11 ms·

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to n

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the KDE version of a fucking text editor is. Seemed really, really stupid. Can't we just have a relatively standard GUI text editor across platforms? Or were we all just expected to use vi and emacs? When the windowing layers stopped moving around so much, and Greg Kroah-Hartman and co. had gotten the driver problems under control, we suddenly had a bunch of different Linuxes that were no longer compatible with each other due to packaging systems. So, now users had to download a deb, or a yum package, or a gentoo package... It was all very confusing for desktop users, especially beginners. My quote to sum this up would be: "Why are these packages in my repository if they won't work after I install them because I'm using KDE/Gnome/Cinnamon?" [1]: Unity took Ubuntu from being the default Linux I could put on anything, to a bloated, slow moving sack of crap. I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed. Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop.

jankotek 10y ago
2001 laptop? Even contemporary systems (Win XP) would be slow on that. > Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.
- VonGuard 10y ago
  LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.
  - jankotek 10y ago
    Unity needs graphic acceleration. Of course it does not work on something like that. Use Lubuntu and it will work just fine. XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k. No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today. EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.
  - oneshot908 10y ago
    I think Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis. That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack. What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong. Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.
    - VonGuard 10y ago
      Agreed on the Unity stuff. I think Unity could be fine and dandy on its own, but it should NOT be the default UI for a system designed and distributed under the auspices of being the super inclusive Linux of the 3rd world. Which is kinda what Ubuntu was trying to be. If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.
    - yellowapple 10y ago
      > they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community). I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.
- phillipwills 10y ago
  Also, XP was released in 2002, so it should work rather well on the previous year's hardware...
  - jankotek 10y ago
    Wiki: General availability October 25, 2001; 15 years ago. General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.
    - dfox 10y ago
      Microsoft specified minimum is 64MB, recommended 128MB. XP RTM with 128MB RAM was perfectly usable, obviously it was not a good idea to run lots of crap in background.
    - phillipwills 10y ago
      Nice... Didn't Google before posting... Busted. :)
  - Sunset 10y ago
    You're the hopeful kind I see. XP was utter shit on "medium" hardware of its time. It ate ram like no tomorrow compared to 98.
- yellowapple 10y ago
  I've run relatively recent Linux distros on hardware with far tighter constraints (like on my Compaq Presario 1210; may you rest in peace, old friend). Damn Small Linux was king here, but distros like Tiny Core and Puppy are also designed for this exact use case. 256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.
udp 10y ago
> Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop. Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions. In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.
- VonGuard 10y ago
  I've long ago moved on from this. This was many years ago. We put a lot of Linux desktops in a lot of homes, though. Thousands a year.
- acmecorps 10y ago
  Like the OP, I absolutely despise Unity and tried to find a different route. I came across xubuntu - tried it and absolutely love the simplicity. It's minimal, gets out of the way when you need it; but, best of all, it's USABLE. Can't praise it enough.
- yellowapple 10y ago
  To expand on this, Ubuntu MATE is also a viable option if you literally want Ubuntu with the old DE (since MATE is a fork of GNOME2).
- raverbashing 10y ago
  XFCE: lightweight and powerful That's my choice as well
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.
- VonGuard 10y ago
  Exactly! Those keyboard shortcuts and menu positions are part of my daily WORKFLOW! Stop moving them around and changing them! It is utterly infuriating to have to relearn your desktop GUI behavior. Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS. Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).
    - pantalaimon 10y ago
      But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.
      - paulddraper 10y ago
        Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones. If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.
        pinum 10y ago
        I would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions. I want to install SomeApp. My options are: * `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago * Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages" * Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists * Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:" * Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.
dleslie 10y ago
> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. You would like the MATE desktop. Http://ubuntu-mate.com
- VonGuard 10y ago
  I used this on my desktop Linux machine now! I love it!
soyiuz 10y ago
I don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the uni). Most of my frustrations come down to these three basic things: printing, power management, and wifi. I was excited to delve deep into OS internals to troubleshoot in the beginning, bit now I'm just annoyed.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  All of those being moving targets...
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Printing still sucks. Out of the box Ubuntu with my WF-3540... Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great! I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver. So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog. Okay, let's try this again. Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add. "Success!". I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing. Then I look. And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF? Alright. Delete printer. Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great. But holy crap. It's 2017. It's Ubuntu. How the hell is something this simple this broken?
  - dorfsmay 10y ago
    Don't use the apps, use cups directly. It's not right but it'll get you printing. http://localhost:631 http://localhost:631
throw2016 10y ago
Curiously my experience of Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 is the exact opposite. It's by far the fastest Linux desktop I have tried and I have been tinkering with Linux desktops since the early 2000s. My experience has been so dramatically different from some of the negative reviews I had read online that I can only conclude these are from older buggy versions or perhaps mis-configured or non accelerated GUI drivers. For me it's been much faster and smoother than my 13 retina Macbook Pro and Window 7 Desktop and this on an ancient i3 2100 system with 4GB ram and old 6770 Radeon card. My only regret is I didn't try it earlier because of all the negativity floating around about it. I suggest anyone interested in Linux desktops ignore the negativity and try Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 with an open mind. Its fast, lightweight and reasonably sleek and minimal.
- AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
  This! The negativity regarding Unity is hurting Linux. So many people I know who tried a switch in the last couple of years were put off Linux because their Linux-friends pushed them to Mate or Xfce, running on Arch, or something similar. Those friends heavily warned against Unity and Ubuntu as if they were the devil. Showing those who were interested in a switch what a modern Linux desktop looks and feels like was a revelation to them.
AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop. Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, but for me it's just frustrating having to use Desktops that are basically some half baked variation of Windows XP. Let me put it this way: if the desktop environments you so eloquently despise wouldn't exist, I would be writing this comment on a Mac and not on Linux.
- wink 10y ago
  I think the problem here is if people were happy with what they had in 2003, why change it? Not everything UI-wise in 7 or later is better than in XP I'd say. And apparently many people agree. Actually I am still using 7 and all the UI stuff that's nixer than XP or even 2000 is just eyecandy and nothing "I would totally never go back". Because I would - if I needed a stable Windows that only came with XP's UI - so be it. FWIW, I noticed recently that I've been using xmonad for 5 years (+/- 2 weeks) and still 100% happy. It lets me work efficiently and nothing has changed.
  - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
    If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style. Nowadays I have the feeling, Linux has become the resort of the grumpy and disenfranchized, clutching to whatever was cool when they were young. The levelheaded and progressive jumped ship to OSX and are now probably contemplating switching to Windows 10 after Apple dropped the ball for them. This leaves all Linux progress like Gnome and Systemd maintained by inept pompous hipsters. /rant
    - 10y ago
julian_1 10y ago
> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows. It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They restore sanity by providing lightweight, shortcut focused GUI systems, that don't intrude but provide enough functionality to get things done. For anyone searching and testing GUIs like XFCE, don't dismiss tiling window managers as being too complicated or a bridge too far. My experience is that they work wonderfully in practice.
- j3097736 10y ago
  But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it! But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else! What works for one person likely won't work for another.
    - raarts 10y ago
      And this is what killed the Linux desktop. 99% of the population does NOT want to try a gazillion desktops (of which the installation is error prone), just to find out what 'works best for you'.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        You don't have to if you don't want to. Any sensible desktop distro has a DE configured for you out of the box, if you want to just start using it.
  - 10y ago
flukus 10y ago
At least 10 years ago x11/xorg was a reliable component. Now there's an extra layer of churn below the desktop level too.
feedjoelpie 10y ago
Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.
- ue_ 10y ago
  I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas are large, and on systems with bad or no graphics acceleration it will complain and make you use Gnome Shell, which is ironically, in the opinion of many, nicer than Gnome 3 default UI. I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown. Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though. If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view. But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    I think part of the issue with GNOME 3 is that the instructions on screen for how to use the UI hide the most efficient ways to do so. The application launcher for me is universally used by hitting super, typing what I want, and hitting enter. I never actually click on anything. Same with swiping up on the login screen, you can do that on a touch screen, but you can also just start typing your password.
- herbst 10y ago
  I too am totally in love with gnome shell. Guess people just hate on new workflows because szre it takes a few hours to adapt
rsheridan6 10y ago
I just bought a sub-$300 laptop, which was unusable with the default Windows OS. It's snappy with Ubuntu/unity. I don't think very many people care about running 2001 laptops anymore.
vacri 10y ago
> I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed. This use case is an edge case, and you could still serve it by using a non-default desktop (like lubuntu). Laptops from 2001 have super-weak cpus and gpus, and aren't a representative sample of desktop users. At one of the two companies I work for, more than half the developers use Ubuntu, and all-but-one (me) use Unity and like it. I use KDE there because of old-school configurability, but after a couple of years of dealing with KDE's bugginess, it's time to move on, methinks.
antfarm 10y ago
Have you tried lubuntu [1], i.e. Ubuntu + LXDE [2]? LXDE is my favorite desktop environment for being clean, modern looking and lightweight. [1] http://lubuntu.net/ http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://lxde.org/ http://lxde.org/
michaelmrose 10y ago
Your post is a whole bucket of wrong. You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop. Vim and emacs are awesome. Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program itself and can even be done by individuals far less skilled than the original dev. This means with only a relatively tiny additional input of labor a program can be packaged for all the most common distros. I don't prefer unity but I think you bazaarly overstate the case.
- Samathy 10y ago
  I see an awful lot of posts like OP here where they're for some reason thinking that using a specific distro, or even DE, locks them into using specific packages. You can literally install anything on any Linux distro. Some things might take a bit of work, sure, but they're all just a Linux system underneath. Install the right dependencies, get the app somehow (through a package manager, or source),put the files in the right place, and bobs your uncle.
Zenst 10y ago
I'm tending to agree for the mass's at least, for me CDE was and still is a great desktop, least for somebody who just wants to pull up lots of terminals and have multi-desktop panels - just works. Simple, basic and sure lacks eye candy beyond Xeye's but then I own a lava lamp. Yes mass basic users like their eye candy, and the diversity which is a strength in many area's is equally a weakness when it comes to desktops. GUI's and the overhead add so much in complications to code that if they keep changing then they tend to get ignored or badly utilized and that gives the user a mixed half-baked experience. This and they tend to be the epitome of feature-creep.

