2 ms·

It's a funny anecdote: at the time half-baked Unity was rolled out, Gnome Shell was introduced as well, and it was worse (no really: even if you liked the UX de

It's a funny anecdote: at the time half-baked Unity was rolled out, Gnome Shell was introduced as well, and it was worse (no really: even if you liked the UX design, it was so buggy to be really unusable; Unity was simply a plugin for Compiz trying to turn off all features that were buggy). And that's coming from someone with "emeritus" @gnome.org email address. So basically you were going to get an entirely unfamiliar interface anyway. You could get unpolished Red Hat contraption of Gnome Shell, or unpolished Canonical contraption of Unity. If anything, Unity had more resemblance to the interface of old (eg you had static virtual desktops, which you only kinda have even today with Gnome), and if you ever used a spatial grid of workspaces (to leverage your human spatial memory: I used 3x3 grid with Emacs in the centre one and task-based workspaces around it), you were out of luck with Gnome 3. I think Gnome 3 has become significantly more robust even before Unity's demise, but UX design-wise, Unity is much better even today after being unmaintained for years (though buggy as hell).

worik 6y ago
Interesting. At the time I looked at Gnome Shell. I do not recall the details but I retreated to Mate (? was that the name of the Linux Mint desktop?) that had the old style. I thought I decided I wanted the comfort of the familiar. Over time it won me over. Which was my point. Canonical at the time were so arrogant that they did not try to win me over, they dumped me in it
- necovek 6y ago
  Exactly, you retreated to Mate that shipped with Gnome 2 because Gnome 3 sucked too :) However, Gnome 2 was all but abandoned at the time, and it did not make sense for Canonical to commit to supporting it for the next 5 years with their LTS release without the help of the upstream. All the big distributions were "forced" to switch to an unfamiliar interface. Fedora did too with Gnome Shell. Ubuntu at least had derivatives like Mate or Kubuntu that you could easily move to with an apt-get install.
  - worik 6y ago
    But they could have had a transition. They did not. Users == Lusers thinking.
    - necovek 6y ago
      You seem to overestimate the resources Canonical had on Ubuntu, and especially on Ubuntu Desktop. But you seem to have been already decided that they did it because they are mean, so I don't think it makes sense to continue the discussion.

worik 6y ago

Interesting. At the time I looked at Gnome Shell. I do not recall the details but I retreated to Mate (? was that the name of the Linux Mint desktop?) that had the old style. I thought I decided I wanted the comfort of the familiar. Over time it won me over. Which was my point. Canonical at the time were so arrogant that they did not try to win me over, they dumped me in it

necovek 6y ago
Exactly, you retreated to Mate that shipped with Gnome 2 because Gnome 3 sucked too :) However, Gnome 2 was all but abandoned at the time, and it did not make sense for Canonical to commit to supporting it for the next 5 years with their LTS release without the help of the upstream. All the big distributions were "forced" to switch to an unfamiliar interface. Fedora did too with Gnome Shell. Ubuntu at least had derivatives like Mate or Kubuntu that you could easily move to with an apt-get install.
- worik 6y ago
  But they could have had a transition. They did not. Users == Lusers thinking.
  - necovek 6y ago
    You seem to overestimate the resources Canonical had on Ubuntu, and especially on Ubuntu Desktop. But you seem to have been already decided that they did it because they are mean, so I don't think it makes sense to continue the discussion.