Unity’s global menu system was wonderful and once getting used to how well it used vertical space switching to gnome was like going back 10 years. Seeing multiple empty bars across the screen makes it completely unusable to me not to mention their need to replace simple menus with seemingly random icons scattered everywhere. I’m using kde plasma now with a global menu set up. It’s good but isn’t as hassle free as Unity was.
I’m really sad that canonical abandoned Unity. It was so easy to use and was really easy to recommend to people. I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it.
I am same there (using KDE Plasma with global menu). Recently, with VSCode's menu on title bar, it seems to have started a trend doing so. For example, JetBrain's IDEs are also designed that way. I found the term for that, it's called LIM (locally integrated menu). Now, Unity has done that many years ago. If I remember correctly, the behavior was: when maximized, it behaves like a global menu; when not, it's a LIM.
Fortunately, there's a PR for implementing such things in KDE Plasma. Here is the discussion [1]. Right now, you can use it, but it probably won't be merged into the main branch soon.
This seems like a weird half-step between "headerbars" / client side decorations / hamburger menus. KDE Maui is going that direction: https://mauikit.org/apps/
Sadly it just seems to be more like a custom window decoration that only does shadows (no actual title bar) and regular KDE headers, no actual window controls / CSD.
I felt much the same way. The global menu also fixed the issue of people shoving menus into hamburgers that I hate. Unity additionally had their search feature that doubled as a run box which was awesome. Tap meta and type the application name and hit enter. Unity really maximalized productivity in my opinion. It’s a shame that Canoncial abandoned it, but being open source the community seems to have quietly continued.
Ultimately, I think Canonical just slowly realized that home users are going to cost money for everyone but Apple, while servers will make money. They shifted nearly all of their focus there and just package the same things everyone else does for desktop. Sadly, the one non-standard thing that they continue insisting on is Snap.
Which is a feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" nearly 20 years ago, under the name Spotlight, and now implemented in Windows Vista and almost every OS or desktop since then.
>Sadly, the one non-standard thing that they continue insisting on is Snap.
Snap was and largely is mainly for the server crowd, that they've shoved into the desktop. So in that regard I suppose it's at least consistent for them.
That said, snap is still terrible, but Canonical always just does their own thing.
> As a small example, the update makes right-clicking the trashcan in the Launcher to empty it work again, without needing to open the trashcan's own window.
I feel like that single line illustrates just how badly GNOME has lost the plot over the last decade.
AFAIK GNOME doesn't really do desktop icons and the ones Ubuntu added were actually a GNOME extension. Ubuntu chose to bundle that extension so the burden on creating a unified experience should be on them.
Windows 3.11 docked applications onto the "desktop" when you minimized them so no, not really.
It's not really taking inspiration as much as trying new things. Everyone has copied over the desktop because everybody else did so, all the way back to when Apple first ripped off Xerox's GUI. Even on Windows I disable all the clutter of desktop icons that programs will randomly add to my desktop because they deem themselves important.
I personally don't see the benefit, but people who do can pick a distro that writes a well-integrated desktop icon addon (apparently, not Ubuntu).
Apparently so does every recent OS, e.g. Windows, Mac, ios, Android,.... . They all feature an app drawer/launcher/start menu quite prominently and that is always not the desktop.
Having one window of the files app always open, removing all window decorations and calling it "desktop" can be good, but I won't pretend that there isn't an overarching movement away from that.
I am; it is possible, but it is not the default. You have to manually install it. Even upgrading a 16.04 machine to 18.04 removed Unity by default and replaced it with GNOME.
> I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it
Well, yes, but "an extremely loud minority who weren't even using it" can have an important point about something: namely, that investing/focusing on polishing it, detracts from investment/focus on polish of the alternative they prefer.
Ubuntu GNOME was always a spin of Ubuntu; but when it became the flagship spin of Ubuntu, the polish on it got a lot better. (For example, previously, effort on an "app store"-experience application was divided between Canonical's "Ubuntu Software Center", and GNOME's "GNOME Software", with both being pretty janky as a result; with the switch, the "Ubuntu Software Center" was discontinued, and all effort of both parties went into polishing GNOME Software, and it became something worth using.)
> I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it.
As I recall it, the initial uproar was over the opt-out phoning home and web searches in the main menu/search integrated with the desktop. (Unity called this menu/search mechanism a 'lens'. Contemporary (10 and 11) windows start menus kinda resemble it, although they are worse when it comes to what people objected to in Unity.) Eventually Canonical relented and promised that the next (never finished?) rewrite of Unity would make those features opt-in.
Then there were conflicts with GNOME, where there were difficulties upstreaming parts of Unity, and GNOME was resistant to changing its direction for the sake of the alternative visions of downstream projects.
Both conflicts were unfortunate, but I don't think any of the big complaints were about the desktop experience itself. I don't remember hearing that Unity's vision for the desktop was a bad one, and as a user who was a very turned off by the whole shopping lens thing, I actually really liked the general lens functionality and desktop workflow, and I loved the global menu search.
I feel like despite the controversies, the potential of the desktop experience was always clear.
I'm sure they had their reasons for dropping it, but I wish Canonical had stuck with Unity, even if it wouldn't necessarily be my choice on all my machines, we still only have the big two when it comes to mature, feature-complete desktop environments on Linux and the free Unices.
I wasn't a fan of Unity when Canonical was pushing it, but I totally agree that it was better than the GNOME Shell version we're left with nowadays.
