You would like to open an app and don't know its name. Without the search it takes much longer to reach the app.

In Ubuntu 12.04, to reach an app whose name you don't know, you must perform these steps in Dash Home: move the mouse diagonally down to the second left option at the bottom of the lens, move the mouse diagonally up to the "filter results" categories, click on the correct category, move to the middle area labelled "installed", sometimes click "see X more results" (where "X" is the number of results), navigate down and traverse the installed apps and then open the desired app. That's quite a long journey to make without the search, especially with hundreds of installed apps!

How do you put apps within easier reach of the user?

When you search for an app - notably Wine - and you wish to run any of its sub apps (e.g. the "Browse C drive" in Wine), you must somehow know the EXACT name of the sub app and type this into the Dash search. If you don't know the exact name, then the search may not find the desired app.

This limitation appears to affect Wine mostly, because Unity does not search or display sub apps - including Windows apps, as these run via Wine.

When you click anywhere in a program's window, it gains input focus and moves to the top of the window stack - covering everything behind it. If you accidentally click on a maximised window, you have to traverse through all the open apps on Unity to bring them back to the front.

This is annoying: say you want to type something into the Terminal window when referring to a support webpage; you cannot just type into the Terminal while part of it is overlapped by the web browser window, even if the text input area of the Terminal window is not covered. Also, if you move the scroll bar of the web page, then the web page will gain input focus and cover the Terminal window - which you were about to type in!

Why is there no option to change the behaviour of application windows and input focus?

The option "Always On Top" does not solve this problem, as it prevents you from moving a window above it e.g. when you need to get to an urgent e-mail message; see comments.

When you install apps from the Software Centre, there's no reminder to leave reviews about the quality of the apps. The option to leave a review is hidden away under the "More info" button, after you install the app.

The scrollbars in Unity are too thin and this makes them *very* fiddly to use because it's hard to position the mouse pointer onto the scrollbars. Attempts to move the mouse pointer over these thin scrollbars means you can easily miss and end up too far left or right of the scrollbar itself.

This problem is even worse with some brands of computer mice which operate very fast when plugged in!

The 3 buttons in the top-left of any window i.e. "close" "minimise" and "restore" are tightly packed together. It's too easy to click on "close" and accidentally close a program because the mouse pointer moved slightly when you went to click on either "minimise" or "restore".

Given how easy it is to nudge the mouse pointer by accident and close a program, this problem could be addressed. Note that not all programs prompt you to "save" what you're doing e.g. games.

Removable media, such as USB pendrives, can be inadvertently unplugged by inexperienced users before all data has been written, which causes file corruption. Also, such users' are unaware of "Eject" or "Safely Remove Drive".

Installing programs from the Software Centre often leaves users without newer versions of them programs, despite the newer versions being compatible with the user's Ubuntu release.

This often puzzles users, because they are expecting newer versions of the programs to be provided with the updates, which already happens with some programs like the Chromium web browser.

As an example of this problem, look at the download page for Pidgin and you will see there are 2 choices for the user: 1) install Pidgin from the Software Centre in Ubuntu or 2) Install the .deb file - which adds the PPA - then open the Update Manager, manually check for updates and install the newer release of Pidgin.
Read more on the download page here: http://pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/

If you have many open programs, they can be located either: at the top, somewhere in the middle or somewhere at the bottom of the launcher.

It would be more productive to put the open programs together on the launcher so they are instantly available.

When the Update Manager is updating the programs, these programs should not be open at the same time.

Here's an example of what I've witnessed: if Chromium is open at the same time that Flash Player is being updated, the user visits a website with Flash content and the site says Flash is not installed. But when Chromium is closed and opened again after the update, Flash Player works again.