But, it looks like it's undergone a few improvements.
(Strangely, I know,) I trust the people working on Ubuntu to make rational decisions. It looks like unity pulled through.
One real plus in 11.04, is the installer. Really convenient.
I didn't know about Unity before this, even though I've been using Ubuntu for the last 7 years.
I used Tint2 on Openbox to get a vertical taskbar. Combined with Tree Style Tabs for Firefox it creates a consistent UI hierarchy going from left to right.
I don't have any problem right now with the size of the icons, but screen estate is always an issue. Window organisation, as it has been for the last 15 years, seems like it has much better room for optimisation.
Other choice have also seemed a bit arbitrary - like moving the power options to the status bar, whilst also moving the window controls away from the status bar. Mouse movement has increased in my experience.
1. The menu bar at the top is now wasted space. 2. The task bar is on the side.
Shortcuts to spreadsheet, worth authoring, etc, should be hidden away in the menu. Honestly how many new spreadsheets do you create every day? Not many. What you might do is double-click on a spreadsheet and have it open, but that doesn't require a big shiny shortcut being in the taskbar.
These are just defaults and can be changed, but still, I feel as if they are poorly considered defaults.
When it is properly released I will do a reinstall, and I will be using gnome with it. Unity is crap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toAEQTsidvg
I guess I'll try out Unity, but I may have an itchy trigger finger ready for a switch back to something more familiar.
And by doing that -- the win7 icons don't bother me in the slightest.
Anyone who used Unity in 10.10 should give 11.04 a new and fair shot since they are 100% different things.
The topbar in Unity contains the menu for the currently focused window (and, in the future, hopefully the currently focused application). This vertical space had to be used anyways - the clock and some sort of notification area are essentially mandatory.
As a person who primarily uses Mac OS X, I think that the menus are the best use for the vertical space that those items provide. I can use Cmd+tab or Exposé for switching applications, so a list of the currently open windows isn't particularly relevant. By moving the menubar to a single spot, if anything we save space.
That sidebar is truly awful though.
But the other day, after having bought a new computer, I did give a go to this beta Unity.
It's definitively not my taste, BUT I can see why this was made. It's clearly simpler than anything I've tried before on Linux. The "start key" open a sort of menu, type to search apps, all in the bar make sense, I'm not fond of the global menu, but well, people seems to like it.
We have to keep in mind that it's just the first release, and it'll evolve in the future, but after having tried it I went from a complete hater to a "well ok, it has it's place".
After 2 days I moved back to my simple and light openbox/tint2 combo, but well, this is only because I'm not the target market for Unity. Unity is for people not for hackers.
My netbook IS running unity w/o the System Monitor, but I rarely do heavy work there. If the thought is to switch over to Unity for more casual users, then it probably works out well.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/indicator-sysmonitor-simp... (seems to be down atm) https://launchpad.net/indicator-sysmonitor/+download
Glad to see the downvote-disagree is becoming ever more prevalent! Obviously an opinion on the aesthetics is totally unproductive. Here we go again... k--;