I keep reading people saying this, but my netbook screen is 1024px wide, and eating up any of that space turns websites into things that must be scrolled horizontally as well as vertically.
Unity ruined Ubuntu on my netbook because of that. Sites that I read before no longer fit in the screen width, including Ubuntu's own homepage.
I dumped that noise and installed LXDE and made my netbook usable again.
True, and I personally find the default setting ok using Unity 2d (desktop with blacklisted graphics card) and Unity (netbook). However this same logic means that the Launcher position could be made optional without detriment.
12.04 is currently in an 'interesting' state, so I'm waiting for the repositories to update before exploring Unity 5 on the netbook.
There is one thing that really annoy me with the autohide feature. When you want to close the window the launcher often gets in the way. My mother got a little annoyed at this since I upgraded her computer to 11.10.
You might find you'd like to change the "edge reveal timeout" which is actually the time it waits before the launcher reveals. The default is set to 150ms, but I like it much better at 300ms. You can also change the launcher edge to the right, but that probably has more issues with scrolling. All of that is set in CompizConfig Settings Manager.
Yes, what trotsky said - the default behavior (on 11.10 at least) is to auto-hide the sidebar launcher, so it doesn't get in the way of anything. And even when it unhides, it doesn't squash open windows, it just superimposes temporarily on top of them, until it hides again.
Unity ruined Ubuntu on my netbook because of that. Sites that I read before no longer fit in the screen width, including Ubuntu's own homepage.
I dumped that noise and installed LXDE and made my netbook usable again.