On the other hand, that impression might be because the default GNOME apps back then had much more usable menus packed with features. Now it doesn't really matter whether your menu bar is global or not, because all those menu items are being killed anyway. Otherwise the multiple empty bars you see wouldn't have been as empty as they are.
When Ubuntu moved to Gnome I remember getting so frustrated at how much screen space Gnome wasted that my old laptop became difficult to use. I gave up on the Linux desktop after that
I remember a lot of the same sentiment about GNOME 3, but if you recall, were you aware of WMs or other DEs at the time?
There was a short lag between when 2.32 was deprecated and when Maté and Cinnamon were released, and I remember XFCE and KDE still being pretty excellent. I used tiling WMs on my other TTYs so changing the defaults didn't affect me.
It only provides some of the cosmetic look of Unity. It doesn't provide any of the functionality, such as global menu bars, keyboard controls, a dock with both keyboard and mouse controls, and so on.
You can't move all the app's menu bars into a global menu bar when the new UI guidelines means that GNOME-conformant apps do not have menu bars.
You can't have a search tool that searches menu trees that aren't there.
You can't have add-on status icons in the top panel when the developers have removed the APIs for add-on status icons and combined their own status icons into a smaller number (gods know why, but they have, and it sucks.)
You can't make intelligent use of title bars, for example optionally putting menus into the title bars, or hiding them for full-screen apps, when the GNOME guidelines say don't have a menu bar, use CSD and put dialog buttons in there.
KDE can fake up a global menu bar; GNOME cannot and the GNOME team actively seek to prevent such things.
This young fellow is why computing should be accessible everywhere. How many more wunderkinds are we missing out on and failing who may be wallowing in poverty or suffering elsewhere in the world?
i this you linked to the wrong unity8 ... unityx seams to be something different ... https://lomiri.com/ is the renamed unity8 that is used in the ubuntu touch phones now ubports phones
I used Ubuntu Unity for a while when I realized, such a strange feeling: yeah, I seeked for, downloaded, trusted, and I am very satisfied with the work of a ~12 yo kid.
Also I can recommend Ubuntu Unity. It's not that different from gnome, but works great.
Damn, what kid! To be fair - having time and access to computer between the ages of 9-15 is something that I have come to appreciate in my life as well. Even if I didn't understand everything at the time, playing with open-source software, Linux, jailbreaking iDevices etc has definitely formed who I am today.
Unity just felt consistent, usable and boring - all qualities that I appreciate in a desktop environment, which is why some of my devices still use XFCE and there's almost nothing that I find lacking in that regard.
Now, GNOME isn't necessarily bad either but it was still sad that Canonical moved on from developing Unity because it did set Ubuntu apart and by the time of the official migration away from it, was actually pretty stable and solid.
Of course, the financial aspects of developing their own DE when they could just be contributing to GNOME instead also need to be taken into consideration.
If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users (I don't know if that was large group or just very noisy), and an approach to community management that was basically if you don't like, go away.
In the early days, Unity was more usable than GNOME (could be my hardware, perhaps; apparently my nvidia drivers were buggy and I was told to change GPU), but back then Mark Shuttleworth wasn't the best PR person always starting flames on his blog.
At the end I got tired of the almost constant drama and gave up the new desktop trend and settled on XFCE (and I couldn't be happier).
> If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users (I don't know if that was large group or just very noisy)
The GNOME redesign. The old 2D GNOME was OK. It was functional, stable and pretty (for someone who thinks that Windows 3.11 style is a good fit for a work environment). Then the old software was abandoned and the update was pushed onto users.
KDE also had a transition disaster. That time was not a good time for Linux on the Desktop.
> KDE also had a transition disaster. That time was not a good time for Linux on the Desktop.
KDE's transition disaster came a bit earlier, with the release of KDE 4.0 in 2008. By the time GNOME 3 came out in 2011, KDE 4.x had seen 6 or 7 feature releases, and had (imo) largely recovered from all the rewrites in terms of feature parity. I was pretty happy on KDE in 2011.
That period I stopped recommending linux to friends as I felt burned by the experience of losing gnome 2. I remember going from ubuntu 10.04 beyond support, to xfce, gnome fallback, gnome flashback, linux mint cinnamon, crunchbang (stayed a while), linux mint mate then ubuntuMate, where I've been for several years now.
I'd say UbuntuMATE is functional, boring and pretty, and frankly should be the modern standard for a work environment linux.
Has there ever been a good time for Linux on the desktop? I'm using Linux (Kubuntu) daily, and it works most of the time, but I still see some issues from time to time (multi-monitor strangeness, windows suddenly appearing without frames because kwin crashed, desktop wallpapers not being shown or being shown incorrectly etc.).
Isn't that just how all desktop OSes are? It works most of the time, and then sometimes you run into things that are bafflingly broken.
For me, it's the Windows desktop at work. I'm accustomed to Windows spawning windows fully or partially out of bounds, though at least that's something that you can fix with the "Move" option from the Ctrl+Space menu. But for a few weeks now, there seems to be a bug where the affected window just stops being rendered entirely. It's in the taskbar, I can start Ctrl+Space "Move" and see the movement cursor, but there's nothing there. I don't know what triggers it yet.
Meanwhile, my Linux desktop has no problems at all.
Yes. I had easily as many issues with Windows and OSX when each was my d at driver. I don’t really have anything bad to say about Fedora + Gnome except that occasionally, my 5k thunderbolt monitor is finicky when waking from sleep. It’s a simple enough fix, but it’s still a minor inconvenience maybe once a month.
