Ubuntu – Unity displaces windows when switching workspaces

I'm assuming you have a Window maximized on the first workspace which causes the "dodge" hide of the Launcher be active. When you switch to the new workspace, there is no window causing the dodge behavior of the Launcher to kick in, so the Launcher shows itself.

There is no default way (in Ubuntu 11.04 -> 11.10) to change this. There are methods involving installing CCSM, yet these are unsupported and can break your Unity environment. I won't get into those, as I haven't tried them, perhaps others will.

What is good for you to know is, that in the upcoming 12.04 release you can choose to have the Launcher either always visible, or always hidden (on all workspaces), and you can adjust the size of the icons to reduce screen space used. Perhaps this will give you a working solution without resorting to hacks in the near future.

If you don't have the application "Configuration Editor", install it using this command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install gconf-editor

Now, open Configuration Editor in the Dash. You will want to navigate to this path:

/apps/metacity/workspace_names

Now, rename name_1, name_2,... whatever you would like. :)

If it doesn't work initially, you may want to log out and log in.

Edit: This does NOT work with the right click option that you requested, sadly. It does work with the indicator-workspaces package and some other things on Ubuntu. Thought this would help :(

Edit Again: This link shows that the newest version of compiz that will be in 12.10 WILL have this capability. So, it looks like we'll have to wait another 2 months or so, then we can do this all we want. :)