No Unity Launcher Autohide In Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10

 

You know the Unity Launcher right? It's the dock the Ubuntu devs don't want to call a "dock". I'm not sure why.

Well, the Unity Launcher-dock won't get an autohide feature in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10, however such a feature is planned for UNE 11.04. That's probably going to annoy a lot of people: most websites are not designed for browsing on a screen width smaller than 1024px and even applications like OpenOffice are hard to use with the Unity Launcher on a 7 inch screen.

Here is how the Unity Launcher auto-hide will work, as explained by Mark Shuttleworth:

The current plan is for the Launcher auto-reveal to happen when the mouse is over the top left Ubuntu icon only, not just against the left of the screen.

All this info comes from the Ayatana mailing list - and also on the Ayatana mailing list there's a suggestion to use full screen mode while browsing (or use another distro - my addition).

While I absolutely love most of the innovations (some might not really call it that) in Ubuntu, I just don't understand why incomplete features are constantly being included in final Ubuntu versions - and sometimes "incomplete" also means tons of regressions. If you're going to say "you should only use a LTS (long term support release)", please try Lucid and try to spot the incomplete features - ok, "try" was not the proper word as they're everywhere (theme, MeMenu, and well like I said, everywhere).

It's great we have a new Ubuntu version every 6 months but these "innovations" will scare away lots of users. Who's going to use a netbook OS with a locked down (or actually without the applets feature implemented) top panel, a dock with no options other than "pin to dock" and with a bug like suspend / hibernate not working since Ubuntu first came out. There are going to be a few... that's how Linux progresses (user share wise): +/- 0.00000001 users per year.

Feel free to disagree. Or not.