Comment 275 for bug 668415

I want to thank you John Lea for your attention and your patience in answering questions. It's really appreciated!

People complain about the design team, but more often than not users act almost like bosses to them. Do you think that Unity bashing will make anyone more likely to listen to you if you say you have been using Ubuntu ever since 6.06?

If you want to prove your point, the best way to do this is to do usability tests, and not with the Gnome-2 power users, but with the simple people that Ubuntu is aiming for. Get two Ubuntu computers, one with the default left-launcher and another with the bottom-launcher from Unity plugin rotated, and, with a similar approach to the design team, invite users to use them and share their impressions. This way, you will have factual data to share, collected in a more scientific manner, and you will be able to make arguments based on something other than your own personal opinion and workflow.

I'm someone who likes the launcher on the left but understands that lots of people don't like it, so I voted for this bug. I know it's frustrating that things now are not the way everyone wants, but John's answers are very reasonable. The previous reason for the lack of movement of the launcher was the BFB, but now that reason is gone, there is a lack of humanpower. That's the bottom line, and it's something totally understandable. I'm sure this issue will become a priority when Unity becomes more stable (after 12.04) and the primary focus shifts to the phone and tablet interfaces, as the transition between the landscape and portrait orientations of the devices will become a challenge for the launcher.

Until then, there's a Compiz plugin that anyone can install, and it should really get more technical support from the community, plus an effort to help Pavel Golikov to test and to iron out the plugin would make its possibility of a future acceptance into the Unity main code smoother. Focus should be turned to this.

As to left-handed people, this is an important usability issue, and there already exists a (accidental) work in progress for fixing that: bug #654988 is about mirroring the interface. The fix for Unity 2D was released, and a fix for Unity 3D will be released when it is possible. I'm sure this is not useful for RTL locales only, but would be welcomed by the left-handed people who commented on this bug report too, so it would be nice to vote for and comment on that bug and to ask to be able to use this also in LTR locales.a