unity-design team mailing list archive

[Stefanos Apostolopoulos <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

2012/2/8 Michael Hall <mhall119@xxxxxxxxxx>

>
>
> On 02/08/2012 09:49 AM, tommy wrote:
>
>> If minimize by launcher were possible, I could simply Super+1, Super+3,
>> Super+7 and I'm all done having few windows I want, insted of 20 clicks
>> and moving mouse along the whole desktop.
>>
>
> I haven't had a use for minimizing windows in well over a year.  Between
> Unity's easy window switching and multiple workspaces, I leave open windows
> I am using, and close those I'm not.
>
> What exactly is your use case for needing to minimize a window, let alone
> multiple?  Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it's a legacy feature
> that is only kept around because it's always been that way.
>
>
Indeed.

Window management is a pain in the ass. Workspace management is an even
bigger pain in the ass.

Combine the two and you don't solve the problem - you just make it worse.
Now you don't have just 20 windows to manage, you have 20 windows spread
over 4 workspaces (and 2 monitors in my case). This is awful.

Gnome Shell is marginally better here, because it tones down both window
and workspace management to their bare essentials and removes the overlap
between the two. I can now do exactly two things: move a window or kick it
into the workspace below and the choice boils down to a simple conditional:
if I want to use this window right now, I'll keep it in the current
workspace; otherwise I'll kick it one workspace down. I don't have to
decide which workspace (right, down or diagonally?), I don't have to pick
between minimize vs workspace and I find the whole experience much less
aggravating.

Yes, that's the word: aggravating! Unity gets window management wrong, by
giving me too many options while lacking the means to allow efficient use
of these options. A minimize button that's way too hard to use (here's a
16x16 rect appearing in a random spot of your 1920x1080 display - good
luck!); a spread view that impossible to invoke efficiently (move your
mouse all the way to the other side of your monitor and click a few times
until it takes - oh, and you might have to suffer through a workspace
animation first); lots of workspace choices that you have to populate
manually on every single boot (no way to autolaunch and/or pin
applications); and random bugs that make the experience painful (like
pop-up windows appearing on a different workspace than their parents).

This is pretty much the reason why I prefer Ubuntu + Gnome Shell over
Unity. I do believe that familiarity with the quirks and bugs of Compiz and
Unity makes many of these problems fly under the radars, but this doesn't
mean that the problems aren't there.