{"id":5794,"date":"2012-03-29T19:51:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T02:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=5794"},"modified":"2016-11-03T10:43:56","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T17:43:56","slug":"unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2012\/03\/unity\/","title":{"rendered":"Unity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 2 <\/a> everyone!<\/p>\n

I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post<\/a> from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding<\/a>!).<\/p>\n

That said, I wanted to take some time to give a respectful nod to Unity.<\/p>\n

I recently tried Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity on a new laptop<\/a>. I have to admit that I found it a bit cumbersome (point: I also called Gnome2 cumbersome). There were little things about it that felt unfinished, like gaps where just using keyboard navigation didn’t quite cut it. I also quickly realized that pretty much all of my favorite tips Jorge Castro<\/a> showed off in his The Power User’s Guide to Unity<\/a> talk at Ubucon at the Southern California Linux Expo back in January where specific to the newer version of Unity in 12.04. I grabbed the daily build on March 13th and loaded it up alongside my Xubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 daily installs.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n
Installing Ubuntu 12.04 on my Lenovo G575<\/small><\/div>\n

Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 is really quite impressive.<\/p>\n

As a long-time fan of minimalist desktops I like it when the UI stays out of my way. I am a total sucker for keybindings, I use keybindings for everything. The new Unity has patched up the gaps in support for keyboard navigation to make the whole experience very smooth. Holding down the Super key (usually<\/a> has a Windows logo on it) will pop up a cheat sheet for keybindings that I immediately fell in love with. The “display all windows” option (shift alt up arrow) for seeing all open windows on a screen is super useful when you have multiple windows of the same type open doing different things, like terminals. After sitting on my couch with my laptop for an hour I was quite comfortable with the new interface and had started working on some project stuff.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n
Showing all windows with shift alt up arrow<\/small><\/div>\n

In all, Unity in 12.04 is significantly more polished than previous versions and I think finally presents a solid implementation of the vision that the designers had for it. Bravo! If anyone was put off by Unity in the past I highly recommend giving it another shot with this new release.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, April 17th, Grant Bowman<\/a> and I will be doing a presentation on 12.04 at the Bay Area Linux Users Group<\/a> (BALUG) where I’ll be showing off some of the nifty tricks I’ve learned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 2 everyone! I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-planet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5794"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12133,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5794\/revisions\/12133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}