I've used Gnome (on Fedora) for 10+ years as my daily driver and just recently have been using the pre-installed Ubuntu 16.04 and Unity that came with my new Dell laptop. One of the things I immediately loved is the global menu. This greatly expands application space especially on small laptop screens. I figured I would wipe the laptop soon after delivery and install Fedora/Gnome but the look and integration of global menu has me staying on Unity for the time being. This was a small thing I had no idea existed after years of Gnome 2/3.<p>I would love for this to be an option in Gnome Shell or just the default. I've seen hints of an extension coming, hope it gets some traction.
This survey and the article show a remarkable amount of humility, which is something new to Ubuntu. I'm quite pleased to see this new direction for them.
Users are split on whether window controls should be on the left or right.<p>Hint: make it easily configurable.<p>Otherwise, you get to irritate 40-60% of your users.
Now that I think of it, what will happen with the Unity HUD (`alt` key brings a search hud that indexes the app's menu, kind of like Sublime/Atom/VSCode's Control+Shift+P command palette)? Will they port it as a Shell add-on?<p>After using that for a while and switching to another desktop, I sorely missed it.
Of the extensions they surveyed, the only one I really see as a must have is Top Icons Plus. That weird little corner tray that Gnome puts the legacy tray icons in is, well weird. It just seems so out of place.<p>Of the rest of them, the only one I'd really loathe to see enabled by default is Dash to Dock. I really hate the that when I first log in to a fresh install there's a big static dock(initially filled with utter useless short cuts) eating big bite of screen real estate.
The people who have knowledge about these extensions cannot be said to be the target audience of Ubuntu Desktop. Or are they going all-in on the multiple desktop environment crowd?<p>I'm kinda surprised they are not aiming at making Gnome as similar to Unity as possible. I expect the majority of Ubuntu users to be familiar with Unity and not much else in the Linux Desktop ecosystem.
As a longtime Unity user, I hope they maintain the tiling-by-keyboard function of Unity in the new GNOME (or maybe it's a part of GNOME already).<p>I like using the keyboard as my main input for everything except scrolling. The more I can use the keyboard on a laptop, and the easier it is to know those hotkeys (holding down Meta key on Unity), the better.<p>If you haven't used Unity in a while, spin up a 17.04 VM to give it an hour or so of use. Makes you appreciate how far it's come.