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This certainly brings back some memories. This is what I wrote in HN when I first encountered Unity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972 https://news.

This certainly brings back some memories. This is what I wrote in HN when I first encountered Unity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972 HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice. I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity. And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes. After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it. But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I "use" the touchscreen option only inadvertently. The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.

jdlyga 9y ago
The problem is, Gnome 3 is way more of a "tablet" operating system than Unity turned out to be. I'd take a halfway point between Gnome 3 and MATE.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  I've used Cinnamon, MATE, Gnome 2, and KDE before making the switch to i3. I highly recommend switching to a tiling WM.
  - 0xFFC 9y ago
    I am looking for tilling window manager for Wayland. Sadly I couldn't find any stable one yet. But SwayWM seems promising.
    - pimeys 9y ago
      Running Xorg is still possible and it's not bad at all. With a recent Intel chipset it might be even faster right now. I'm all in for Wayland, but others than Gnome are not there yet.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      I'm using Sway on my notebook, but I still have Plasma as a fallback. General window management works reasonably well, but some particular Wayland protocol extensions are missing (for example, relative pointer motion, without which games like Minecraft don't work).
      - btschaegg 9y ago
        This. It's easy to just hit C-M-F2 and start an Xorg server if necessary. And, until now, I've had to do that way more often because of bad GUI applications that ignore the possibility of there being a tiling WM instead of problems with wayland...
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    Tiling WMs like i3 or xmonad are great. Xmonad can run under GNOME, making it easier to set up. https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome
  - virtualwhys 9y ago
    Have been running i3 sans Gnome for about 6 years now in a minimal Fedora install. Throw in the tiny `xcalib` package (all 100KB of it) for easy screen inversion (i.e. hotkey toggle light/dark "theme") and you get an easy-on-the-eyes UI with sane window management.
- r3bl 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it just looks like a tablet OS, it doesn't behave as such. I've tried to make it work dozens times, and while I can navigate across the opened windows and start a new one (just don't try it with Dash to Dock), I simply get stuck somewhere. The virtual keyboard doesn't show up, or the virtual keyboard does show up but it doesn't detect key presses. And it's not intuitive. Let's say that I want to open the application launcher and start an app that isn't in my favorites. I can't scroll over the icons because that selects and moves the icons. I have to scroll on the side, where no icons are present. And even then, I can't make a small touch gesture. I have to scroll through all the vertical space on my touchscreen to get to the next grid of apps. I can't use my 2 in 1 in a tablet mode for anything more complicated than the simplest tasks (like reading PDFs in Evince, which works wonderfully).
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Strange to relate, I find Gnome 3 to be fairly keyboard friendly. Coming from dwm/dmenu and using small laptops so tending to use all applications full-screen. Perhaps we need different UI logics that can be selected from a configuration application?
- stevepike 9y ago
  While it looks like a tablet interface, I use gnome 3 on the desktop with two 4k monitors and it works great. (I mention 4k, because while I'd love to use a tiling manager I haven't found good support for UI scaling outside gnome and KDE). Not sure what it's called, but the app launcher + window switcher that comes up when you hit super is really fast / useful even with lots of windows and apps (https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/).
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I distantly remember that there is (or used to be?) a tiling-window-management extension for KWin. Google might help finding it.
dilap 9y ago
it's worth pointing out that apple was immune to this madness.
- zeusk 9y ago
  or is it? Look at Siri, Launchpad, touch bar, photos, iTunes.
  - dilap 9y ago
    they've definitely let the desktop os be swayed by touch idioms (which you could reasonably argue was good or bad), but they didn't try to unify it all into a single os, like a windows and ubuntu.
    - zeusk 9y ago
