yes, but you still loose the top to that menu bar

Doesn't Windows 7 have menu bars on every window?

This is one thing that I'm very glad Unity does - it removes those menubars and has a global menu like OS X. Saves so much screen space.

I prefer the way Apple does the UI.

I tried the netbook release 10.04 for a week on older hardware; in the end, I felt like I had to jump through another hurdle to get to an application - what I mean is that it was a two step process through the global menu. Dialogues end up a bit messy. It felt half way there - I'm glad though that Ubuntu are at least trying something different.

I removed my top panel by accident in Gnome yesterday, and was thinking about abandoning it, but I placed it back, mainly for the date and time and system resources widget thing - that I like to keep an eye on in case XYZ app gets out of control.

Notification icons are useful, but they should complement proper applications. How do you select wireless networks in Gnome without the wireless icon thing?

I'm one of those that starts to flail if I can't do it on the command line, let alone some system menu.

IIRC, it's long been possible to patch GNOME/Gtk to do this (and such patches exist).

I think the global menu would be a huge nuisance on a multihead setting.

Personally the amount of times I need to use a menu and thus need to go up to the top menu bar are slim to none. Mostly when hunting for some option in Preview.

Ultimately I am a command line user overall, so keyboard shortcuts and commands are my bread and butter. I can't remember the last time I really needed the menu bar for something, so even on my dual monitor (laptop, and external screen) MacBook Pro I really don't care where the menu bar is located.

I was looking at the notification-osd guidelines yesterday. And in it there was an idea of your notifications moving to the screen that is selected. The way they determined this was a bit odd. I'd certainly want to change where they appeared. And I'd like a CLI equivalent, but I digress.

I abandoned multi-monitors in the end, because I got sick to death of the lack of keyboard control and the unpredictable nature of applications in that environment. Too many assumptions, like me having both monitors turned on. I'd rather think in workspaces, and be able to group apps to a workspace, or shift the menus easily to the one I was using.

I'm sure there are ways around it.

I don't know, I use XP at work and linux for everything else.

My complaint is that there's the menu bar AND there's the dock the combination really takes up alot of screen real estate

I personally use awesome WM one status bar at the top, no window decorators, maximum screen real estate for apps ( I'm also using an 11.6'' laptop)

No. Explorer, IE, Firefox (4), Chrome, Office, Windows Live foo... none of them have menu bars.

Apple started to push for full screen apps as shown in OS X 10.7 "Lion" preview.

That's interesting, but for me a web browser only needs a width of about 80 characters! Apple owners probably have high resolution large monitors, so it would just look silly.

Indeed. They are pushing full screen apps where it makes sense for them to be full screen (iPhoto, video editing stuff, etc) not everywhere. Web browsers, like you pointed out, along with stuff like: iTunes, terminals, text editors, ftp clients, cd burning apps, etc all would be pretty silly full screen.

iTunes and Terminal are the top apps that come to mind that I wish I could full screen ala Lion. Outlook 2011 and the iWorks apps, too.