Linux package management alone puts it ahead of both Windows and OSX in my book.
Having made a sibling comment lamenting issues with my Linux desktop, I have to sort of agree with you. Sort of because, I have seen issues like what you mentioned on Windows in the past, but not that often. I use Linux desktop not only on principle but also because of open source and the flexibility is unparalleled, but I do feel like things break more often than they do on Windows (maybe due to the amount of flexibility and therefore the use cases/scenarios it has to deal with).
Having said that, Pop!_OS was also problem free for me for quite a while until the desktop blanking issue started happening - right at the time of NVIDIA driver upgrade. Linus was right shitting on them - my next laptop would not be using NVIDIA for sure.
I would have disagreed with you except atleast once a day (usually more), my monitors go blank and once the display is back after few seconds, all the windows get shoved to the smaller monitor on the right, all resized to the monitor size. I move the windows again one by one to the main monitor, resize them to how they were and curse NVIDIA while praying that this doesn't happen again too soon. Even changed from Pop! desktop to KDE which didn't help (that's why my unsubstantiated choice is to curse NVIDIA instead of the DE). Cherry on top if I'm connected to the work machine over Citrix so I have some more windows to resize and reposition over there too.
Close to two decades of using Linux desktop on a daily basis and I still have to deal with these issues. As someone who doesn't have any intention to leave Linux due to these issues, I don't think there EVER will be a 100% rock-solid time for Linux desktop. Wayland will stabilize and then people will point out issues with it, come-up with another component and we will wait for that to stabilize - and on and on, forever.
Ironically, such issues rarely happened, if ever, when I was using Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
>my monitors go blank and once the display is back after few seconds,
Are you sure you aren't having power issues? I had similar problems I think I fixed with randr, but a UPS for your monitors might be a better choice. Never daily though, more storm based or once every few months.
I'm only sharing my experience, but the reason I figured out it was a power thing was in the summer my AC would stop for a second too. I never noticed any problems with anything else in the winter.
I have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 with i7 processor and NVIDIA Max-Q graphics so I think the issues common on low-end machines are unlikely to apply in this case.
I love linux but the desktops are horrendously balkanized. I support the continued development of Unity in the hopes it destroys others. I mean, it won't.... but at least Linux is trying.
We had a solid 10 years of Apple neglecting OSX and more importantly Microsoft ruining windows with their tiles dual desktop. What did Linux do? pointless rewrites that added nothing to the fundamental usability of the desktops.
The opportunity has passed. We either hope that Satella moves Windows closer to Linux/Unix, or ... desktop linux fades with desktops in general.
Yes for someone like yourself who is comfortable with a computer from 2003-2022.
The challenge is that Linux isn't a singular product its a source compatible ecosystem of parts. There has always existed a collection of excellent parts one could use to make an excellent experience. However as a user you probably don't want to build your own distro so you are going to be relying on someone else's collection and projects come and go and differ substantially in quality both between projects and over time.
For instance Ubuntu has basically from my perspective gone to hell.
I much prefer modern GNOME and KDE to their older counterparts. I believe modern DEs definitely lack a certain polish, but the old, clunky late-00s UI is incredibly unappealing.
I can see why existing Linux users may have resisted the change but I wouldn't have even tried Ubuntu long enoughto switch to Linux had they stuck with the old system.
Windows 3.11 is a terrible fit for productivity, Win95/98/2000 were immensely better. The Windows usability only improved until mscursed themselves with Windows 8 (with the exception of Vista which was released before it was done and was almost as buggy as modern Linux, though SP1 fixed most of that).
The biggest deal was that you couldn't have old and new and many distros with a rapid release cycle adopted new versions as soon as they became available.
For instance KDE 4.0 which wasn't really ready came out 11 January 2008. Fedora 9 came out in May.
Had simply choosing 3 or 4 beta as it might accurately have been called been possible at login I think there would have been zero issues. 4.0 wasn't actively broken but it lacked polish and it was missing features from 3.x that hasn't been implemented yet.
You memory is correct and incorrect at the same time: early Unity was rejected by many because too much rigid (like you can't move the launcher bar or the top bar) and "too alien" because at that time people was thinking in category-based menus not dashes and fear to loose the "overview ability" of menus. Than Unity mature a bit and such criticism disappear.
In the end most power users at that time already have switched to side docks observing that they fit better modern 16:10 and then 16:9 screens instead of the old 4:3. Also Android at that time offer a substantially identical graphical concept with a dash-like menu, a fixed launcher bar on the shortest side of the screen witch happen to be the bottom one on mobile, have a small fixed top bar etc.
Unity offer innovation and after much reticence people embrace it without even notice. Windows have copied Kde4 menus, most have copied Android and Unity desktop.
Gnome criticism are a far older things about absurdity like nautilus spatial view the RH management want against nobody, the new rush was for GTk3 and the choice of going web-tech, against vala crap etc after with Gnome SHell criticism add to criticisms because Gnome SHell essentially copy Unity look & feel suffering from a secondary narcissistic design that put the desktop at the center of the world instead as a silent servant who appear only when needed.
At a certain point Canonical decide that people are too reactionary and so there is no interest in innovate desktop anymore, it's time to make money and they loose much on the mobile finally find a room in IoT and server support.
