Given the new behaviour of Unity-greeter, it's somewhat astounding that
the transition from log-in to desktop was not addressed. We still have a
very stuttery implementation currently.
Now, going back, I believe Sam Spilsbury posted on his blog about the
idea of a mini compositor to alleviate that. (And, for all I know, this
may be "fixed" by Wayland.) But I want to propose that we create a
consistent animation for Unity to appear after login and disappear at
shutdown/lockscreen. Right now, things just appear, period. Wallpaper,
full stop. Top bar with "Ubuntu Desktop", fullstop. Indicators, full
stop. Etc.
Instead of this, why don't we use a small animation to symbolically show
that the user in the login box is taking over*, pass to a
mini-compositor to make sure their background stays on the screen, hand
it all over to compiz and keep the wall up. Now, from there, make it so
that Unity doesn't show up until it's all ready/loaded and have the top
bar slide down from the top of the screen and once that is complete,
THEN slide in the launcher from the left and lock it in place.
Just an idea that needs some refinement still, have at it!
*My current idea for it doesn't work as well for login as it does
locking the screen, so I'll just detail the lock screen animation: Using
the current behavior of the screen fading before locking, we have the
whole screen fading to a black, as this is happening, the launcher
slides out to the left, the top bar fades to it's lightDM transparency,
the screen over all continues to fade until its overlay fade matches the
Unity-greeter login box. From there the overlay would condense and
resize to the login box itself. Then it would fade out properly or
something.
Sorry I don't have an animation, came up with the idea and wanted to
share, hopefully what I've said it clear enough that you can picture it.
