[SGVLUG] Unity

[Braydon]

I think it's great and reminds me of Ubiquity for Firefox and the Enso 
visual command line. Typing to open locations and commands is more 
accessible. Unity  doesn't go as deep as either of those, but their 
efforts were very ambitious to integrate all applications through an API 
like interface useful by natural language. But just  "email" can mean a 
bunch of different things depending on each user, so that ultimately was 
the biggest roadblock. For using Unity in Ubuntu it's good just for 
opening applications.

In 11.4 and 11.10 of Ubuntu, I recommend disabling the autohide of the 
launcher and disabling overlay scrollbars. This way targets are always 
visible and don't require an action to activate the target. These should 
be default settings.

$ sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
$ ccsm

Search for unity and enter it's options and change "Hide launcher" to 
"Never". Be careful installing and opening ccsm as it is possible to 
disable Unity here, and leave you with a Desktop without a way to open 
applications without entering them into a bash script.

To disable the overlay scroll bars, I have done this in 11.10:

$ sudo echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0">  /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars
$ sudo apt-get remove liboverlay-scrollbar*|

No guarantees this won't mess things up, and you can restore default settings of unity:

$ unity --reset
|


On 11/06/2011 08:30 PM, Braddock Gaskill wrote:
> I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity, and frankly I can't
> understand the negative reaction to it.  It is in my mind superior to the
> traditional Gnome desktop.  Perhaps it is because I've been using a tiling
> window manager for years and am not overly attached to a "traditional"
> windowing environment.
>
> Unity makes excellent use of screen real-estate.  I can sling a terminal
> to the top and get a real full screen console minus the small menu bar.  I
> can sling a browser to the left side of the screen and it Aero-snaps to the
> left half for easy side-by-side use, my usual tiling mode.  The attractive
> launcher on the left stays out of my way unless I need it, and lets me
> navigate applications and search in a far easier way than the damn Win95
> start menu clone in Gnome 2.
>
> This is an environment that could replace Awesome WM for me.
>
> -braddock
>
>
> !DSPAM:4eb75ed5121881410093335!
>

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