Nowadays desktops are left at that evolution point, with no further advancing for generic users, while power users have rediscovered past ideas like tiling WM and document-centric UIs. Generic users desktop is pushed to be a modern WebVM improperly named browser for legacy reasons, power users goes deep in the classic glorious and far more advanced past than today dark middle age of tech. Surely some choose XFCE, Fluxbox etc simply because they are born with such WM concept in the '90s/early '00 and do not want to move from that era, as many still want '60s cars instead of something else more older or more modern :-)
I didn't hate Unity, but it had a bug (for me, and clearly a bunch of others based on the launchpad bug traffic for the bug I filed) that persisted for the entire time Canonical owned it, that meant I couldn't use it.
I could repeat it very easily, just start the application using alt+f2 and use the keyboard to launch it (terminal, chrome, whatever). When triggered a window wouldn't be accessible over alt-tab. Was running, couldn't alt-tab to it. As someone that uses the keyboard a lot for navigation, it was a show-stopper. I have to be able to alt-tab between windows.
In fact, even now, the number of "confirmed" bugs with long life on them on Launchpad is particularly disturbing, considering how many of them are fairly fundamentally impacting.
Like, say, https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1126221. Filed 2013 by an at-the-time Canonical employee, confirmed in 14.xx and then 16.xx. If you had multiple displays, put a window on one and then disabled it, windows on the other screen get essentially stuck, can't be alt+tab'd to or anything.
Over and over and over, what could have been a really good desktop experience was crippled by stubbornly ignoring the bugs filed against it (at least, I assume ignoring because the number of times engineers would actually comment on the tickets seemed to be few and far between). Canonical repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by not nailing the basics: the environment has to work.
These are legitimate criticisms and some of the only ones I've seen in all these comments.
The only thing I'd say is that as someone using Unity almost every day for a decade now, I've never encountered a single one of them.
I am not saying that they are not real or did not affect you or anyone else. Merely that they are not widespread deal-breaker problems for all users, because I've never noticed a single one of them myself.
>If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users
Of course GNOME fanboys complained that someone dared to replace their precious DE with a nicer Qt based one instead of kissing the ass of giant ego GNOME designers. Even when Ubuntu got back to GNOME Canonical listen to the users and put features back in on Ubuntu.
I am not sure if most, but there were a lot of happy Unity users , but the DE got of lot of hate , much more hate then other GNOME forks or alternatives, Probably Ubuntu/Canonical haters just found another project to attack and seen it as Canonical inventing something new instead of letting RedHat inventing shit and kissing TH ass and follow them.
I profoundly dislike all that "hater" rhetoric. Sure, there will always be trolls, but by tagging any dissenting opinion as "Ubuntu/Canonical haters" I feel like there's a lost opportunity to improve.
You can't please everybody, but both Unity an GNOME shell had some very bad ideas, and it took too long to correct course (and in some cases it didn't happen). I believe some of the criticism came from people that really loved those DE, and that's why they were passionate about it.
When people don't care, they just use something else.
Come one, Arch users complaining that Ubuntu was not using SystemD was not honest, the Arch users were not using Ubuntu or Upstart to have a clue what they are talking about. And related with SystemD debate, you have alot of people that are not system admins or can't write a C program or a good bash scrip[t having an opinion because they read a blog post , I wish we all can't determine when we have no idea and just abstain. So about SystemD , I have no idea if is better or worse, my experience with init systems is almost zero so I should shut up.
There were a lot of hather, sure there were some valid criticism but you can't invalidate the fact they were haters, and if we would want to waste our time we could read those old topics and find them but we have better things to do.
>I really disliked Unity, and hated the fact that Canonical was pushing it down my throat.
But we KDE users should we hate Canonical that they were pushing GNOME?
I did not hated them for this though I am puzzled why not create Unity based on KDE libraries (probably there were many reasons some including Qt and C++ are ugly)
I remember that at one point Canonical had done real user testing, bringing people to use stuff and watching them struggling. Big difference vs the other DE that they use now where some big ego dude instinct determines what is removed or changed for the sake of brand identity or futuristic design.
Was that user testing on new users, or experienced ones? There's a big difference between how to make the onboarding as easy as possible for someone who's never used your system before, vs making it efficient to use for power users. The former gets you Ribbon UI and similar - which is really really good at that - but it means that people like me get annoyed when something they have to do 50 times a day now takes 3 clicks instead of one. I can understand that I'm on the losing end of a tradeoff that's a global improvement, but I still get annoyed.
When you're building bazaars and not cathedrals though, there's no good reason why everyone should be using the same UI. Maybe I'm part of a 5% or less of the population who wants the title bar of the active window and only that to be my accent color, but the solution here is to just let me configure that. And I don't mean in the sense of "I can spend a summer learning and editing the source code and build a custom distro that looks the way I want", I mean that I remember the old days where this was either a switch, or the default, or a couple of lines in a config file. I gave up on GNOME when everything became "sure, you can do a term project on configuring the CSS files" if you really don't like THE ONE true design choice.
I think there wee people that used computers before, user testing will usually identify situation you describe where doing a task takes too many clicks.
My issue is with big ego people, they use the excuse of casual user to impose their views, I have a KDE example too (so GNOME users can stop downvoting this without any comment explaining why) , on KDE4 the big ego dude added a thing in the corner, "the cashew". the users asked for an option to hide the ugly thing but the dude refused to add an option, he refused patches,.
Now some people will say that we the users do not understand that adding options is adding complexity but this is not the case here and in the end KDE removed it https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbo... probably after the big ego dude left.
This is not the only KDE example, t was the same with scrolling on some widgets, options to disable it was refused by same dude. No user testing, no group of people thinking about it, just one big ego person thinking that because he read half of a book he is a big visionary.