      I was merely pointing out that Apple was not immune to the paradigm; it isn't a bad thing but needs clear thought of the differences between the two platforms. Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo. My only concern in computing is that of vendor lock in, on the desk/laptop/living room - I'm using a self assembled PC, Surface pro and Xbox One X and the integration is outright amazing but on the mobile side I have an iPhone and an Apple watch which can work very well with each other but not so well with the other ecosystem. Windows is trying to better work with non Windows devices since Satya whereas on the Mac side, anything but iPhone is (and has been) crapshoot. Cloud storage and syncing services (Google Photos, Drive/Dropbox) are godsend but I feel I've gotten way off point now.
      - rodgerd 9y ago
        > Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo. Yes, and my MiiX does a nice job of flipping in and out of tablet mode when I attach and detach the keyboard.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  A problem with Apple is that you can't change it if something doesn't work for you. If I don't like GNOME or Unity, I can easily switch to xmonad, i3, awesome, openbox, fluxbox, xfce, lxde, kde, or many other options.
frik 9y ago
I actually like Unity (especially Unity of Ubuntu 12 and 14 LTS). And Ubuntu Mate with its Gnome 2 inspired shell sounds great. But plain Gnome 3 took the wrong direction, it's too tablet OS alike, a unfortunate regression compared Gnome 2 in usability. Unfortunately KDE also took the wrong direction, after the great KDE3, with KDE4 the started from scratch again, what a big mistake. Basically Gnome and KDE wasted years with rewriting, that turned out worse, and can be blamed that Linux desktop is still at less than 5%. So let's hope Ubuntu 18 LTS transform Gnome 3 to look subjectly less ugly (more traditional) and at least add back the removed toolbars and menubars to the Gnome Texteditor, filemanager, etc. Who came up with the single toolbar button in Gnome 3 Texteditor with only a paste functionality and thought it is a good idea? Bring back the Gnome2 Texteditor as featured in Ubuntu Mate. I want the tab-support in Terminal app back. Why was it removed in Gnome3?
- johnramsden 9y ago
  KDE Plasma 5 is actually at a great state right now. It works well and you can customize it to me whatever kind of desktop you like. Canonical could have made it into whatever they wanted it to be. It's built on top of a Qt, that works everywhere instead of GTK that just focuses on being there for GNOME. In addition to that canonical has already been using Qt for the past few years and could have just continued on with it. Alas, the decision has been made and they're not going to be changing their mind anytime soon.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I've settled on it after trying most of the alternatives, for me it was the only reliable desktop with good high-dpi support.
  - zingmars 9y ago
    I don't think KDE is really quite there yet. For me and from what I've seen and heard it can be extremely unstable (and that's using KDE Neon which ships the up-to-date version of KDE). Hell, at this point I'm giving up on S3 sleep and KDE because after starting it up again KDE is sure to crash a lot when doing simple things like switching to other apps etc.
GuiA 9y ago
> But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. I see as many tablets walking around town, taking the subway, etc as I do laptops, when 6 years ago I saw none, so the tablet future definitely happened, and we are living in it. It’s just that it turned out to be a new category of device that coexists with laptops, rather than replaces them like some pundits thought.
katastic 9y ago
I actually got used to and like Unity, sadly. It's low cpu/memory usage on my 2 GB RAM laptop with a Celeron processor. (A Chromebook converted to Linux.) It overloads a ton of meta keys for moving windows around, moving between workspaces, etc. Very natural once you get used to it on my small keyboard, small 13" screen, and 1366x768 resolution. And once again Canonical is like... f it... after telling us Unity was the new thing and everyone had to get used to it... f it... let's go back. Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now." Going back to Gnome proves to me that there is no grand design behind their decisions. Just hubris and condescension.
- greenhouse_gas 9y ago
  >Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now." On the other hand, it's been six years. That's quite a run (in contrast, gnome 2 switched to gnome 3 only after about 4 years), and considering that Ubuntu as a company is explicitly pivoting to focus on the GUI-less target (pretty much the idea of GNU on the Desktop taking over the world is quite dead, and if Ubuntu goes public, they'll want to focus on what makes money), it's quite expected. The question is if a community fork will emerge.
  - axaxs 9y ago
    Huh? Gnome 2 was 9 years old when Gnome 3 was released..
- dm319 9y ago
  Have a look at what they've done with ubuntu-mate in 17.10. They've got a working global menu, unity-style dock and the HUD.
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jdlyga 9y ago

