When I found out about Ubuntus plans to replace Gnome 2 with Unity as the main Ubuntu desktop I was at first sceptical about how well it would work as a main desktop, but at the same time I was excited because of the potential. Also gnome-panel is one of the most outdated horrible pieces of software out there, and getting rid of it promised a new and improved experience.

Even though I didn't really like the feel of Unity when I first tried it, I figured I would give it about two months to get used to it. In that time one should be able to find out if it's good or not.

There is a lot of thing that they got right in Unity. Getting rid of the clutter was a really nice thing. But this brings me to my first gripe with it. The global menu is horrible, actually much worse than horrible. It's totally unusable. I don't mind that much, but there could have been an option of turning it off, now you actually have to uninstall a package to get rid of it.

I know about 5 people who have tried Natty, and every single one of them turned off global menu. It's basically the worst idea ever.

Next problem, virtual desktops. They are pointless because it takes too many clicks to switch. I know you can use the keyboard, but I have gotten really used to switching with the mouse and one click. This is not a big deal because I have 3 monitors on my main system, and the Unity design is basically an alternative to the virtual desktops anyway, but they could perhaps have disabled them by default, and made the switcher more prominent if you enable them.

The Windows 7 copy task switcher is just about as bad as it is in Windows with one improvement, and one declination. The improvement is that it's moved to the side of the screen, as modern widescreen monitors have too much horizontal space and too little vertical. It also hides very nicely. However it's not really as easy to get it to show up again, at least if you have more than one monitor. If you move it to the leftmost screen the travel-time is too great to get to it, and if you have it on the right or in the middle the mouse-pointer don't stop at the edge, which means that you have to hit 2-3 pixels for about half a second to get it to pop out. Also It's not really intuitive that you have to hit the upper left corner to get it to pop out, I used it for a few days by trying to get it out by going to the left edge, and it wasn't until a colleague pointed it out that I noticed that you have to go to the corner.

I actually kinda like the "lenses", not so much for their functionality as for their potential. I use the search quite a lot, but there should probably be a menu for people who don't know what programs there are installed.

So now my 2 months are up, and I have switched to "classic" desktop on my work and my main machine. I still use Unity on my laptop, because it work a bit better on a single smaller screen, and it would be a natural fit for a netbook.

In conclusion I want to give an A for effort on the Unity project. There are a lot of small genuinely good things about Unity and the effort to update the seriously outdated gnome desktop. And I still have some hopes that they will make Unity as powerful to use as gnome 2 on desktops in Oneiric. If not, I guess it's time to start looking for another distro.