Probably you refer to the "forced" passage to Unity-Qt, who was not mature at that time, witch means buggy and laggy.
BUT such move was not bad, was needed because too much people do not want to evolve, keeping on menus-based systems who start to age, without this move GNU/Linux would probably lost many new users who want modern desktops...
Unfortunately modern desktops are still crappy floating WM with a completely lost design underneath but that's another story...
As a company it made sense to develop their own desktop experience instead of relying on the default experience provided by Gnome, since the majority of developers in control of Gnome are Redhat employee or ex-employee or affiliated to Redhat in some way, and Redhat is their main competitor.
To provide some historic context: Unity was released in times when there was this "Netbook" trend, started by Asus EeePC with 7" display, followed by a lot of other cheap Netbooks in the 7"-10" display category. Additionally, Canonical pushed to become a mobile/smartphone OS vendor. These constrained display sizes were some of the main factors in the UX design of Unity. Fast forward to today, Netbooks were a short-lived hype to be replaced with Ultrabooks (13" and up), and Canonical failed to become a mobile phone OS vendor and went back to Gnome as a default DE.
The make or break moment for Unity was Canonicals failed crowd-source campaign for their phone. Work on Unity 8 was underway and would have succeeded Unity 7, and would have been the DE for both their phone and desktop.
With the end of the campaign, it seems like all their desktop efforts ended too, and they shifted focus to servers, snap, snap-stores.
This is nowhere near the historical truth. The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project. Those were cancelled several years (2017) after the Ubuntu Edge as a result of a business decision to make the company more profitable for investors. There is zero money in desktop, and Canonical continues supporting Ubuntu only as enabling technology for their server and IoT product lines.
> The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project.
The failure of Ubuntu Edge to meet its lofty ($32M) crowdfunding target did not immediately result in Canonical abandoning their convergence aspirations. But it was part of a broader trend of failed attempts to monetize mobile and desktop users. Had more those attempts been sufficiently successful I doubt they would have abandoned OS convergence.
Nowhere near you say? Mir and Unity 8 dev were put on the back burner not long after the Edge campaign. Remeber that no release with them was ever made. Formally terminating dev work a few years later seems to fit in very well: there suddenly was no need for Mir, and the shift in focus to the server fits well with dropping a custom DE.
Mir is still a product that Canonical ships and supports. The converged desktop/phone project was cancelled 4 years (many "not longs" in move-fast-and-break-things timescales) after the Edge proposal was cancelled and really really had nothing to do with the Edge proposal.
I know and understand that I'm an insider with actual information and facts but the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet is not enough to change the experience I had when I was there.
> the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet
Funny, based on my inside info you look to be one :) Maybe should shouldn't assume so much, since you are obviously keenly aware of of how one might look on the web.
It was amusing to read @bregma's comments here, because they said what I was thinking at each point.
The dates are a matter of public record, and trivially Googled. It is not "insider knowledge" to have a memory.
The phone flopped in 2014; the desktop and convergence projects weren't cancelled until the HN thread four years later.
IMHO as a Unity user, the phone deserved to flop. It offered no new compelling features. If it had had some big-ticket selling point, like a slide-out hardware keyboard -- something that used to be a widespread feature in smartphones before the iPhone -- then I would have backed it. I did back the Planet Computers Gemini and I have one. It's a lovely device.
But it didn't. To conflate these things is entirely bogus.
Amusing that you seem to have ignored to read other comments. And that you missed their contradiction: mir was formally cancelled (as if there was nothing between the phone and that) 4 years later and is still on shipping.
I am in the same boat. Windows 95 like desktops are simply not the most optimal way to work anymore.
The reason I like gnome most is because it is so out of the way. I am enjoying maximal screen estate while switching apps is just as easy as it is supposed to be.
When gnome shell was new some things were buggy, especially on low power machines, but that changed really quick. I can't think of a single issue.
Not many distros ship KDE as a main and first class DE. On the ones which allows KDE during install (meaning it was at least somehow tested, probably), in my anecdotal experience KDE 5 often run horribly with severe visual bugs. AND then community says this "why did you pick distroname+KDE, it is cutting edge, go pick Mate/Gnome/Cinnamon/XFCE". And both of these things together are rather frustrating.
I used Gnome for a very long time, switched to KDE and switched back. Recently I decided to retry KDE after hearing good things about Plasma, and I can say that it wasn't hyperbole. The desktop feels light and snappy, the settings have been cleaned up and organized while retaining the flexibility/configurability. It may not be as "clean" as Gnome out of the box, but it can be customized a whole lot more to how you want your desktop to be.
The common "simple, honest" narrative about KDE is unfair and unjust.
Xfce is simple. LXDE is simpler still, and LXQt simpler than that.
KDE is not simple. It is a complex and elaborate environment with extremely complex customisation options, and it still doesn't do things I want from a Windows-like desktop.
- I can't set (or limit) the size of the Start button or the clock.
- I can't have a panel spanning 2+ screens. (That was an option; it was removed.)
- I can't have a vertical taskbar that works as well as Windows.
- It does not use Windows keystrokes, which in a Windows copy is unacceptable.
- If it is so customisable, why can't I have BeOS tabbed title bars? Or side title bars, like in wm2?
- Why can't I tick a box that says ALWAYS show me a menu bar, because I hate hamburger menus and never ever want them.
(1) that they forced desktop users on a phone UI intentionally
(2) or that they weren't trying to make a phone UI but somehow ended up with the gross garbage that is GNOME 3+ anyway.
Either way GNOME 3+ stinks.
