Ubuntu – Ubuntu Touch Desktop

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

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...