"listing applications" in Unity is a failure case

My desktop takes the logical next step, before I moved back to gnome-panel I simply dragged the applications I used out of the overlay thing onto the desktop. I keep the icons organised, so they're always in the same place. Anecdotal observations from "normal" people show that they use their Windows Vista/7 desktops much the same way, not even bothering with the start menu except to shut down. They get grumpy whenever anything is different at all in which icons are shown and in what order. Their allegations that I broke something weeks after I accidentally left, say, a copy of unzip on their desktop is of course laughable at best. But the concept of having shortcuts on the desktop, certainly not. Makes me wonder why Unity bothers with a separate desktop at all, it could benefit from the screen real estate when that overlay screen sits at the bottom of the stack as the root window. I loved the netbook-launcher it grew out of, too bad it was discontinued.

Users don't want to list applications; they want to launch the one application they were looking for

The Gnome consensus used to be that users don't care which application they're using, they just want to carry out a certain task. Which is why they all have boring names such as "document viewer" and "web browser". How is a user going to know to find evince and epiphany or firefox? In Unity, search quickly breaks because of this. If you know the name of the application, it can find it. But if you don't, it doesn't map keywords to application names. It would be impossible to maintain appropriate keywords for all applications in Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) so it doesn't.

Fortunately, all the current desktops run a terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+T. It's the one failure mode they all support equally well, supports tab completion and isn't limited to applications with a .desktop file. This is what I do for most tasks besides web browsing, so even after all these years of developing desktop environments the main purpose is still to run multiple terminals side by side. If only twm had niceties such as network manager and removable media.

No. I had doubts last year about the wisdom of Canonical starting from scratch with Unity rather than just building on GNOME Do (see http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2011/04/ubuntu-11-04-everything-ol...), but the last couple of releases have put my doubts to rest. Unity is everything GNOME Do is/was, but now with the possibility to extend even further into things like the new HUD (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD), which does to application menu bars what Unity does to application lists.

They get grumpy whenever anything is different at all in which icons are shown and in what order. Their allegations that I broke something weeks after I accidentally left, say, a copy of unzip on their desktop is of course laughable at best

You seem to be under the impression that the Unity desktop can't have icons/files/launchers/etc. on it. It can, mine does. It's accessible via the usual "Desktop" folder in your home directory.

If you know the name of the application, it can find it. But if you don't, it doesn't map keywords to application names. It would be impossible to maintain appropriate keywords for all applications in Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) so it doesn't.

You're incorrect here too. Unity does support searching by keywords, and all you need to do to hook into it is create a standard freedesktop.org-style .desktop file for the app (http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/a...) and fill in the "Keywords" field inside it. Unity will pick up those keywords and use them when searching in the application lens. Most of the commonly used applications already have the most obvious keywords provided for them.

(Putting the keywords in the desktop entry file means that Ubuntu/Canonical don't have to maintain a master list of keywords for every application; app developers can just provide relevant keywords for their app in the DE file they ship, and users can tune them if needed just by editing the DE file.)

I get the feeling from your complaints that you checked out Unity briefly early in its lifecycle and haven't checked back in on it lately. You should try it again now, you might be pleasantly surprised.

I never got the hang of Do, either. In order to do things with do, you have to learn its vocabulary. Whenever there was something I didn't know how to do with do (or it didn't have a certain plugin), the old way of doing it was still there. This made me reluctant to ever press the button that triggers it. Maybe I'm bad for not investing time into making it work better, perhaps desktop environments are not being treated fairly in this regard. To clarify, maybe it's hard to unlearn the ways of interfaces which came before. I was taught how to browse the web with Netscape and today I'm still bitter about certain changes in Firefox (I know there's seamonkey but it's a second-class citizen nowadays). This doesn't hold true for all user interfaces, but I'm not sure if age plays a significant part (as in, learn UI X before age Y => forever stuck with the concepts of X), prolonged use or a combination of either along with not having any alternatives (thus, not building the required mental abstraction layer to differentiate the underpinnings of various UI concepts). I have only myself to sample and given that people are using user unfriendly (or even hostile) window managers such as evilwm, fluxbox and xmonad, there have to be wildly different "mental operating systems" in any representative sample group.

Gnome usually worked well despite this psychological hellhole, I could introduce people to it and it generally wasn't met with contempt. They knew their users so well that I, for one, was shocked and baffled when at the first command I entered in the preferences of the panel applet Fish, it berated me for trying to make it useful (there's only 1 command which does that).

Most of the commonly used applications already have the most obvious keywords provided for them.

I see, that's great. Sadly this hasn't worked for me, but I'll keep this in mind whenever I'm searching in Unity and something is missing. I hope seeing how it works hasn't skewed the way I use it too much.

app developers can just provide relevant keywords for their app in the DE file they ship

Yes, I hope package maintainers will do this too. This can be useful for a11y and other desktop environments, nice.

I get the feeling from your complaints that you checked out Unity briefly early in its lifecycle and haven't checked back in on it lately.

This is false. Although I have tried Unity in each Ubuntu release starting from 10.10, I've tried hard to work with it (instead of replacing it outright) in 12.04 over the course of months. I turned to Google just to figure out where my applications are for starters, instead of flipping tables. What recently drove me away is the instability, not the glaring usability quirks. At some point, compiz flat out refused to start but compiz 2d still worked (for a while). Compiz stability is very hard to fix as it can even depend on obscure GPU bugs only found in serial number x through y of model z manufactured by {.

However, I did manage to find one improvement over gnome-panel: it's easy to use the keyboard to navigate panel applets/indicators. Just by pressing e.g. Alt+F, you can move (using the arrow keys) all the way to the power button. A lack of pointer input always renders gnome-panel useless.

Still just press the Super key type in "doc" and you will see the "Document-Viewer" which is evince.