Even the GNOME developers had to concede and offer the alternative GNOME flashback (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback), which looks like GNOME 2 (but not customizable). Given how intransigent they are usually, the push-back must have been enormous.
Unity wasn't appreciated because it wasn't better than what it was replacing (GNOME 2). Though at least it had a sort of window list you could use to quickly switch windows with a mouse. You know - the device people use on desktop PCs.
Nothing to do with whiners. Although I'm sure the world feels like it's full of whiners if you work on UIs at Red Hat. As is often the case though, that feeling is more a reflection of your situation than objective reality.
I was using Ubuntu but when Unity got dropped I went back to Windows... Now I'm on Fedora 36 with KDE, and :'( my new work laptop has to be Windows :'( so sad.
Kind of off-topic, but I've been enjoying Regolith[0] on Ubuntu lately.
It uses i3 as a window manager, but integrates a bit more neatly with things like the Gnome Settings application so you can use the tiling window manager but still don't have to configure everything the hard way.
When Canonical dropped Unity for Gnome I also jumped to Regolith, and have been very happy for a couple years. Fell in love with the tiling aspect of i3 without the need to endlessly tinker with my OS. This truly was a set-and-forget experience.
Interesting, will check it out. I think I've read that pop shell from system76 is an i3 inspired layer on top of gnome. I'm curious if it provides even better integration than Regolith. Only problem is that the one serious attempt to port pop shell to NixOS has been aborted. Will probably move from i3/sway to one of these two at some point
That's exciting. I must be one of the few who actually liked Unity a lot, probably better than Gnome. From what I understand, a lot of the underlayment was 'hacky' and abandoned. While I don't like most NIH that Canonical does(snaps, upstart, mir), I really wish they'd have kept Unity.
When Gnome2 was finally removed from Ubuntu, I tried Unity desktop for a while, didn't like it and installed Gnome3...
...
...
... and after an hour decided, that Unity is actually not that bad. Almost every change Gnome3 did over Gnome2 was a change for the worse or for far worse. Unnecessary waste of space on meaningless panels, unnecessarily revamped menus, etc. Just no. I didn't dive in this matter in detail, but people were saying that Gnome3 team has a rather hostile attitude towards criticism, and it shows in the results.
Anyway, after a few years of using Unity I got used to it and was sad when it was killed. Hope it gets the second chance.
Gnome3 and Unity drove me to use MATE, and though I give KDE, Gnome, and XFCE a shot every six months or so I still use MATE.
AFAICT, for someone who prefers verbosity, purposeful display usage and textual clarity over all else, it doesn't get much better on the Linux desktop than MATE.
How is MATE these days? I switched to Xfce when the Gnome 3 debacle hit, and after spending about 10 minutes arranging things to look like Gnome 2, have never looked back.
It's a nice Gnome 2 experience. If you're set up with Xfce there's little reason to switch, but if you want to go Gnome 3 -> Gnome 2 then MATE is the best option imo.
If you didn't give gnome shell a second chance, maybe it's time to do so. When it was released many defaults made gnome 3 awkward to use, mostly wasting screen estate for huge icons and so on.
Meanwhile it's all configureable and at least with Manjaro also comes with sensible defaults that work well on a 28" as well as a 15" notebook.
It might be worth trying gnome 3 again, and opening gnome tweaks.
There’s a couple size settings that makes stuff feel good. I have moved onto KDE and honestly KDE is way less smart about screen real estate (it makes up for it in functionality fortunately)
Agreed - def worth trying again. Gnome 3.x was what - Windows Vista era? I switched back to Gnome after the 4x series was released a year or two ago. A bunch has changed for the better.
It was picked up by an interested party and then attracted a community, after the Gnome folks dropped Gnome 2 like a hot coal when they announced Gnome 3 (no we're not supporting it any more, it's deprecated, no, there's no way to make 3 behave like 2, no, you can't have 2 and 3 on the same box, that doesn't work).
So it continued after a short period of discontinuity, during which time I think a lot of people moved to Xfce, and Mint built their "Cinnamon" DE.
There was a several year hiatus between end of gnome 2 and beginning of mate, and even longer (a year or two) before mate was solid. During this time I remember a lot of attempts at gnome 2 replacement (fallback, flashback etc) and people jumping ship to xfce. I spent a while on ubuntu 10.04 LTS beyond security support then crunchbang before hearing of the mate project, then moved to linux mint and ubuntumate, which is where I've stayed. Those years were a bit disrupted and I stopped recommending linux to friends during that time.
> Almost every change Gnome3 did over Gnome2 was a change for the worse or for far worse.
At first it felt like they just went for change for a sake of change so they could be unique among the DEs but now, it seems the long-term goal wasn't just creating a combination between desktop and mobile environment but aiming at being the mobile environment first with optional support for desktops.
And indeed, reading all experiences people had with devs working around Gnome nowadays it seems they forgot they're an open-source community and decided to play corporation card, where it's totally fine to ignore the end-user and their feedback.
Gnome’s focus has been creating a desktop environment that is consistent and easy to develop for. Which requires minimal testing and is not exceedingly buggy.
Which is why Gnome is extremely popular across the spectrum. With users, distros and developers.
Gnome makes Linux an OS that can compete with the likes of Macos and Windows and actually best them.
> but aiming at being the mobile environment first
I'd say, being 'touch environment first', not mobile. And it resulted in a very poor UX for mouse users, while touch GNU/Linux computers never appeared (except androids, but they have no use for gnome anyway).
