Single menu bar for Ubuntu

I really admire Shuttleworth and the rest of the Ubuntu design team for being courageous about making basic changes to the desktop UI. Open source tends to produce a lot of design-by-committee or completely undesigned software, so having somebody making big decisions and experimenting is really valuable. Nobody else big is really doing this.<p>There are plenty of alternative window managers for Linux or whatever, but few organizations besides Ubuntu have the inclination and resources to actually make the required changes to the relevant applications such that the desktop feels in some way consistent. And I know ubuntu isn't quite there yet, but it feels like it's making really rapid progress, and it's very encouraging.

Shuttleworth did a great job on the article, but I am disappointed that something of this GUI nature wasn't supplemented with some screenshots.

Personally I'd like it for the desktop too. I've grown quite accustomed to MacOSX's menubar.

This is probably the only netbook remix feature I want ported to the regular builds. Globalmenu is broken in subtle but dealbreaking ways, and getting a large part of the ubuntu team on it should sort it out so I can finally use it.<p>I hope there's a reasonable path to including it in the standard desktop.

While I don't like global menus in general, it makes a lot of sense for netbooks, I think. I look forward to seeing this one come to fruition. That said, I agree with one of the commenters on the OP that pointed out the difficulties posed by toolbars. Hopefully, Ubuntu can come up with some good solutions to the toolbar problem, too.

Are there any renderings of what he's describing here?

I find that a lot of applications do not need to show the menu most of the time. For most users, in my experience, the menu bar need only be shown some of the time (with some exceptions such as word processors and large programs). Toolbars are usually much more important, as are keyboard shortcuts.<p>A right-click on the window decoration/titlebar to show the menu would be a much more elegant solution for many applications. This interaction with the window manager could also introduce some interesting application-specific window management, such as "arrange to fill screen" for gnome-terminal, or "optimize width" for Firefox, for instance.

<i>There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart.</i><p>Fitt's Law means that, in the relevant respect, the edge of the screen is always closer to your mouse than just about anything else.

Ubuntu has been making a lot of UI changes lately. I can't figure out if they're really being innovative or if they're trying to copy Apple.<p>KDE had something like this as an option in 2.x and 3.x, though it appears to be gone from 4. It only supported KDE apps and therefore didn't provide a very good overall user experience. I always liked the Mac's global menu bar, so I kind of hope they can pull it off.

Getting this working would be great -- not because I want one menu to rule them all; but because I like the flexibility.<p>For example, it would be possible to hijack some of the logic and have the current app menu (better: palettes too!) show up as an android app, turning a bt-tethered phone into an input/hotkey device...

I have to confess that I've been using gnome-do in Docky mode for the last few weeks and I've only greatly enjoyed it. I have a few small suggestions, like a digital clock perhaps, but so far it's been solid gold.<p>I'm all for going where Apple has and then going past them in terms of UI decisions like this.

In principle this sounds like a good idea if preservation of vertical screen realestate is a priority.

1) How is this better than just autohiding the panel?<p>2) The main reason why this would be normally bad for me is that focus-follows-mouse seems to be incompatible with a global menu. On a netbook most apps are maximized so I can see that as being not so bad.

Between this and the system tray changes it seems Ubuntu is moving further away from the stock GNOME desktop environment. They're both good changes in theory but I'm not sure it's a good thing to add more fragmentation.

A bit unrelated note, but if vertical screen estate is valuable also in normal laptops, why aren't more people putting the toolbars to the sides ot the screen? As most laptops are widescreen anyway these days.

Step by step Shuttleworth moves the Ubuntu UI to in one way after the other be like OS X' Aqua. A good move in my opinion.