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Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

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Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#31

Post by knorker »

antman wrote: post #16

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!

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.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#32

Post by bitcharmer »

antman wrote: post #16

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 don't think Canonical cares at all about community input on things like that (just look at snap). It was just that unity really was that bad.

No need to blame HN crowd for this.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#33

Post by bitcharmer »

thriftwy wrote: post #30
okasaki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be noted that compared to Unity, GNOME 3 is an even more extreme variant of the phone/netbook UI.

I'm wondering why more people are not using KDE. It is a honest desktop environment which does not try to pretend phone/netbook or parrot Mac OS X. Many of KDE apps are the best in a given category. Konsole certainly is.

> Many of KDE apps are the best in a given category. Konsole certainly is.

Have you tried Terminator?

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#34

Post by thibran »

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.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#36

Post by knorker »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#37

Post by threatripper »

reidrac wrote: post #12
KronisLV wrote: post #7

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 actua…

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 wa…

> 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.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#38

Post by Nursie »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #13
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> When Gnome2 was finally removed from Ubuntu, I tried Unity desktop for a while, didn't like it and installed Gnome3... Gnome 3 was never known as an improvement over Gnome 2. But didn't Gnome 2 continue as MATE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)

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.

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#39

Post by colordrops »

jstanley wrote: post #27

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. [0] https://regolith-desktop.com/

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

Re: Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

#40

Post by fellerts »

jstanley wrote: post #27

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. [0] https://regolith-desktop.com/

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.
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