GNOME has excellent support for keyboard based navigation BTW. Almost anything can be done with the keyboard. Most shell actions has a keyboard shortcut.
They could have done it without taking away convenient menus. Previously all apps had standardized interface, now everyone invents the bicycle for themselves.
You are not alone, Unity was my desktop until it was dropped by Canonical. I ended up moving to Windows after that as I did not like the replacement. The main thing I remember was that it was quite fast and worked well with Vmware which is what I used to host client's VMs. Maybe I will give it another go now.
It was always there, just apt install unity? It even asks you which greeter to use and, unlike when Canonical was trying to monetize it, you don't have to remove the adware "lenses" such as Amazon.
The best feature from Unity was just tapping alt and easily finding the menu option on the app I was running. This helped a lot with apps that had many or deep menu items like GIMP or LibreOffice. The new policy, however, is for apps to drop menus. I don't think a new incarnation without app developers embracing it would have the same effect.
Also, for the sake of maintainability, it would be very good if this was implemented using GNOME extensions.
I remember what happened I think. There was a thread here on HN a few years back presenting something new Ubuntu Unity related and discussion developed about how Unity was bad. Someone from Ubuntu team saw the thread and said he did not know people hated it so much and they will look into into it/change it back to gnome?
Apparently forgotten and I can't find the thread to verify the details!
I was involved in the development of Unity at Canonical, just as I was involved in the development of the Eee PC at Xandros before that. Unity developers were very well aware that there was a small but extremely vocal minority of users who expressed their strong dislike and contempt for their work. We were also aware of the much larger and quieter plurality of people who liked and appreciated it, and maybe the majority of people who just turned on their computer and got to work without a second thought about the desktop environment. A part of my job was managing the negative feedback from users... I think would have been aware of any decision to change back to Gnome based on the strident and biased opinion of some rando on the internet.
For the record, Unity was discontinued as a business decision to make Canonical more profitable for its investors. Plain and simple. Normal everyday business.
> Unity developers were very well aware that there was a small but extremely vocal minority of users who expressed their strong dislike and contempt for their work. We were also aware of the much larger and quieter plurality of people who liked and appreciated it, and maybe the majority of people who just turned on their computer and got to work without a second thought about the desktop environment.
How would you tell? If most people don't say anything and most of the ones that do say something have negative feedback, how do you distinguish between most people being okay with it versus most people hating it quietly?
I remember this events too, probably HN hate was not the main reason but probably it was the final straw.
Then you see some dudes ehre hating on snap, dudes calm down, your fucking flatpacks are not equivalent, they are GNOME/desktop centric, can't use them on a server.
I opened that post. The top comment asks for mixed DPI, trackpad gestures, and better power management. I had to scan (and click the next page thing) quite a lot to get to something that looked vaguely critical of Unity (and even then it was "collaborate with Gnome more"). I wish they took the other suggestions as seriously…
I did not hate Mir, but given that Canonical was attempting to develop so many projects at the same time:
- a conventional PC desktop;
- a mobile device desktop;
- a packaging format;
- a mobile OS for smartphones and tablets.
It seemed foolish to me to work on a new display server as well.
And yet, oddly, while both the desktops, and the mobile OS, are now abandoned by their creator company, the display server is alive and well, and is now being turned into a Wayland compositor.
What i remembered is that it was widely hated, and canonical was shoving it down everyone's throats and saying things like "we know that unity is objectively the best desktop environment that ever existed", allowing them to discard any critique.
But eventually they had to face reality, and gave up.
I'm sure there were people who liked it. I never met one.
I used to dislike Unity when it came out. I thought it's weird with the global menu, close button in the top-left corner and other ideas. However, after using macOS for a longer period of time, I got used to these ideas and actually prefer them nowadays. After that Unity became one of my favorite desktop environments.
The fact that unity just seemed like "let's cargo cult macos" while they were bragging about how awesome they were ("objectively the best" was thrown around) was a real turn off for me.
I still use Gnome metacity flashback because it wastes less screen space and has a nice virtual workspace switcher.
I'm less happy with the configuration/tweak tools and the fact that they are only accessible from within the account and the display itself (not easy to administrate for different users). I wish there was someone keeping a list of requirements so that every new WM could avoid mistakes in the previous ones.
IMO, the lasting stability of a UI is a far greater factor in long-term user acceptance, satisfaction and facility than almost any breaking "improvements" that are imposed by developers - c.f. Firefox for a negative example.
So, if you want to (re-)introduce a new desktop paradigm, give users a simple mechanism to choose to disagree.
Canonical had at some point two variants of Unity, the regulate one (slow) and a qml based one (super snappy). I'm still sad that they did not stick with the qml version. GNOME nowerdays is fine, but for years it was slow and lacking compared to what we already had with qml Unity.
There's another comment below that mentions Unity 8, which has been forked and is being maintained as a mobile shell. Is that the same QML Unity you're mentioning? I remember they were going for some kind of convergence.
Unity was probably the most straightforward n00b-friendly Linux DE. I'm still rocking it in 2022 because I'm running a Lisp VLM on a 16.06 Ubuntu image. It's... less objectionable than GNOME and less fiddly than KDE.
I have tried and still use different DEs, but for some time now Windows 10 DE is my favourite one. I think all others should just copy it, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Anything specifically you like about it? Tiling seems really limited, virtual desktops could still need more work, the search I have basically given up on (though "everything" is a kinda nice app for part of that), volume mixer widget is also very limited (e.g. see ear trumpet as an alternative), file manager still does not have tabs, network settings are convoluted (manual eduroam setup anyone?),...
