unity-design team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hi,

I mostly use a laptop or desktop with a single display for work. When I
use an additional monitor it's usually in 'mirror' mode when giving a
presentation.

Yesterday however I had a go at multi-monitor in latest 12.04. A couple
of issues worried me and once I started talking about it, it seems I'm
not alone.

* With two monitors side by side a launcher is on both and traversing
the (always out) launcher the mouse slows. The slowing of the mouse as
you pass the boundary is very jarring when I can't smoothly drag an item
or even just the mouse from one desktop to another.

I ended up mitigating this issue by putting the external screen above my
laptop screen (which was actually practical in this example given the
size [40"] of the external screen) but it's way more common to have
desktops side by side.

https://twitter.com/#!/popey/status/175235794909401090/photo/1

* Launcher (and top bar) on every desktop wastes space and is somewhat
redundant. I can appreciate the "I have to travel a long way to get to a
single launcher on one screen" argument for having one on every desktop.
But as I have my launcher always visible (the default) it's a chunk of
space along the side which I can't use for anything else, and leads to
the issue outlined above.

Ideally I'd like to have the option to have the launcher on one desktop
of my choosing, and be able to dial down the resistance to make it less
obnoxious.

* Multi-monitor usage patterns. It _feels_ like the usage pattern that
Unity launcher placement and multi-screen behaviour is based on is
limited to "use each screen for one separate task at a time". If I did
this and didn't have to traverse the screens much I could probably cope
with the above issues a lot better. However that doesn't seem to be the
way most people use multi-monitors. I might have a mail open on one, and
a browser on another, zipping the mouse between to cut/paste or just
scroll the window. It feels like this wasn't designed for, but more
"stay on one screen until your unit of work is complete".

Are we tracking these issues somewhere?

- -- 
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ubuntu.com/
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