5 ms·

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 the

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 actually pretty stable and solid. Of course, the financial aspects of developing their own DE when they could just be contributing to GNOME instead also need to be taken into consideration.

reidrac 4y ago
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 wasn't the best PR person always starting flames on his blog. At the end I got tired of the almost constant drama and gave up the new desktop trend and settled on XFCE (and I couldn't be happier).
- threatripper 4y ago
  > 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.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Has there ever been a good time for Linux on the desktop? I'm using Linux (Kubuntu) daily, and it works most of the time, but I still see some issues from time to time (multi-monitor strangeness, windows suddenly appearing without frames because kwin crashed, desktop wallpapers not being shown or being shown incorrectly etc.).
    - majewsky 4y ago
      Isn't that just how all desktop OSes are? It works most of the time, and then sometimes you run into things that are bafflingly broken. For me, it's the Windows desktop at work. I'm accustomed to Windows spawning windows fully or partially out of bounds, though at least that's something that you can fix with the "Move" option from the Ctrl+Space menu. But for a few weeks now, there seems to be a bug where the affected window just stops being rendered entirely. It's in the taskbar, I can start Ctrl+Space "Move" and see the movement cursor, but there's nothing there. I don't know what triggers it yet. Meanwhile, my Linux desktop has no problems at all.
      - noisy_boy 4y ago
        Having made a sibling comment lamenting issues with my Linux desktop, I have to sort of agree with you. Sort of because, I have seen issues like what you mentioned on Windows in the past, but not that often. I use Linux desktop not only on principle but also because of open source and the flexibility is unparalleled, but I do feel like things break more often than they do on Windows (maybe due to the amount of flexibility and therefore the use cases/scenarios it has to deal with). Having said that, Pop!_OS was also problem free for me for quite a while until the desktop blanking issue started happening - right at the time of NVIDIA driver upgrade. Linus was right shitting on them - my next laptop would not be using NVIDIA for sure.
      - christophilus 4y ago
        Yes. I had easily as many issues with Windows and OSX when each was my d at driver. I don’t really have anything bad to say about Fedora + Gnome except that occasionally, my 5k thunderbolt monitor is finicky when waking from sleep. It’s a simple enough fix, but it’s still a minor inconvenience maybe once a month. Linux package management alone puts it ahead of both Windows and OSX in my book.
    - noisy_boy 4y ago
      I would have disagreed with you except atleast once a day (usually more), my monitors go blank and once the display is back after few seconds, all the windows get shoved to the smaller monitor on the right, all resized to the monitor size. I move the windows again one by one to the main monitor, resize them to how they were and curse NVIDIA while praying that this doesn't happen again too soon. Even changed from Pop! desktop to KDE which didn't help (that's why my unsubstantiated choice is to curse NVIDIA instead of the DE). Cherry on top if I'm connected to the work machine over Citrix so I have some more windows to resize and reposition over there too. Close to two decades of using Linux desktop on a daily basis and I still have to deal with these issues. As someone who doesn't have any intention to leave Linux due to these issues, I don't think there EVER will be a 100% rock-solid time for Linux desktop. Wayland will stabilize and then people will point out issues with it, come-up with another component and we will wait for that to stabilize - and on and on, forever. Ironically, such issues rarely happened, if ever, when I was using Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
  - pxc 4y ago
    > KDE also had a transition disaster. That time was not a good time for Linux on the Desktop. KDE's transition disaster came a bit earlier, with the release of KDE 4.0 in 2008. By the time GNOME 3 came out in 2011, KDE 4.x had seen 6 or 7 feature releases, and had (imo) largely recovered from all the rewrites in terms of feature parity. I was pretty happy on KDE in 2011.
  - dm319 4y ago
    That period I stopped recommending linux to friends as I felt burned by the experience of losing gnome 2. I remember going from ubuntu 10.04 beyond support, to xfce, gnome fallback, gnome flashback, linux mint cinnamon, crunchbang (stayed a while), linux mint mate then ubuntuMate, where I've been for several years now. I'd say UbuntuMATE is functional, boring and pretty, and frankly should be the modern standard for a work environment linux.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I much prefer modern GNOME and KDE to their older counterparts. I believe modern DEs definitely lack a certain polish, but the old, clunky late-00s UI is incredibly unappealing. I can see why existing Linux users may have resisted the change but I wouldn't have even tried Ubuntu long enoughto switch to Linux had they stuck with the old system. Windows 3.11 is a terrible fit for productivity, Win95/98/2000 were immensely better. The Windows usability only improved until mscursed themselves with Windows 8 (with the exception of Vista which was released before it was done and was almost as buggy as modern Linux, though SP1 fixed most of that).