Honestly, whenever I use windows it feels "okay" but I could not point at anything to say "oh, neat".
For all it's faults and annoyances I have never once considered gnome, kde, or even cinnamon inferior to unity.
People talk about it's consistancy in the comment section but as someone who has had to use different DE varients over the years, any features unity had a claim to fame for were implemented and then superseded by gnome a long time ago.
But I am typing on it right now, and it does a bunch of things better than any other desktop I've tried.
The global menu bar is easy and efficient. It reduces onscreen clutter -- an unfocused window simply has no menu bar. If you click on it, it appears in the panel. I have 3 monitors here and each of them has several apps on; this means that for each monitor, there is a separate menu bar, but only when I am using it.
(In this respect it is like AmigaOS, not macOS: Mac menus are always visible. AmigaOS ones only on a right-click.) Unity menus appear when the mouse is over the panel; otherwise, I see the current app title, and the window title if it's maximised.
In compliant apps, menus are navigable with the keyboard alone, using the same shortcuts as on Windows. This is a win for accessibility. Sadly it's succumbing to bitrot now.
With a pointing device, menus are super-easy to hit, because they are on a screen edge. This is called Fitt's Law and it is a law of ergonomics, not some preference. To hit in-window menu bars, you have to aim, and the target is vertically very small, but at least it is wide. With a hamburger menu as in GNOME, Pantheon, and modern KDE, it is a single character cell, hard to hit both vertically and horizontally, and with zero visual clue that it is important.
Unlike macOS or AmigaOS, windows are manageable with keyboard shortcuts as well, and again using the same standard keys as on MS Windows. This is a boon for accessibility. If you wish you can have an MS Windows/Motif style window menu, and the buttons are easily rearranged for a Windows-like layout if you wish.
The app launcher/switcher is vertical, which is more space-efficient on widescreen displays. MacOS can do this but it's an option; it's the default here. But it's better than the Mac one, because:
- it shows how many windows you have open;
- it's trivially easy to open a new empty window: middle-click the dock icon.
Windows snap like on recent MS Windows, but not on macOS without add-on apps.
So we have a happy combination of some of the best Mac, Windows and Amiga features:
- a global menu bar, very easy to hit, more space-efficient on small displays and easier to hit on big displays;
- keyboard accessibilty, like on Windows but unlike the Mac;
- a space-efficient layout for widescreens that exceeds its inspiration;
- which is also efficient on large screen and multiscreen layouts;
- and a dock that has more utility than the macOS dock.
It's a really good combination of the best features from Windows and macOS (and others), plus additional tweaks.
Compare to the competition:
- KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXQt can't handle vertical taskbars properly. KDE doesn't honour Windows keystrokes, and in recent versions is removing the menu bar from apps altogether.
- LXDE does do vertical taskbars and keystrokes, but the layout is rigid and can't easily be customised.
- Xfce does vertical taskbars well and honours Windows keystrokes, but can't do a global menu bar. Its customisation is excellent and it's low-resource.
- GNOME has its own wholly new set of keystrokes and is conspicuously poor at window management ansd multihead displays. It's not designed for people who do their own window management or want multihead; it's designed for keyboard warriors who want a few full-screen or tiled console windows. It has an empty wasted panel with a few small combined controls that can't be separated. It is poor for keyboard access, and has no menu bars by design. Features are being removed from the file manager. It's bad if you know the dominant platform's keyboard controls. It's bad if you use a screen reader. It's bad if you want rich multihead -- e.g. I can't put the panel on 1 monitor and the dock on another and the virtual-desktop manager on another.
Some but not all of these things can be fixed with GNOME extensions but this 100% always breaks on a GNOME version upgrade. Extensions must and can only target specific versions of the desktop. There is no safe mode to load without extensions. Theming has been intentionally removed in version 40+.
GNOME CSDs also destroy a hallmark feature of desktop GUIs since the Apple Lisa, which is that almost all human languages and scripts read from top to bottom. So you start at the top with a title, then you read the content, and then at the bottom are the buttons which you use to decide what to do with it: OK, cancel, close, apply, whatever. GNOME inverts this in all its dialog boxes: the main action buttons are at the top, before you've read the content. You must skip them, read down, decide, and then maybe click a button at the bottom and maybe go up to the top and find a button in the title bar. This is not obvious and so designers resort to making that button brightly coloured so it stands out. Unless you are using a non-GNOME non-Gtk app, in which case the buttons will probably be at the bottom, perhaps, maybe.
Also, a time-honoured feature of xNix window managers since the early 1990s is that you have a 3-button mouse and can middle-click the title bar to push the window to the back of the Z-stack. GNOME CSDs break this. One of the developers promised me personally that it would not be broken; it was broken anyway.
GNOME has new features that its fans love (like the overview, a combined app-search screen and tiled window preview). Non-GNOME fans find this hard to understand or see the appeal. KDE is adding it; other desktops ignore it.
It feels funny. When Ubuntu moved to the Gnome shell with their customizations, it felt strange for a couple hours, then everything made sense. I completely forgot I am not using Unity on Ubuntu - the icons are where they used to be and that's about what really feels different now from stock Gnome.
For me the killer feature of Unity is the HUD[0] allowing you to simply type to find menu items. Save so much time going through options it is incredible.
There was also plotinus (https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus) for a sort-of-similar thing. I think it still works, but I use too few gui applications to bother.
I’m really sad that canonical abandoned Unity. It was so easy to use and was really easy to recommend to people. I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it.