Every six months I foolishly endure another distribution update from the jokers at Canonical. This fall's oneiric ocelot was no lack of surprises. For once, I didn't revert to classic, and have struggled to work through unity (I think there are people who like this, I doubt they use a trackball). Although I am growing less opposed to the poorly thought out hovering scrollbar, I still am not able to adjust.
My number one complaint, besides the absence of the nice footprint menu with a categorical grouping of installed applications, is the second class status of the terminal, perhaps the one program I use the most. Open a terminal (if you didn't figure this out, it's C-M-t, now switch applications to something else, M-tab, now try to get your terminal back? It's absolutely invisible, like a second class citizen. Clip it to the Launcher (dock). Can't see the window list? Not there... open 20 terminals, try to get to any of them... Curiously, they had to purposefully exclude this, since a dumb old xterm works just fine and is a first class citizen.
Really, I think the move to netbook optimized interfaces is going to leave unhappy dinosaurs like me migrating to a sane environment. I started using Window Maker again on my primary laptop (still on 11.04 since I see no reason to ruin two computers) and apart from manually having to handle pm-hibernate and nm-applet, it's rock solid and a positive environment. I can live with compiz not making my windows wobble while I move them.
I guess it's user friendly to make the terminal a one shot deal, but that's what M-F2 used to do, rather than conjuring a powerless launcher that looks like a heads up display for an action game. It used to call up a 'run' dialog. Hail the 'run' dialog.
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okay, so that terminal gag looked like a short term issue, and rebooting (what!?!) fixed it. All the same, the 11.10 install is running WindowMaker, a sane environment, and my laptop switches regularly to stumpwm, which seems to stay out of my way, and provide a wonderful full screen color emacs environment once I set menu-bar-mode and toolbar-mode to nil. I got to be a big fan of C-t n to switch windows until I saw what a pain it was to spawn a new tab in firefox. C-t ! to launch a command was good enough, now that unity has broken M- as a useful run shortcut (it looks like I have to click on an unambiguous selection rather than hitting enter.)
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