No really. I prefer GNOME, so clearly pretty isn’t the biggest factor here. When I first
started using Ubuntu, I would drag the top GNOME panel to the bottom and have it sit
under what is normally the bottom panel. It looked ugly as sin, but this is how, as (back in
2005) a recent Windows refugee, I was used to working and so this is how I chose to organise my
space.
Most importantly, it wasn’t hard for me to do this. My most recent installs, almost 4 years
later, primarily on laptops rather than desktops tended to be left as is — a panel at the
top and a panel at the bottom. I find this seems to suit laptops better, and
I’ve become accustomed to it. However, had I not been able to move the panel from the
start, I might even have ended up on Kubuntu. Well, if it were not for the silly single-click
thing that fires stuff off even when you don’t want it to, like when you bump the mouse
accidentally. Ok, truth be told, I probably would have stuck with Ubuntu, because, well, all the
functionality was still there. Just in a different place to where I was expecting
As with most computer users, I’ve never owned a Mac. When I was little, my school had a
some (iirc) Mac II’s but I am pretty certain that the number of times that I, at 28, have
used a Mac since would barely exceed the number of digits on my hands, and OS X is nothing like
the first Macs I used. I think the last time I used a Mac was in 2005; for about 20 minutes.
But now with the sneaky Lucid UI changes, I might as well be using OS X as far as my learned
behaviours are concerned. And lets just hope that my laptop trackpad doesn’t jump at an
inopportune time — like it does sometimes when I go to open the system menu and instead hit
the firefox icon right next to it instead — as trackpads are prone to.
I work 100% from a laptop and use the trackpad 90% of the time. The chance this ridiculous UI
change will not bite me hard is pretty slim. The only plus I’ve come across so far
is that it made it easier to close out of the awkwardly oversized evolution setup wizard that
launched on my eeepc701.
However, putting even that glaring risk aside, the one thing that I am absolutely hating
the most about these sneaky UI changes is the abolishment of informative
tooltips. This is a loss of functionality.
My battery icon, my wifi connection icon, my xchat icon — they now tell me nothing
when I merely nudge them, I now have to smack them over the head with the cursor. I cannot tell
at quick glance if I have enough charge for something, on the wrong wifi network, or whether I
can ignore that xchat message I missed the notification for. I have to exert time, energy, and
most importantly brain focus to get what used to be a simple matter of an effortless
enlightenment. I now have to go through what is sometimes several clicks. Extra clicks are bad.
Clicks add obscurity. Extra clicks are effort.
This bleeps me right off. I can learn to move a mouse in a different direction (though I’m
not at all believing that new windows migrants will cope), but I really do not have the
capacity to circumvent the application to read the bytes from the disk myself to find out what my
battery level is without clicking through some dialogs. The software is supposed to do that
for me.
Alas, my software no longer does this for me, and ergo, my software no longer works for me.
To get this information, I now have to do stuff for my software. I
should not be working for my software.
Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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