How to make unity launcher apps not bundle together when you have lots of them or to speed up the bar when scrolling down to apps?

Solution 1:

If you don't mind installing a PPA, you may consider Drawers. There's a nice video by quidsup on Drawers along with installation instructions and a more recent video, also by quidsup, in which Drawers gets a mention: http://youtu.be/3jZTTp8nefw?t=4m29s at the time specified in the link. And version 13.2 has a review here.

Stack your applications under one icon with this great new Drawers feature for Unity Launcher. I reckon this is one of the best new features for Unity desktop.

Each Drawer can be customised with size, icon size, colour, transparency, and whether to show text. Feature is available for Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, and 13.04.

Install instructions:

Open Terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ian-berke/ppa-drawers  
sudo apt-get update  
sudo apt-get install drawers

The image (stolen from quidsup's video) shows a couple of browsers stacked horizontally. (Apologies if reproducing it here is a violation in any manner.)

Caveat: I have no personal experience of Drawers.

As far as speeding up scrolling goes, it may be an issue of resources and may be related to the "special effects" enabled. If you have limited resources, in terms of, for example, CPU, GPU, or RAM, you could try disabling some of the visual effects associated with the Launcher. Many of them are described here in the section appropriate to your version.