Ubuntu 11.10 is a very nice desktop environment. Nevertheless, it has many failings. Here are some that annoy me:
- Lack of good dual screen support. There are many aspects to this:
- There is no functional unified configuration UI for both AVI and NVidia. This is not Ubuntu’s fault, but they should workaround it, somehow. NVidia certainly aren’t gifted UI developers; their configuration widget is adequate, but not ideal. The gnome/ubuntu display widget doesn’t even know that I have two monitors.
- You can’t (via the UI) set a different wallpaper on two screens, or the same wallpaper spanning two screens. (At least when running an NVidia card w/ TwinView.)
- You can’t change (via the UI) where the Unity app launcher pops up. This is problematic particularly when using a docked laptop with a large desktop screen; when docked, Unity should be (configurable to be) on the large desktop screen, but when undocked, Unity should be on the laptop.
- The “system tray” (or whatever it’s called) displays on both monitors, as does the top bar. This is messy, although I can see how that decision could have been reached.
- Alt-Tab groups windows from the same application, and won’t let you flip through them unless you hold on the item for around 1 second. This is fine for UIs like Gimp, where there are lots of popup windows, but horrible for UIs like OpenOffice or IntelliJ, where you have one window per document. It should be configurable. It’s (apparently) not.
- The popover scrollbars are nice, but are inconsistent (Chromium) and fiddly. They need refinement.
- The sound menu is fine, but incomplete. It should be configurable (e.g. you should be able to add “rating”).
- The unity “finder” does not find all of my files. It looks like it only goes a couple levels deep from my home directory; it should be configurable, but is (apparently) not.
- The menu editor is non-functional; you cannot edit command line parameters for existing menu entries, at least when running from the unity launcher.
- Adding items to the Unity app launcher is more cumbersome than it should be. I ended up creating a shortcut on my desktop, and dragging it onto the launcher bar. However, when I deleted the shortcut on my desktop, the item on the launcher disappeared. Weirdly, I can’t drop a folder onto the launcher bar.
- The top menus aren’t smart enough. Mouseover to view is a dumb default, and should be configurable. If I have a window on each screen (chromium on left, gedit on right), I have to click on the gedit window, and then move the cursor to the top of the screen, just to _see_ the gedit menus (i.e. despite there being a top bar for each screen, they don’t behave independently). If I was typing a blog post about gedit menus, this would be a giant pain in the ass. Of course, as soon as I focus back on chrome (on the left screen), any open gedit menus will disappear, despite the chrome menu being on a different screen from the gedit menus.
- LibreOffice sucks. Gnumeric is a superior spreadsheet application, and Abiword is less cumbersome than the Word alternative. Ubuntu should strongly consider supporting gnome-office as the default.
- The chat client (empathy) sucks. It will frequently be behind windows, and not be able to surface when I click on the chat item from the communications menu. It frequently messes up my login to IRC servers (possibly due to not timing out on another computer when idle.)
- The communications menu sucks. Why can’t those settings go in the “me” menu?
- Banshee sucks. It dies halfway through indexing my collection. Rhythmbox works better, but can’t read the metadata banshee wrote to my files (rating, etc), and doesn’t reorganize my directory structure based on song metadata, as I was halfway through doing with an older version of banshee.
- Software center won’t let me perform updates with unauthorized sources, despite my turning the appropriate settings on. This is problematic, as I get frequent updates from logitech for my squeezebox.
- The printing UI won’t let me override the “out of toner” warning from my printer. My printer lies.
- Software center is pretty good, but hangs at startup for 15 seconds until it loads all metadata. Cache & gradual display, people.
- Chromium looks different from most other apps, as does IntelliJ. Better attention to display of non GTK apps is needed.
Ubuntu are making good progress in making a stylized desktop experience, but need to stop cutting out user options. The best desktop environment I have used thus far was KDE 3; its consistent philosophy of “right click anything to configure it” should be emulated by Ubuntu as it moves forward. Canonical need to make bold choices with the apps that they bundle, and continue to exert their sizable clout to make various behavior more consistent between similar apps.