unity-design team mailing list archive

[Biturica <biturica@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark, I'm not sure how Gnome Shell enters into this, I certainly have no 
desire to use Gnome Shell. "Gnome Shell is worse" is not a great defense 
of Unity, nor a sufficient distraction from the lack of configurability 
in a premature serving of ~Unity~ as a Gnome 2.x replacement.

Unity's anti-pattern directly inspired this new minimize button, and as 
I said, naturally reminds me of the anti-pattern. So separating Unity 
from a detail of Unity is illogical and would amount to a matter of 
convenience for those with a vested interest. The issue is Unity breaks 
things people are used to for no / whatever reason, but more 
importantly, does not give you a way to undo that and preserve ~your own 
decisions~.

Middle of the screen? My Radiance minimize button continues the 
horizontal / minus (substraction) concept and I can minimize to the top 
panel just fine (screenshot <http://i.imgur.com/0Cen8.png>). 
Furthermore, the global menu I use gives me a list of windows in all 
workspaces, and the MintMenu keeps me from needing any dock. It may be 
lacking in eye candy, but it ~functions~ the way I want it to, is 
intuitive to ~me~, and it is all doable using the existing desktop 
manager that is already ~working~ (except in Natty Classic). Those three 
PPA applets will be useless to me in Natty, in both the Unity and 
Classic sessions. This amounts to someone coming along and saying "stop 
that, use ~our~ preferences, because we wear turtlenecks, and you are 
wrong." Presumptuous?

If Canonical made cars, sold them with doors for seven years, then told 
people "now you have to climb in through the window because we say so" 
or brought them to market before the brakes were installed, it would be 
recognized even by Canonical as a bad ~business~ model.

Moreover, until someone forks it, the classic Gnome experience is going 
away presumably for all distros eventually. So Canonical lost an 
opportunity to be a hero by picking up the ball Gnome dropped and 
preserving it for the entire Linux ecosystem; all the while Canonical 
could have still conducted its own secondary track for an optional 
"alternative" UI ~and~ not have to had wasted resources on Unity 2D. On 
a related note, if Canonical lacks the genuine ability to maintain 
separate tracks for different form factors, perhaps Canonical is in the 
wrong business. If you have to differentiate yourself via new UI 
paradigms, you're doing it wrong. The desktop was a solved problem.

I may very well appreciate Unity on my tablet, but I don't do anything 
of consequence on a tablet. If Canonical wants a diverse user 
demographic, the name of the game is options, even if options are hard, 
and even if the options are not Canonical's personal tastes. Canonical 
can either accept the challenge or not accept it.


On 04/04/2011 04:34 PM, Mark Curtis wrote:
> Right, because the default style of _ means you can never move the 
> Window List to anywhere but the bottom, or well Ambiance has - so I 
> guess that means windows mimize to the middle of the screen?
> GNOME Shell doesn't have a minimize at all, I guess by your logic 
> isn't not configurable at all, or would that be infinity configurable? 
> At any rate CAN you even move the open applications list in GNOME 
> Shell (from, incidentally the left, where Unity's are)? Though that, 
> like the majority of your replay has nothing to do with the minimize 
> icon and more about Unity in general.