jankotek 10y ago

2001 laptop? Even contemporary systems (Win XP) would be slow on that. > Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.

VonGuard 10y ago
LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.
- jankotek 10y ago
  Unity needs graphic acceleration. Of course it does not work on something like that. Use Lubuntu and it will work just fine. XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k. No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today. EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.
- oneshot908 10y ago
  I think Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis. That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack. What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong. Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.
  - VonGuard 10y ago
    Agreed on the Unity stuff. I think Unity could be fine and dandy on its own, but it should NOT be the default UI for a system designed and distributed under the auspices of being the super inclusive Linux of the 3rd world. Which is kinda what Ubuntu was trying to be. If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.
  - yellowapple 10y ago
    > they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community). I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.
phillipwills 10y ago
Also, XP was released in 2002, so it should work rather well on the previous year's hardware...
- jankotek 10y ago
  Wiki: General availability October 25, 2001; 15 years ago. General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.
  - dfox 10y ago
    Microsoft specified minimum is 64MB, recommended 128MB. XP RTM with 128MB RAM was perfectly usable, obviously it was not a good idea to run lots of crap in background.
  - phillipwills 10y ago
    Nice... Didn't Google before posting... Busted. :)
- Sunset 10y ago
  You're the hopeful kind I see. XP was utter shit on "medium" hardware of its time. It ate ram like no tomorrow compared to 98.
yellowapple 10y ago
I've run relatively recent Linux distros on hardware with far tighter constraints (like on my Compaq Presario 1210; may you rest in peace, old friend). Damn Small Linux was king here, but distros like Tiny Core and Puppy are also designed for this exact use case. 256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.

udp 10y ago

> Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop. Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions. In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.