The problem is, Gnome 3 is way more of a "tablet" operating system than Unity turned out to be. I'd take a halfway point between Gnome 3 and MATE.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago
I've used Cinnamon, MATE, Gnome 2, and KDE before making the switch to i3. I highly recommend switching to a tiling WM.
- 0xFFC 9y ago
  I am looking for tilling window manager for Wayland. Sadly I couldn't find any stable one yet. But SwayWM seems promising.
  - pimeys 9y ago
    Running Xorg is still possible and it's not bad at all. With a recent Intel chipset it might be even faster right now. I'm all in for Wayland, but others than Gnome are not there yet.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I'm using Sway on my notebook, but I still have Plasma as a fallback. General window management works reasonably well, but some particular Wayland protocol extensions are missing (for example, relative pointer motion, without which games like Minecraft don't work).
    - btschaegg 9y ago
      This. It's easy to just hit C-M-F2 and start an Xorg server if necessary. And, until now, I've had to do that way more often because of bad GUI applications that ignore the possibility of there being a tiling WM instead of problems with wayland...
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Tiling WMs like i3 or xmonad are great. Xmonad can run under GNOME, making it easier to set up. https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome
- virtualwhys 9y ago
  Have been running i3 sans Gnome for about 6 years now in a minimal Fedora install. Throw in the tiny `xcalib` package (all 100KB of it) for easy screen inversion (i.e. hotkey toggle light/dark "theme") and you get an easy-on-the-eyes UI with sane window management.
r3bl 9y ago
Unfortunately, it just looks like a tablet OS, it doesn't behave as such. I've tried to make it work dozens times, and while I can navigate across the opened windows and start a new one (just don't try it with Dash to Dock), I simply get stuck somewhere. The virtual keyboard doesn't show up, or the virtual keyboard does show up but it doesn't detect key presses. And it's not intuitive. Let's say that I want to open the application launcher and start an app that isn't in my favorites. I can't scroll over the icons because that selects and moves the icons. I have to scroll on the side, where no icons are present. And even then, I can't make a small touch gesture. I have to scroll through all the vertical space on my touchscreen to get to the next grid of apps. I can't use my 2 in 1 in a tablet mode for anything more complicated than the simplest tasks (like reading PDFs in Evince, which works wonderfully).
keithpeter 9y ago
Strange to relate, I find Gnome 3 to be fairly keyboard friendly. Coming from dwm/dmenu and using small laptops so tending to use all applications full-screen. Perhaps we need different UI logics that can be selected from a configuration application?
stevepike 9y ago
While it looks like a tablet interface, I use gnome 3 on the desktop with two 4k monitors and it works great. (I mention 4k, because while I'd love to use a tiling manager I haven't found good support for UI scaling outside gnome and KDE). Not sure what it's called, but the app launcher + window switcher that comes up when you hit super is really fast / useful even with lots of windows and apps (https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/).
- majewsky 9y ago
  I distantly remember that there is (or used to be?) a tiling-window-management extension for KWin. Google might help finding it.

dilap 9y ago

it's worth pointing out that apple was immune to this madness.

zeusk 9y ago
or is it? Look at Siri, Launchpad, touch bar, photos, iTunes.
- dilap 9y ago
  they've definitely let the desktop os be swayed by touch idioms (which you could reasonably argue was good or bad), but they didn't try to unify it all into a single os, like a windows and ubuntu.
  - zeusk 9y ago
    I was merely pointing out that Apple was not immune to the paradigm; it isn't a bad thing but needs clear thought of the differences between the two platforms. Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo. My only concern in computing is that of vendor lock in, on the desk/laptop/living room - I'm using a self assembled PC, Surface pro and Xbox One X and the integration is outright amazing but on the mobile side I have an iPhone and an Apple watch which can work very well with each other but not so well with the other ecosystem. Windows is trying to better work with non Windows devices since Satya whereas on the Mac side, anything but iPhone is (and has been) crapshoot. Cloud storage and syncing services (Google Photos, Drive/Dropbox) are godsend but I feel I've gotten way off point now.
    - rodgerd 9y ago
      > Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo. Yes, and my MiiX does a nice job of flipping in and out of tablet mode when I attach and detach the keyboard.
JoshMnem 9y ago
A problem with Apple is that you can't change it if something doesn't work for you. If I don't like GNOME or Unity, I can easily switch to xmonad, i3, awesome, openbox, fluxbox, xfce, lxde, kde, or many other options.

