my workflow only happens on occasion. Times when I need to know when an app is open is because I wish to do something in said application, I check to see if it is open before opening it. I think that the direction that Unity is going in this regard avoids this issue, you select the application, if multiple instances are open you get to choose, otherwise it's launched. Which solves the whole reason why I check to see if an application is open. The only other reason is when I wish to reduce memory, because I'm working on a system that has limited memory and/or I have a lot of resource hungry applications open. I would judge the later one to be more the realm of 'power users' and is not a normal behaviour of the average user. To me these are infrequent activities, not something I need to do all the time. The only real time I look at what is running
Most importantly, though, some bits of information are useless
*unless* they are always visible. I won't know if my inbox is
populated unless I can see the envelope icon. I won't know that
something is very wrong, and taking up 100% of my CPU, if I have to
move something or go to another screen to see my CPU indicator. The
whole point of these sorts of indicators is specifically TO get in the
way of whatever I'm doing, because there are some instances where I
have deemed it *important to interrupt me*.
Hmm. Maybe in your use of a system you need to know the CPU all the time, but I know of very very few users who would fine this information useful at all, let alone all the time. I personally like to know the load, but only when things are sluggish and I'm looking for the reason behind the responsiveness of the system. IMHO, the average user doesn't need to know this and I would suggest wouldn't wish to know this.
I am tired of playing these silly hide-and-seek games with my OS. We
all knew a decade ago that designing a "discovery"-based
mouseover-heavy web site was poor design; why, then, is it all of a
sudden OK to do with an OS's main Graphical interface? I do not want
a GUI that essentially mimics the worst behaviors of the CLI, or web
design from 1996. I don't want important information removed from
sight because some people think it's "Ugly" or "too chromey" or
whatever; that's like removing the speedometer from a car's dashboard
because it "breaks the line". The machine becomes more infuriating
and less useful in these new paradigms, *especially since none of
these shenanigans were necessary before*.
Well I cannot comment on your hide and seek games with your OS. I'm only aware of the global menu being an issue, which I do agree with, it should be visible all the time. However comparing it to a speedometer on a car is no way apples to apples comparison. It would be better to compare it to your tachometer or maybe your clock. A speedometer is required all the time, you are obligated to keep to the speed limit and as most drivers try to be as close to that speed limit as possible, then monitoring the speedometer is something that must be done all the time. Menus, docks, etc are not required to be watched all the time to use your computer. The tachometer is something you can watch if you like when changing gears in a manual car. Most people tend to use the sound of the engine (they get used to the sound of how high the car is reving to decide if they need to change gears), but some use the tacho and it can be useful, however not all the time. Same applies to the clock. Seriously how many people need to see the clock on the desktop 100% of the time? How many times during the course of your day do you refer to the clock? Not all the time, and not 60 times per hour, 12 hours per day.
Before all this new-wave, touchscreen-friendly kerfuffle, if I wanted
to know anything about my computer from the important to the trivial,
all I had to do was *look at the screen*. Every single click target
and status indicator was right there, in a fairly unobtrusive manner;
the Dock/Docky in particular is actually fairly elegant in this
regard. There is no usability-based reason to remove all of this
data, or confine it to a new corner of the OS a la "Mission Control".
I didn't *need* a mission control before, I had a desktop.
There is a valid usability based reason to remove data that the average user has no use of IMHO. I have no problem with that approach and from a purely usability point of view it makes sense to me. It's like companies that used to have their thumb in so many pies as a part of their business. If your a manufacturer you may have warehouses, trucks to ship goods, etc, etc. A lot of businesses found that it's easier to focus on the core business if they're not distracted by all this other stuff that really has nothing to do with what they excel in, namely manufacturing widget X. So they outsourced their warehouses, distribution lines, Help Desks, service centres, etc. What I'm trying to draw an analogy with is that generally the average user is focused on one task at a time. They wish to surf the net, which involves clicking on links, maybe typing in a url (though I find a lot of users who use google to find the site they wish to go for). Some will use bookmarks. But generally they don't care about what other applications are running, they don't care about the status of their printer, the current time, how much disk space they have left, if blue tooth is enabled, what programs they can launch, what the weather is in the local city, etc. All they care about is reading lolcats or chatting to friends on facebook, etc. This is purely from my own observations.
In essence I'm trying to say that IMO the job of the OS should be to allow the user to do what they want, it shouldn't get in the way and clutter their screens. If they want to watch youtube, look at facebook, check their gmail account, etc, then the whole focus of the UI should be on what they're trying to achieve. And when they wish to do something else, then let them see the extra options they need for that activity. But when 80 or 90 percent of the time is spent looking at the contents in a window, there is no point cluttering up the landscape with irrelevant information.
Of course there are power users, or business users who need to switch between applications, etc. But I think the push to show information about the system, current running applications and launchers for new applications only caters for a small percentage of the time spent by a user on a computer.
I would suggest that people are serious about improving Unity then we need to be developing proper use cases to document the different work methods people utilise. This would go hand in hand with identifying the type of users, what percentage of the marketplace they make up, which direction is Ubuntu going and what users they wish to target. To me it seems that a lot of the arguments are subjective, some based on an emotional reaction. Some proper use case documentation, analysis of the user base, determining what use cases are used and how frequently they're used based on time spent in front of the UI would help provide some objective information on this whole UI issue.