Comment 41 for bug 527458

I like streamlining, but I wouldn’t want to remove the tooltips alltogether. The tooltips are only displayed if you hover above the respective button. So intitially they are invisible, which is good. A complete novice, who doesn’t know anything about ubuntu, may value the tooltips a lot. However, they do become superfluous clutter if you are accustomed to the interface.

Here’s my suggestion: Keep the tooltips, but monitor the user actions. If a user uses a certain application very often, say each time, the computer is booted, then it is safe to assume that he knows the purpose of the tool. Then stop displaying the tooltips for these tools. Keep the tooltips for tools, which are not used often. This has to do with the idea of an automatically customised interface.

Since the panel is used on a regular basis, the tooltips should disappear quite fast after the initial install… So maybe removing them by default would not hurt any regular ubuntuuser. But, for someone who is a first time user – and we want many more of those, right? – these tooltips do make a difference! Please consider!