Unity is still nice for Notebooks with
small displays, but there is no big
advantage on the desktop compared with
other desktop environments like Gnome
2/3 or KDE.
Unity is still GNOME. Uses Gnome technologies under the hood. The user interface is different. Right now we have gnome-panel
as user shell which is getting deprecated.
So, thats my suggestion. But what is
the real plan for Unity or Ubuntu in
general? I'm curious ;)
From what I heard, they want to experiment and come up with a great user-shell for having a great user-experience. As of writing this, the experience with Unity is not top-class, but it is improving day by day.
Unity has a concept of Dash
which is better explained by the screenshot below
![Unity Dash](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2t7BL.png)
If you are confused what various terms are used for defining various parts, then you can find it here on this AskUbuntu question
My first suggenstion was a hybrid
between tablet pc and a desktop, for
example for a manager. He can plug the
tablet in a docking station in his
office and he can work at a normal
desktop,
Why isn't that possible. The bigger thing is that - It lies with hardware manufacturers to have such a thing. Just like you have a Touchpad on laptop but you can connect external mouse when you put it on your desk.
Similarly, you can have Ubuntu/Unity tablet(touchscreen) which you can dock at your workplace, plug in a keyboard and start using it. If you plug in a mouse, a pointer should appear, when you unplug, the pointer should disappear.
I believe you would be able to use the project https://launchpad.net/magick-rotation
though I do not have a Dell Inspiron Duo rather I am using a HP EliteBook 2760p and have successfully used that project to run shell scripts from which point one could script what ever they wanted including calls to existing programs.
As for the touch interface, "Ubuntu Touch" is mostly for phones but you have a tablet pc...unsure the complexity of switching between the "Unity" and the "Touch" interface...
Though to the point of scripting the screen rotation you can find the following example here
#!/bin/bash
old="0"
while true; do
if [[ -e /sys/devices/platform/hp-wmi/tablet ]]; then
new=`cat /sys/devices/platform/hp-wmi/tablet`
if [[ $new != $old ]]; then
if [[ $new == "0" ]]; then
echo "Rotate to landscape, hide CellWriter."
xrandr -o normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate none
xsetwacom set eraser rotate none
xsetwacom set touch rotate none
cellwriter --hide-window
elif [[ $new == "1" ]]; then
echo "Rotate to portrait, show CellWriter."
xrandr -o right
xsetwacom set stylus rotate cw
xsetwacom set eraser rotate cw
xsetwacom set touch rotate cw
cellwriter --show-window
fi
fi
old=$new
sleep 1s
fi
done
# From Red_Lion post #576: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=845911&p=7732316
There is a poject called desktop-switcher which has an non maintained "sourced code base" which might be helpful if you want to do more than scripting as suggested above...
Best Answer
Yes, but it is a bit limited, the only 2 desktop applications that are available are LibreOffice and Gimp
Others can be installed by using a tool named Libertine https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Libertine It needs more documentation to be useful to novice users