frik 9y ago

I actually like Unity (especially Unity of Ubuntu 12 and 14 LTS). And Ubuntu Mate with its Gnome 2 inspired shell sounds great. But plain Gnome 3 took the wrong direction, it's too tablet OS alike, a unfortunate regression compared Gnome 2 in usability. Unfortunately KDE also took the wrong direction, after the great KDE3, with KDE4 the started from scratch again, what a big mistake. Basically Gnome and KDE wasted years with rewriting, that turned out worse, and can be blamed that Linux desktop is still at less than 5%. So let's hope Ubuntu 18 LTS transform Gnome 3 to look subjectly less ugly (more traditional) and at least add back the removed toolbars and menubars to the Gnome Texteditor, filemanager, etc. Who came up with the single toolbar button in Gnome 3 Texteditor with only a paste functionality and thought it is a good idea? Bring back the Gnome2 Texteditor as featured in Ubuntu Mate. I want the tab-support in Terminal app back. Why was it removed in Gnome3?

johnramsden 9y ago
KDE Plasma 5 is actually at a great state right now. It works well and you can customize it to me whatever kind of desktop you like. Canonical could have made it into whatever they wanted it to be. It's built on top of a Qt, that works everywhere instead of GTK that just focuses on being there for GNOME. In addition to that canonical has already been using Qt for the past few years and could have just continued on with it. Alas, the decision has been made and they're not going to be changing their mind anytime soon.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I've settled on it after trying most of the alternatives, for me it was the only reliable desktop with good high-dpi support.
- zingmars 9y ago
  I don't think KDE is really quite there yet. For me and from what I've seen and heard it can be extremely unstable (and that's using KDE Neon which ships the up-to-date version of KDE). Hell, at this point I'm giving up on S3 sleep and KDE because after starting it up again KDE is sure to crash a lot when doing simple things like switching to other apps etc.

GuiA 9y ago

> But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. I see as many tablets walking around town, taking the subway, etc as I do laptops, when 6 years ago I saw none, so the tablet future definitely happened, and we are living in it. It’s just that it turned out to be a new category of device that coexists with laptops, rather than replaces them like some pundits thought.

katastic 9y ago

I actually got used to and like Unity, sadly. It's low cpu/memory usage on my 2 GB RAM laptop with a Celeron processor. (A Chromebook converted to Linux.) It overloads a ton of meta keys for moving windows around, moving between workspaces, etc. Very natural once you get used to it on my small keyboard, small 13" screen, and 1366x768 resolution. And once again Canonical is like... f it... after telling us Unity was the new thing and everyone had to get used to it... f it... let's go back. Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now." Going back to Gnome proves to me that there is no grand design behind their decisions. Just hubris and condescension.

greenhouse_gas 9y ago
>Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now." On the other hand, it's been six years. That's quite a run (in contrast, gnome 2 switched to gnome 3 only after about 4 years), and considering that Ubuntu as a company is explicitly pivoting to focus on the GUI-less target (pretty much the idea of GNU on the Desktop taking over the world is quite dead, and if Ubuntu goes public, they'll want to focus on what makes money), it's quite expected. The question is if a community fork will emerge.
- axaxs 9y ago
  Huh? Gnome 2 was 9 years old when Gnome 3 was released..
dm319 9y ago
Have a look at what they've done with ubuntu-mate in 17.10. They've got a working global menu, unity-style dock and the HUD.

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