The new Unity interface for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Light will remind you of Gnome Shell, but Unity seems more usable, with the "dock" panel on the left. We took Ubuntu Unity interface for a test drive, so here are some screenshots and video I just took, as well as explainations on how the Unity dock works.
Unity dock options / behavior: you can pin applications to the dock by right clicking them and selecting "Keep in Launcher", meaning you'll always have a shortcut available when the application is not running. Also, running applications have an arrow on the left, while the currently active application has an arrow on the right (thus the two arrows on Chrome in the screenshot below):
You can also re-arrange the dock icons but in a somewhat unusual way. You must drag an icon to the right and then moving it to the new position:
The date has been removed from the Unity interface: only the time is displayed in the panel and upon clicking it, the user can see the date as well as adjust the date/time:
Impressions
Another feature I really missed in Unity is panel applets - just like in Gnome Shell - is that you can't add applets to the top panel. Sure, the top panel will be used in the future to hold the mighty Global Menu but for now it's a bit useless and annoying. You can't even right click it (you can, but nothing will happen).
And another option I would have wanted and found that it's missing is creating custom launchers in the Unity dock - that's not possible for now. You also can't change any dock icon.
Finally, a note: if you want to run Compiz using Unity... you can't, just the way you can't currently run it with Gnome Shell. Hopefully this will change in the future.
Here is a video with Ubuntu Unity in action
The video has been recorded in 1080p. You can also watch it @ Youtube.
Did you try Unity? Even if you didn't you saw lots of screenshots and videos (many just in this post alone), so what do you think?
Update: for the latest Unity screenshots and video, check out the second half of our Ubuntu 10.10 desktop and netbook editions post
Update: also see ->