VonGuard 10y ago
I've long ago moved on from this. This was many years ago. We put a lot of Linux desktops in a lot of homes, though. Thousands a year.
acmecorps 10y ago
Like the OP, I absolutely despise Unity and tried to find a different route. I came across xubuntu - tried it and absolutely love the simplicity. It's minimal, gets out of the way when you need it; but, best of all, it's USABLE. Can't praise it enough.
yellowapple 10y ago
To expand on this, Ubuntu MATE is also a viable option if you literally want Ubuntu with the old DE (since MATE is a fork of GNOME2).
raverbashing 10y ago
XFCE: lightweight and powerful That's my choice as well
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.

VonGuard 10y ago
Exactly! Those keyboard shortcuts and menu positions are part of my daily WORKFLOW! Stop moving them around and changing them! It is utterly infuriating to have to relearn your desktop GUI behavior. Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS. Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).
  - pantalaimon 10y ago
    But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones. If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.
      - pinum 10y ago
        I would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions. I want to install SomeApp. My options are: * `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago * Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages" * Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists * Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:" * Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.

dleslie 10y ago

> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. You would like the MATE desktop. Http://ubuntu-mate.com

VonGuard 10y ago
I used this on my desktop Linux machine now! I love it!

soyiuz 10y ago

I don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the uni). Most of my frustrations come down to these three basic things: printing, power management, and wifi. I was excited to delve deep into OS internals to troubleshoot in the beginning, bit now I'm just annoyed.

digi_owl 10y ago
All of those being moving targets...
FireBeyond 10y ago
Printing still sucks. Out of the box Ubuntu with my WF-3540... Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great! I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver. So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog. Okay, let's try this again. Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add. "Success!". I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing. Then I look. And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF? Alright. Delete printer. Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great. But holy crap. It's 2017. It's Ubuntu. How the hell is something this simple this broken?
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  Don't use the apps, use cups directly. It's not right but it'll get you printing. http://localhost:631 http://localhost:631

throw2016 10y ago

Curiously my experience of Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 is the exact opposite. It's by far the fastest Linux desktop I have tried and I have been tinkering with Linux desktops since the early 2000s. My experience has been so dramatically different from some of the negative reviews I had read online that I can only conclude these are from older buggy versions or perhaps mis-configured or non accelerated GUI drivers. For me it's been much faster and smoother than my 13 retina Macbook Pro and Window 7 Desktop and this on an ancient i3 2100 system with 4GB ram and old 6770 Radeon card. My only regret is I didn't try it earlier because of all the negativity floating around about it. I suggest anyone interested in Linux desktops ignore the negativity and try Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 with an open mind. Its fast, lightweight and reasonably sleek and minimal.

AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
This! The negativity regarding Unity is hurting Linux. So many people I know who tried a switch in the last couple of years were put off Linux because their Linux-friends pushed them to Mate or Xfce, running on Arch, or something similar. Those friends heavily warned against Unity and Ubuntu as if they were the devil. Showing those who were interested in a switch what a modern Linux desktop looks and feels like was a revelation to them.

AnonymousPlanet 10y ago

Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop. Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, but for me it's just frustrating having to use Desktops that are basically some half baked variation of Windows XP. Let me put it this way: if the desktop environments you so eloquently despise wouldn't exist, I would be writing this comment on a Mac and not on Linux.

