unity-design team mailing list archive

[Phong Cao <phngcv@xxxxxxxxx>]

About Unity & Gnome Shell... none of them is better than the other. It
depends on the users.

I am the kind of user that never open less than 5 windows at a time.

As I explained above:
1. Try to open 3 maximized windows of Chrome, 3 maximized windows of
LibreOffice, 2 Terminal windows and 1 Nautilus window.
2. Now switch between the windows of different applications. You can easily
see that:
- In Gnome Shell: I hover the mouse to the top-left, which takes almost 1
second. Then all 9 windows are shown on the screen for me to choose from.
This makes things simple and easier.
- In Unity:
+ The best way to switch between applications in Unity is using the
keyboard.
+ Other than that, I will have to hover the mouse to the left and then
"guess" "Where is my Chrome/Terminal/LibreOffice icon?" to click on.
+ This causes lots of confusion and time consuming since everytime I want to
switch between DIFFERENT applications I have to "guess" the icon position
again.
+ This should not be a problem if you keep the left panel always visible.
However, Gnome Shell does not sacrifice any horizontal screen space and
still achieve the result I need.

Lastly, please do not use the age of Unity as an excuse. *I am tired of
people saying that "Because Unity is just ... months old and Gnome Shell has
been.... decades old so Gnome Shell is better".*
*Gnome Shell will always be older than Unity and Unity will always use this
statement as an excuse for its weaknesses.* Unity will hardly improve if its
developers use age to say it is better or worse than Shell.

*Weaknesses do not come from age. They come from the design philosophy of
the developers. *
*If the philosophy is wrong from the start and left unchanged, Unity will
hardly gets any better regardless of its age.*


On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Shane Fagan
<shanepatrickfagan@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:50 AM, Phong Cao <phngcv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I am too have been for a long time a Ubuntu's fan. However, I am not
> trying
> > to be negative but... I would say that Unity's design is way far behind
> > GNOME Shell in Fedora 15. I recommend anybody in this email list try out
> > Fedora 15 & GNOME Shell and learn from their simplicity. (Just my
> thought,
> > no offense). After couple days get along with Fedora 15 & GNOME Shell I
> feel
> > that GNOME Shell is more newbie-friendly and productive than Unity. I
> think
> > Ubuntu should reconsider going back to GNOME...
>
> Ok im not being negative or anything but both emails you put in on
> this thread haven't explained why you think shell is better.
> Also it has to be said that Unity (compiz) isn't around very long
> compared to Shell since it was made for 3 years and all and
> Unity compiz anyway is only 6 months of work ish. The reason why im
> mentioning that is there are still many many changes
> and iterations to come for Unity in which it will get better. What you
> can bank on though is Unity is faster and more stable.
>
> The cool things about Shell are the really nice looking animations on
> things there is a lot of nice finishes on everything and
> that stuff comes with time. In terms of Unity and why it is better is
> the simplicity you can do a lot more with the search in the
> dash than you can with Shell and the sky is the limit on lenses and
> all that nice stuff.
>
> --fagan
>