I’ve generally been supportive of Ubuntu’s efforts to improve the GNU/Linux desktop experience by investing in the Unity desktop shell. I’m probably the only person I know who prefers Unity to the other options available on the Linux desktop (Gnome 3, Gnome 2, KDE, XfCE, Mint’s mash-up, etc.). But some of the choices made by Mark Shuttleworth’s designers are just plain bizarre.

For example, have a look at the screenshot below. Utterly confusing. Where does the Chrome window end (on the left)? How do you close or minimise that window?

Except on extremely small screens (like those faddish netbooks one used to see), I can see no justification for divorcing the menu bar and window controls from the window itself and pushing them into the panel at the top of the screen. The menu in the top bar has always been an odd convention on the Mac, and not one I would have copied. But to put the window controls in the panel (when the window is maximised)? That is just plain bizarre. Look at the screenshot below. Do those controls look like the belong to the Chrome window?

Despite some really stange conventions in the Mac OS X world, the full-screen application implementation on Lion is a vastly superior way of saving on UI chrome and reducing visual clutter than these bizarre elements of Unity.