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    The biggest deal was that you couldn't have old and new and many distros with a rapid release cycle adopted new versions as soon as they became available. For instance KDE 4.0 which wasn't really ready came out 11 January 2008. Fedora 9 came out in May. Had simply choosing 3 or 4 beta as it might accurately have been called been possible at login I think there would have been zero issues. 4.0 wasn't actively broken but it lacked polish and it was missing features from 3.x that hasn't been implemented yet.
- simion314 4y ago
  >If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users Of course GNOME fanboys complained that someone dared to replace their precious DE with a nicer Qt based one instead of kissing the ass of giant ego GNOME designers. Even when Ubuntu got back to GNOME Canonical listen to the users and put features back in on Ubuntu.
  - ginko 4y ago
    Actually, I think most Gnome 2 refugees eventually settles with XFCE or Mate. I did at least. ..wonder what I'll do after the Gnome team kills XFCE by enforcing Wayland for GTK.
    - simion314 4y ago
      I am not sure if most, but there were a lot of happy Unity users , but the DE got of lot of hate , much more hate then other GNOME forks or alternatives, Probably Ubuntu/Canonical haters just found another project to attack and seen it as Canonical inventing something new instead of letting RedHat inventing shit and kissing TH ass and follow them.
      - reidrac 4y ago
        I profoundly dislike all that "hater" rhetoric. Sure, there will always be trolls, but by tagging any dissenting opinion as "Ubuntu/Canonical haters" I feel like there's a lost opportunity to improve. You can't please everybody, but both Unity an GNOME shell had some very bad ideas, and it took too long to correct course (and in some cases it didn't happen). I believe some of the criticism came from people that really loved those DE, and that's why they were passionate about it. When people don't care, they just use something else.
        simion314 4y ago
        Come one, Arch users complaining that Ubuntu was not using SystemD was not honest, the Arch users were not using Ubuntu or Upstart to have a clue what they are talking about. And related with SystemD debate, you have alot of people that are not system admins or can't write a C program or a good bash scrip[t having an opinion because they read a blog post , I wish we all can't determine when we have no idea and just abstain. So about SystemD , I have no idea if is better or worse, my experience with init systems is almost zero so I should shut up. There were a lot of hather, sure there were some valid criticism but you can't invalidate the fact they were haters, and if we would want to waste our time we could read those old topics and find them but we have better things to do.
- kkfx 4y ago
  You memory is correct and incorrect at the same time: early Unity was rejected by many because too much rigid (like you can't move the launcher bar or the top bar) and "too alien" because at that time people was thinking in category-based menus not dashes and fear to loose the "overview ability" of menus. Than Unity mature a bit and such criticism disappear. In the end most power users at that time already have switched to side docks observing that they fit better modern 16:10 and then 16:9 screens instead of the old 4:3. Also Android at that time offer a substantially identical graphical concept with a dash-like menu, a fixed launcher bar on the shortest side of the screen witch happen to be the bottom one on mobile, have a small fixed top bar etc. Unity offer innovation and after much reticence people embrace it without even notice. Windows have copied Kde4 menus, most have copied Android and Unity desktop. Gnome criticism are a far older things about absurdity like nautilus spatial view the RH management want against nobody, the new rush was for GTk3 and the choice of going web-tech, against vala crap etc after with Gnome SHell criticism add to criticisms because Gnome SHell essentially copy Unity look & feel suffering from a secondary narcissistic design that put the desktop at the center of the world instead as a silent servant who appear only when needed. At a certain point Canonical decide that people are too reactionary and so there is no interest in innovate desktop anymore, it's time to make money and they loose much on the mobile finally find a room in IoT and server support. Nowadays desktops are left at that evolution point, with no further advancing for generic users, while power users have rediscovered past ideas like tiling WM and document-centric UIs. Generic users desktop is pushed to be a modern WebVM improperly named browser for legacy reasons, power users goes deep in the classic glorious and far more advanced past than today dark middle age of tech. Surely some choose XFCE, Fluxbox etc simply because they are born with such WM concept in the '90s/early '00 and do not want to move from that era, as many still want '60s cars instead of something else more older or more modern :-)
- Twirrim 4y ago
  I didn't hate Unity, but it had a bug (for me, and clearly a bunch of others based on the launchpad bug traffic for the bug I filed) that persisted for the entire time Canonical owned it, that meant I couldn't use it. I could repeat it very easily, just start the application using alt+f2 and use the keyboard to launch it (terminal, chrome, whatever). When triggered a window wouldn't be accessible over alt-tab. Was running, couldn't alt-tab to it. As someone that uses the keyboard a lot for navigation, it was a show-stopper. I have to be able to alt-tab between windows. Eventually filed in 2012, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/951929 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/951929 "Fix Released" but you know, still people reporting it later on in 16.04 In fact, even now, the number of "confirmed" bugs with long life on them on Launchpad is particularly disturbing, considering how many of them are fairly fundamentally impacting. Like, say, https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1126221 