wink 10y ago
I think the problem here is if people were happy with what they had in 2003, why change it? Not everything UI-wise in 7 or later is better than in XP I'd say. And apparently many people agree. Actually I am still using 7 and all the UI stuff that's nixer than XP or even 2000 is just eyecandy and nothing "I would totally never go back". Because I would - if I needed a stable Windows that only came with XP's UI - so be it. FWIW, I noticed recently that I've been using xmonad for 5 years (+/- 2 weeks) and still 100% happy. It lets me work efficiently and nothing has changed.
- AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
  If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style. Nowadays I have the feeling, Linux has become the resort of the grumpy and disenfranchized, clutching to whatever was cool when they were young. The levelheaded and progressive jumped ship to OSX and are now probably contemplating switching to Windows 10 after Apple dropped the ball for them. This leaves all Linux progress like Gnome and Systemd maintained by inept pompous hipsters. /rant
  - 10y ago

julian_1 10y ago

> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows. It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They restore sanity by providing lightweight, shortcut focused GUI systems, that don't intrude but provide enough functionality to get things done. For anyone searching and testing GUIs like XFCE, don't dismiss tiling window managers as being too complicated or a bridge too far. My experience is that they work wonderfully in practice.

j3097736 10y ago
But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it! But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else! What works for one person likely won't work for another.
  - raarts 10y ago
    And this is what killed the Linux desktop. 99% of the population does NOT want to try a gazillion desktops (of which the installation is error prone), just to find out what 'works best for you'.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      You don't have to if you don't want to. Any sensible desktop distro has a DE configured for you out of the box, if you want to just start using it.
- 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

At least 10 years ago x11/xorg was a reliable component. Now there's an extra layer of churn below the desktop level too.

feedjoelpie 10y ago

Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.

ue_ 10y ago
I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas are large, and on systems with bad or no graphics acceleration it will complain and make you use Gnome Shell, which is ironically, in the opinion of many, nicer than Gnome 3 default UI. I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown. Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though. If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view. But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  I think part of the issue with GNOME 3 is that the instructions on screen for how to use the UI hide the most efficient ways to do so. The application launcher for me is universally used by hitting super, typing what I want, and hitting enter. I never actually click on anything. Same with swiping up on the login screen, you can do that on a touch screen, but you can also just start typing your password.
herbst 10y ago
I too am totally in love with gnome shell. Guess people just hate on new workflows because szre it takes a few hours to adapt

rsheridan6 10y ago

I just bought a sub-$300 laptop, which was unusable with the default Windows OS. It's snappy with Ubuntu/unity. I don't think very many people care about running 2001 laptops anymore.

vacri 10y ago

> I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed. This use case is an edge case, and you could still serve it by using a non-default desktop (like lubuntu). Laptops from 2001 have super-weak cpus and gpus, and aren't a representative sample of desktop users. At one of the two companies I work for, more than half the developers use Ubuntu, and all-but-one (me) use Unity and like it. I use KDE there because of old-school configurability, but after a couple of years of dealing with KDE's bugginess, it's time to move on, methinks.

antfarm 10y ago

Have you tried lubuntu [1], i.e. Ubuntu + LXDE [2]? LXDE is my favorite desktop environment for being clean, modern looking and lightweight. [1] http://lubuntu.net/ http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://lxde.org/ http://lxde.org/

michaelmrose 10y ago

Your post is a whole bucket of wrong. You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop. Vim and emacs are awesome. Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program itself and can even be done by individuals far less skilled than the original dev. This means with only a relatively tiny additional input of labor a program can be packaged for all the most common distros. I don't prefer unity but I think you bazaarly overstate the case.

Samathy 10y ago
I see an awful lot of posts like OP here where they're for some reason thinking that using a specific distro, or even DE, locks them into using specific packages. You can literally install anything on any Linux distro. Some things might take a bit of work, sure, but they're all just a Linux system underneath. Install the right dependencies, get the app somehow (through a package manager, or source),put the files in the right place, and bobs your uncle.

Zenst 10y ago

I'm tending to agree for the mass's at least, for me CDE was and still is a great desktop, least for somebody who just wants to pull up lots of terminals and have multi-desktop panels - just works. Simple, basic and sure lacks eye candy beyond Xeye's but then I own a lava lamp. Yes mass basic users like their eye candy, and the diversity which is a strength in many area's is equally a weakness when it comes to desktops. GUI's and the overhead add so much in complications to code that if they keep changing then they tend to get ignored or badly utilized and that gives the user a mixed half-baked experience. This and they tend to be the epitome of feature-creep.