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I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Ci

by awat 8y ago

I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon. I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.

aphextron 8y ago
>I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it. Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfce.
  - gnomewascool 8y ago
    1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity). 2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View). 3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space. BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Those are nice, though #1 breaks down with multiple monitors. None really required a new DE, could have been added to any of the existing.
- blahblahblahw 8y ago
  >I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
nol13 8y ago
People (me) were just mad because seemingly in the blink of an eye they went from having a stable mature linux desktop, sometimes even approaching "it just works," to having that ripped away and replaced with a choice between [radical new desktop] or xfce. Unity or GNOME Shell might really be great, but that's a huge change to force on unsuspecting neckbeards. Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
- dopeboy 8y ago
  This is exactly right, it was timing. I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
  - timellis-smith 8y ago
    Lucid and maverick where possibly the best desktop experiences I've had. Going to Natty (and oneric), with its many bugs was such a huge shock that I pretty much stopped using Ubuntu and switched to Mint
jitix 8y ago
I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash). Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
- roryisok 8y ago
  > The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
  - roryisok 8y ago
    Not sure why that got downvoted but ok. Just expressing my opinion that apple are moving toward exactly this
- pmontra 8y ago
  There was, and there is, Gnome Flashback which is basically a Gnome 2 desktop with GTK 3. The Compiz cube still works.
flyinghamster 8y ago
Have they fixed the problems with Firefox on Cinnamon? I ran it for quite a while, and was thoroughly frustrated by dropdowns showing up in the wrong place on Firefox (this on 16.04). Moving over to XFCE was an effective workaround, but other than the Firefox problem, I preferred Cinnamon.
- schwank 8y ago
  I've been running Mint Cinnamon as my primary OS for a few years on both a Dell Latitude E74xx and a homebuilt mini-ITX box with no such issues. The laptop is integrated gfx and the desktop is a 1050gtx at 4k. FF is my main browser and I have not seen any such behavior.
  - flyinghamster 8y ago
    Hmmmm... I've had the problem on a 960/Ryzen 7 and an old 9600/FX-6100 rig, and also on a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with integrated Intel graphics. However, I installed Cinnamon from the Ubuntu 16.04 repos, so maybe they had a bad version there.
pmontra 8y ago
I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04. So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1] In his words > Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable. > The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity. [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unity-mark-shuttleworth-explains https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
zizek23 8y ago
Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it. I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it. Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings. In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
borplk 8y ago
Cinnamon hands down has the best multi-monitor support out of any other non-tiling desktop I have tried.

by awat 8y ago

aphextron 8y ago

>I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it. Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.

jasonkostempski 8y ago
The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfce.
- gnomewascool 8y ago
  1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity). 2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View). 3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space. BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Those are nice, though #1 breaks down with multiple monitors. None really required a new DE, could have been added to any of the existing.
blahblahblahw 8y ago
>I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.

nol13 8y ago

People (me) were just mad because seemingly in the blink of an eye they went from having a stable mature linux desktop, sometimes even approaching "it just works," to having that ripped away and replaced with a choice between [radical new desktop] or xfce. Unity or GNOME Shell might really be great, but that's a huge change to force on unsuspecting neckbeards. Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.

dopeboy 8y ago
This is exactly right, it was timing. I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
- timellis-smith 8y ago
  Lucid and maverick where possibly the best desktop experiences I've had. Going to Natty (and oneric), with its many bugs was such a huge shock that I pretty much stopped using Ubuntu and switched to Mint

jitix 8y ago

I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash). Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.

roryisok 8y ago
> The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
- roryisok 8y ago
  Not sure why that got downvoted but ok. Just expressing my opinion that apple are moving toward exactly this
pmontra 8y ago
There was, and there is, Gnome Flashback which is basically a Gnome 2 desktop with GTK 3. The Compiz cube still works.

flyinghamster 8y ago

Have they fixed the problems with Firefox on Cinnamon? I ran it for quite a while, and was thoroughly frustrated by dropdowns showing up in the wrong place on Firefox (this on 16.04). Moving over to XFCE was an effective workaround, but other than the Firefox problem, I preferred Cinnamon.

schwank 8y ago
I've been running Mint Cinnamon as my primary OS for a few years on both a Dell Latitude E74xx and a homebuilt mini-ITX box with no such issues. The laptop is integrated gfx and the desktop is a 1050gtx at 4k. FF is my main browser and I have not seen any such behavior.
- flyinghamster 8y ago
  Hmmmm... I've had the problem on a 960/Ryzen 7 and an old 9600/FX-6100 rig, and also on a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with integrated Intel graphics. However, I installed Cinnamon from the Ubuntu 16.04 repos, so maybe they had a bad version there.

pmontra 8y ago

I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04. So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1] In his words > Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable. > The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity. [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unity-mark-shuttleworth-explains https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...

zizek23 8y ago

Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it. I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it. Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings. In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.

borplk 8y ago

Cinnamon hands down has the best multi-monitor support out of any other non-tiling desktop I have tried.