Recent versions of Ubuntu use the Unity desktop by default. The overwhelming consensus on the Internet is that, due to lack of configurability, it is a step back from the Gnome desktop previously used. I, however, have a very different set of reasons for disliking it, as I will explain here.
I first seriously installed Ubuntu on a netbook as a replacement for Asus’ variant of Xandros. Then, the Maximus desktop together with a quite usable launcher was the default for the Netbook Remix, and it worked extremely well due to it’s efficient use of screen space – particularly vertically. However, Ubuntu has moved away from this type of interface since then, and the changes are not for the better. Indeed there is no longer a Netbook Remix as such, with Unity being forced upon desktop users as well.
Peeve 1: the icons and buttons in Unity are far too big, and there is no obvious setting to make them smaller. They seem to be made for especially fat-fingered touchscreen users. I don’t know about you, but my desktop machines and my netbook have ordinary keyboards and mice (or trackpads or trackpoints), so fat-fingering is not an issue – desktop users have been successfully double-clicking on 32×32 icons for over 15 years. I would much rather see more, smaller icons on my screen so that I don’t have to scroll. This is a trend which began even before Unity, and considerably impedes navigation on a small-screen netbook.
Peeve 2: the scroll bars are so thin as to be almost impossible to grab, fat fingers or no. Compare and contrast with the above, and scratch your head.
Peeve 3: the application launcher is clunky and hard to navigate. I actually have difficulty finding what I want, even though I know what it’s called and where it was in previous versions of Ubuntu. There is a stark choice between a vapid “favourites” list with a link to the Store, and a massive conglomeration of every single installed application – which isn’t even in alphabetical order. This is exacerbated by the need to expand the list and scroll down to see all the items in any given category. I wonder if Unity’s designers have ever heard of “discoverability”?
Peeve 4: there is no screensaver support. Yes, I know screens technically don’t “burn in” any more, but I want to see something pretty when the screen is locked or blanked. The settings for screensavers have simply disappeared.
Peeve 5: Unity is bloated. This surprised me greatly, considering how simple it appears on the surface. Yet when I installed Ubuntu on a salvaged Thinkpad A20p, I found that it would swap itself to death at the slightest provocation. With a 700MHz P3 and 256MB RAM, the specs are not much below a netbook or an ARM-based tablet – and perfectly representative of an old machine that might be scrounged up for a child, an elderly relative or a disadvantaged family, for which Linux is supposed to be ideal.
A quick look in ‘top’ showed the culprit. Such stalwarts as xchat and gnome-terminal were content in a few megabytes of resident memory, and even X11 seemed to be surviving on 20MB. Firefox, predictably, was consuming rather more, apparently competing on even terms with unity-2d-panel and some Python script which was updating the package database cache. Even though the Unity dock was hidden, the unity-2d-panel was keeping tens of megabytes alive enough to remain in RSS, and this quantity only increased after I convinced Firefox to quit.
Now, a script which walks over a database to create a cache can legitimately consume a lot of memory, so long as it does it’s job and then gets out of the way. But I am completely at a loss to explain why managing a simple dock (which was hidden at the time due to the full-screen terminal) and a menu bar with a few widgets in it – which are less functional than the Gnome equivalents – can keep a 40MB working set active (not even including X11). This does not bode at all well for Ubuntu’s aspirations to use Unity on tablets, a task for which it was obviously otherwise intended.
As for the Thinkpad, I think I will try switching it to xubuntu and see if that successfully removes Unity from the equation. Wish me luck.