Now that the first waves of rage calmed down and i’ve been using Unity for a few days, it doesn’t seem that horrible anymore. I managed to tweak many stuff to my liking, and many still await, but now i can at least get stuff done without constantly being held up by the clumsy interface.

There are stuff that disturb me still though. There is no simple way to switch between workspaces. In the classic Gnome, there was the handy workspace switcher applet on the tray, and it took only a click. In Unity, i’ve to click the icon in the launcher for the workspace wall to show up, and right-click on the workspace i want to move to. I can’t even use the “send to workspace …” options on the right click menu of windows, because it closes the window without warning or question. Not to mention that Unity is prone to crash without any real reason. In the past three days it crashed at least three times when i was just normally using the system and pretty much every single time i tried tweaking the settings. Luckily it restarts quickly, but it’s still annoying.

Also it’s very clumsy to switch between multiple windows of the same app. There is no quick or one-click way that i know of, so if i want to switch between for example three overlapping instances of Aegisub, i’ve to click twice on its icon on the launcher, then choose the window to focus on from a “window overview” (or whatever they call it). In comparison, in classic Gnome this took no time by scrolling the window buttons on the tray. Also, the windows on the wall have no label and they aren’t ordered in any particular way as far as i experienced, so it’s damn difficult to find the right one when the window contents look similar–and there is no setting to enable labels in this “overview”.

So, dear Ubuntu developers, if you are already determined to change the window manager to something totally different just like this, at least wait until the new one actually works flawlessly. I can get used to it, for sure, just it’s clumsy and slow to use, not to mention inconsistent (cf the handling of “bookmarks” in Nautilus). There is a lot of space for improvement, for example i really miss some convenient and quick way to tweak the settings of the notification area, but at least by now i got to the point where i don’t hate it anymore. I may even say “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, but i’m afraid it’d sound way too cheesy.