Clicking on the "lens" button (the ubuntu symbol in the upper left hand corner) takes up ~25% of my 24" monitor to show me six icons. Six. That's great for a netbook or even a touch friendly device (easier to touch!), but on a desktop monitor, it's ridiculous. And there's no way to change it at the moment. So far, it's my biggest complain with 11.04

It takes 25% of your screen; Gnome-Shell's activity pane takes 100%; Mac OS X Lion's launchpad also takes 100% AFAIK.

Seriously, what do you intent to do with all the free space you get if dash takes just 10% of your screen?

Dash is for launching apps and places; You open it, launch an item and it disappears. It doesn't stay there and waste space.

I think people have preconceived notions about Unity and Shell being bad. Just try them with an open mind and give them enough time (say, a week) and I'm sure you'll love them both.

No, I've used it for more than a week, and I don't love it. In fact, it's my biggest complaint about 11.04... like I said above. I didn't come in with any preconceived notions about Unity. In fact, coming in, I thought it might be an interesting change and I largely like it, but I really don't like Dash at the moment. Also, I didn't say Launchpad and Gnome-Shell were better. I haven't used them, I wouldn't know.

Taking up 25% of my screen real estate for 6 icons _is_ ridiculous. I'm not really complaining about how much of my screen its taking up, I'm complaining that it's really inefficient about it. If you're taking up a quarter of my 24" monitor, show me more than 6 icons at time. Show me a search bar that's got text the same pixel size I selected for the rest of my desktop. At the very least, let me configure it to something I like.

I didn't say Unity sucks, I hate it and no one will ever use it, I made a complaint about how it stands currently.

Fair enough, but the whole Dash is used once you search for something or click a category. Filling up empty space just for the sake of filling up empty space isn't such a good idea after all.

No, it is entirely filled up when I click on it, but the text is >30px and each icon is gigantic. I'm not talking about filling whitespace, I'm talking about making items reasonable sizes. I've already set my font sizes, just adhere to that or give me another config option. Similarly, let me adjust the size of the icons and either put more icons in there or shrink the size of dash.