My Unity 5.0 Experience

// January 15th, 2012 // Free Software

Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

11 Responses to “My Unity 5.0 Experience”

Tristan Seligmann says:

15 January 2012 at 17:30

I still can’t understand how anyone figured Unity was better than GNOME Shell; I’ve been using the latter on Debian for a while now, and it just seems so much more comfortable. Also, despite compiz supposedly being faster than mutter (what?), GNOME Shell seems to perform far better on my desktop hardware than plain compiz or Unity does.
Jon says:

15 January 2012 at 17:44

My client sites is my wife’s desktop. I found KDE to be a smaller jump than Unity. The smaller the jump, the happier man I am!
Grimed says:

15 January 2012 at 17:49

If this and the recent news about Ubuntu 12.04 will be realized … then it’s really time to return to her father’s house ))
Anders says:

16 January 2012 at 02:48

My main gripe is with the Dash. I have never seen anything as ugly in my life. I like Ubuntu and commend Canonical’s efforts to make the Linux desktop more modern, but until that thing is fixed, I’m sticking with GNOME Shell.
gnumdk says:

16 January 2012 at 08:02

>I can set the launcher panel to be ever present

You can with previous version, same option in gconf…
jonathan says:

16 January 2012 at 08:22

@gnumdk Yep, that’s pretty much what I said, It’s an improvement since I last used Unity, which is why I put it under the section listing the good stuff
Links 16/1/2012: Mandriva Deadline, Bada OS-Tizen Fusion | Techrights says:

16 January 2012 at 17:05

[...] My Unity 5.0 Experience Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release. [...]
Anon says:

16 January 2012 at 19:56

@Tristan: I actually like Unity much more than Gnome Shell. I find the interface really comfortable. So it’s all about opinion.
Regarding speed, while mutter v. compiz don’t make much of a difference on better hardware, I found mutter nearly unusable on my netbook. It took more than 30s to start the session everytime, so after a week of trying to get used to Shell, I decided that Unity is just better for me.
AnotherJonathan says:

16 January 2012 at 20:14

My first linux machine was Slackware on a 486 with fvwm as the window manager, so I have been using it for a while now.

I updated my main pc to the latest Ubuntu a couple of months ago and as a result ended up trying Unity. I found that I ended up ssh’ing to that pc and manually killing x and logging back in at least once a day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Unity is too buggy to be useful, and this is a two year old mainstream HP pc with an Nvidia card. If Ubuntu wants to push their new tablet desktop onto pc’s then they need to spend time making it stable before they start adding new features.

I then switched to gnome shell for about 2 hours before I was screaming that it was a steaming pile of dog droppings.

I switched to KDE which I used ages and ages ago.. KDE lasted about 2 days before I though to try kde with effects turned off.

That lasted about a month before I noticed Mate. Never did get Mate to compile but I didn’t spend that much time on it.

I then switched to gnome sell without effects and with some pluggins that get it close enough to gnome 2 to be usable anthough not as useful as a real gnome 2 would be.

I suspect that I may be moving from Ubuntu to Mint as they are the ones behind Mate.

At this point I do not feel that I could name a linux desktop that I would recommend to anyone.

Way to go guys!
Tormod says:

17 January 2012 at 10:04

1GB of RAM used for a little launcher applet, maybe including a little status bar? No, wait, 1GB *more* than another one! There is something rotten in modern Linux desktops. If you think of the functionality delivered and the amount of user-visible information being processed, you start wonder where those 10^10 bits go. Send those programmers back to the 80′s for some months. Then come back and make my computer do my work for me
Ankleface Wroughtlandmire says:

17 January 2012 at 15:00

Until both Unity 3D and 2D have a NATIVE option to move the launcher to the bottom, I want nothing to do with it. Drives me crazy the lack of visual balance with the launcher on one side.