Messing Around With Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Part 1 - Unity

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal has been out for about a week by now, and it introduced some major changes along the way. Seeing this I decided to give it a spin, right from day one.

When Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released, the distro dons a new look which is refreshing and elegant, moving from dull brown to more vibrant colors. It is also surprisingly stable for a Linux distro. Now, with 11.04, another big change is applied; the Unity interface. It differs so much compared to the GTK 2.x interface that has been a staple of Ubuntu, the community is split into two distinct groups. Those who love it, and those who don't. I, for one, do love it.

Getting used to the interface really does take time. Initially I'm baffled with the unfamiliar interface, seeing things behave more OSX-like than before. Took me about two days to familiarize. For starters, the top panel in Unity also serves as a menu bar, normally found under the title bar in other OSes other than OSX. Then there was the side dock (called Launcher) which is also like OSX, showing running apps and also serve as the main menu for Ubuntu. It smartly moves out of the way when a window is maximized.

OH SNAP!

Unity also adds a new feature known to Windows users as Aero Snap. Drag a window to the top of the screen and it will maximize. Drag them to the either side of the screen and it fills half the screen. Handy for multitasking or transferring files. Before Unity, Aero Snap can be accomplished in Ubuntu via Compiz, but it's fairly clumsy to work with.

Unity Dislikes Third Party Themes

While Unity can be themed just like GTK 2.x, it appears that buttons are a bit of an issue.

These aren't the buttons we're looking for

This can be fixed, but we got some hacking to do.

Dude, Where's My Scro- Oh.


Not exactly limited to Unity (also applied to the classic GNOME desktop), most of the scrollbars are now reduced to what seems to be a single colored line. Until you put your cursor on it.

Peek-a-boo!

These are called overlay scrollbars, and you can click it to scroll up and down, or just drag it up and down. A nice way to keep things clean on the desktop.

Dashing.

That button on the left side of the top panel opens Dash, which is something Windows users might compare it to the Start menu.

Now with a searchbox!

The guys at Microsoft realized how convenient Googling is, so they applied it into Windows. Now, Canonical was doing the same thing; letting people to type in to search the program they're looking for.

Personally, I wish more customizations are available for Unity Dash, such as adjusting the icon size, changing the number of rows and columns, hide "Apps available to download" section, always let it open fullscreen, and perhaps some other stuff I missed.

I've heard about Unity Lens, which seems interesting but isn't applied by default. Using the exact same interface as above, you can search for *cough*Rebecca Black*cough* on Youtube, without opening Firefox or any other browser. You can see some of the few Lenses in development here.

Finally.

To end my relatively long post today, I'd say that Unity is good enough for daily use, provided you spend enough time to familiarize with it. It still needs some improvements, especially in terms of usability and customizations, so we'll see what Unity matures into.

Also, Unity is very similar to the recently released GNOME 3. Heck, I don't know who copied who, but at least we have options.