One thing that I hated about Windows pre-7 and Linux until Ubuntu was taskbar objects. Why do they need to take up so darn much space? I worked for hours laboring over Gnome 2 to get it to work like Windows 7, with icon based taskbar objects, trying every program and customization I could find. I finally got it just as Unity was announced. I was ecstatic that I could get rid of Gnome 2 and have a desktop that looked how I wanted right out of the box.
But let's not get into how slow Unity is on hardware that blazes with Gnome 2 or Windows... if I could easily get the same thing but much, much faster and something that lets me put that taskbar anywhere I want on the screen, I'd be happier.
If you wanted a dock aka icon based taskbar on Gnome, there were plenty of options before Unity came around. Out of the box they all work pretty much the same. They remain good alternatives if you want to customise. I used to use AWN, worked fine, but I'm fairly happy with Unity. It works very well for window management, and that's really all I want from a dock.
I think the old-school task bar is potentially more useful because it lets you see the window titles at one glance. But it just doesn't scale well beyond a dozen or so windows, either all the text is elided or you end up grouping windows by program at which point you might as well use a dock.
Not only that but there are plenty of options that are still better than Unity. Well, the newest Unity is even good enough for me to leave as default on my non-main machine. Cairo-dock, Docky and Plank (Docky's less functional successor) are all more configurable than Unity and more similar to what people expect from Windows 7 and OS X.
>One thing that I hated about Windows pre-7 and Linux until Ubuntu was taskbar objects. Why do they need to take up so darn much space? I worked for hours laboring over Gnome 2 to get it to work like Windows 7, with icon based taskbar objects, trying every program and customization I could find. I finally got it just as Unity was announced. I was ecstatic that I could get rid of Gnome 2 and have a desktop that looked how I wanted right out of the box.
Indeed.
And actually, after installing 12.10 on, to be fair, new hardware, Unity was just as fast as anything else.
I do despise GNOME 2 and especially its taskbar window list. I'm glad I've found someone else as pained by it as I.
But let's not get into how slow Unity is on hardware that blazes with Gnome 2 or Windows... if I could easily get the same thing but much, much faster and something that lets me put that taskbar anywhere I want on the screen, I'd be happier.