Are you running 11.04 beta2? I've been running it for months now and I LOVE Unity. I installed on my wife's machine, and while she doesn't love it (she really doesn't care one way or another about computers etc etc) she appreciates it in many ways. Though, the best way I can describe my wife's interaction with Unity is she gets less annoyed with it than she does/did with our iMac. True story.
Unity quickly became part of my workflow and improved it greatly. Super-W, Super-# are awesome, Dash is good (not great) and I like that something is built-in to the system that allows me to do basic searching etc (I hope this improves, but initial pass is really quite good). My workflow feels more fluid and solid w/ Unity, and I feel more comfortable, and hence, more productive than when I was in OSX just a short while ago.
And stability is something that is hard for me to gauge as I've been running since January on my test machine and beta1 on my main machine without too much problem. I get some quirks here and there, but nothing drastic. I'm running it on three machines: a mac mini, a lenovo t61p and a lenovo t60p. The t60p is the least responsive (naturally) and that is mostly b/c the ATI drivers are not as good as Nvidia's. The mini and t61p are nvidia and after installing those drivers everything works great.
And to compare, I used a Gnome3 live CD for several days trying to decide if I wanted to install something with Gnome3 (most likely Ubuntu w/ Gnome3 if that was the case, tbh...Ubuntu packaging makes it worth it alone) and while I think Gnome3 is a good release, it can't really compare to Unity. I like where Gnome3 is going, but I don't see it as something that directly competes with Unity at the moment.
I think Unity has a ways to go, but if you compare Unity in 11.04 to, say, OSX when it first came out...by god man, Unity is lightyears ahead in usability an consistency. People tend to forget how rough OSX was for a couple of releases. Apple has their act together now, but it took some time. And I LOVE something like Unity existing on Linux and being FOSS...pushing boundaries...
I've been running Unity for 24 hours now, and I can honestly say it's been the best desktop experience I've had in all my years. Notice I said best "desktop experience", and not "best Linux desktop experience". I have been running Windows since 3.1, Linux since Red Hat 5.2, and OS X since, well, Leopard. Unity is by far the best and most cohesive experience I've had so far. It tops OS X by a wide margin...it has many of the same sort of niceties with window management that actually makes sense (yes, I think OS X window management is horrid). Add to this the fact that it bakes some of my favorite compiz features (grid plugin anyone?) in and I couldn't be happier.
I know there will be some naysayers...many, in all likelihood, but in this daily Linux desktop user's eyes, Unity is a VERY big win for Ubuntu.
Can you please give a couple of examples of why is so? The usability test this thread refers to is really just oriented to new users (mainly: how easy it is to find this and that). I wonder what Unity does for everyday users.
I've been using Unity for about a month (or more?) now. It is indeed an awesome experience. Definitely much better than Windows 7. I can't compare it to OS X because I haven't used it, but your testimony makes me really excited :D
If you haven't tried it yet, give original Gnome 3 / Gnome shell a go. You might like it even more than Unity. I get a feeling that by jumping straight to Unity, they will cause many people to be excited about it, not knowing they've lost something at least as good.
Unity is not bad by any stretch, but it feels unfinished to me when I use it. I kept hitting the wrong thing and breaking the flow of whatever task I was doing. I'm sure with some more experience with it I'll quit doing that, but it kept violating my expectations and stealing my attention from more important things.
Gnome 3 was a big change, but felt much tighter and polished. I didn't seem to have to think too much about how to do stuff.
Based on that experience, I think I'd like to use Gnome 3 on Ubuntu long-term.
Actually, the usability test pretty much replicated my experience with Unity. The dock was fine, but the way it folded was awkward. I wasn't sure what the Ubuntu menu did either and I eventually got sick of never being able to find system settings and the really unhelpful search and switched to Xubuntu. I was reading this usability test and going "...And they went ahead with it!!??"
I'm not sure what you were disagreeing with, but I have to disagree with your disagreeing because if 5/11 people crashed the thing in an hour, it's completely unusable for many people, me included.
When someone says "pulseaudio 2.0", they mean it in a derogatory sense ;)
Also, the statement about Ubuntu being less stable than debian testing. I don't know the GPs specific instance, but Ubuntu has basically made debian a usable desktop.
When ubuntu first switched to pulseaudio it was apparently a big mess, and the "fix" was basically to uninstall it. So, calling Unity "pulseaudio 2.0" implies that the first thing everyone will want to do is switch from unity to "classic" GNOME because Unity is too buggy (right now).
As I understand it anyway, I wasn't using Ubuntu Desktop by the time the pulseaudio thing happened.
Are you running 11.04 beta2? I've been running it for months now and I LOVE Unity. I installed on my wife's machine, and while she doesn't love it (she really doesn't care one way or another about computers etc etc) she appreciates it in many ways. Though, the best way I can describe my wife's interaction with Unity is she gets less annoyed with it than she does/did with our iMac. True story.
Unity quickly became part of my workflow and improved it greatly. Super-W, Super-# are awesome, Dash is good (not great) and I like that something is built-in to the system that allows me to do basic searching etc (I hope this improves, but initial pass is really quite good). My workflow feels more fluid and solid w/ Unity, and I feel more comfortable, and hence, more productive than when I was in OSX just a short while ago.
And stability is something that is hard for me to gauge as I've been running since January on my test machine and beta1 on my main machine without too much problem. I get some quirks here and there, but nothing drastic. I'm running it on three machines: a mac mini, a lenovo t61p and a lenovo t60p. The t60p is the least responsive (naturally) and that is mostly b/c the ATI drivers are not as good as Nvidia's. The mini and t61p are nvidia and after installing those drivers everything works great.
And to compare, I used a Gnome3 live CD for several days trying to decide if I wanted to install something with Gnome3 (most likely Ubuntu w/ Gnome3 if that was the case, tbh...Ubuntu packaging makes it worth it alone) and while I think Gnome3 is a good release, it can't really compare to Unity. I like where Gnome3 is going, but I don't see it as something that directly competes with Unity at the moment.
I think Unity has a ways to go, but if you compare Unity in 11.04 to, say, OSX when it first came out...by god man, Unity is lightyears ahead in usability an consistency. People tend to forget how rough OSX was for a couple of releases. Apple has their act together now, but it took some time. And I LOVE something like Unity existing on Linux and being FOSS...pushing boundaries...