https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1126221. Filed 2013 by an at-the-time Canonical employee, confirmed in 14.xx and then 16.xx. If you had multiple displays, put a window on one and then disabled it, windows on the other screen get essentially stuck, can't be alt+tab'd to or anything. Or https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1619563 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1619563, hey I know, let's have two actions be on alt+tab. Switch windows, and close window! What could go wrong... or https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/49579 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/49579, reported 2006, still reported 16 years later. If you have menus like the Application open, the timed screen lock won't kick in. Over and over and over, what could have been a really good desktop experience was crippled by stubbornly ignoring the bugs filed against it (at least, I assume ignoring because the number of times engineers would actually comment on the tickets seemed to be few and far between). Canonical repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by not nailing the basics: the environment has to work.
  - lproven 4y ago
    These are legitimate criticisms and some of the only ones I've seen in all these comments. The only thing I'd say is that as someone using Unity almost every day for a decade now, I've never encountered a single one of them. I am not saying that they are not real or did not affect you or anyone else. Merely that they are not widespread deal-breaker problems for all users, because I've never noticed a single one of them myself.
simion314 4y ago
I remember that at one point Canonical had done real user testing, bringing people to use stuff and watching them struggling. Big difference vs the other DE that they use now where some big ego dude instinct determines what is removed or changed for the sake of brand identity or futuristic design.
- red_admiral 4y ago
  Was that user testing on new users, or experienced ones? There's a big difference between how to make the onboarding as easy as possible for someone who's never used your system before, vs making it efficient to use for power users. The former gets you Ribbon UI and similar - which is really really good at that - but it means that people like me get annoyed when something they have to do 50 times a day now takes 3 clicks instead of one. I can understand that I'm on the losing end of a tradeoff that's a global improvement, but I still get annoyed. When you're building bazaars and not cathedrals though, there's no good reason why everyone should be using the same UI. Maybe I'm part of a 5% or less of the population who wants the title bar of the active window and only that to be my accent color, but the solution here is to just let me configure that. And I don't mean in the sense of "I can spend a summer learning and editing the source code and build a custom distro that looks the way I want", I mean that I remember the old days where this was either a switch, or the default, or a couple of lines in a config file. I gave up on GNOME when everything became "sure, you can do a term project on configuring the CSS files" if you really don't like THE ONE true design choice.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    Unity had a lot of features for power users as well (good default shortcuts for ex.) and the global menu was a godsend on smaller screens. So I wouldn't say it's really an either-or scenario, just that tastes differ.
  - simion314 4y ago
    I think there wee people that used computers before, user testing will usually identify situation you describe where doing a task takes too many clicks. My issue is with big ego people, they use the excuse of casual user to impose their views, I have a KDE example too (so GNOME users can stop downvoting this without any comment explaining why) , on KDE4 the big ego dude added a thing in the corner, "the cashew". the users asked for an option to hide the ugly thing but the dude refused to add an option, he refused patches,. Now some people will say that we the users do not understand that adding options is adding complexity but this is not the case here and in the end KDE removed it https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbox-icon https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbo... probably after the big ego dude left. This is not the only KDE example, t was the same with scrolling on some widgets, options to disable it was refused by same dude. No user testing, no group of people thinking about it, just one big ego person thinking that because he read half of a book he is a big visionary.
bmacho 4y ago
> boring I always found it neat, especially with the ubuntu colors and fonts. Aesthetically stimulating, really.
akagusu 4y ago
As a company it made sense to develop their own desktop experience instead of relying on the default experience provided by Gnome, since the majority of developers in control of Gnome are Redhat employee or ex-employee or affiliated to Redhat in some way, and Redhat is their main competitor.

reidrac 4y ago

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 wasn't the best PR person always starting flames on his blog. At the end I got tired of the almost constant drama and gave up the new desktop trend and settled on XFCE (and I couldn't be happier).

threatripper 4y ago
> 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.
- rob74 4y ago
  Has there ever been a good time for Linux on the desktop? I'm using Linux (Kubuntu) daily, and it works most of the time, but I still see some issues from time to time (multi-monitor strangeness, windows suddenly appearing without frames because kwin crashed, desktop wallpapers not being shown or being shown incorrectly etc.).
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Isn't that just how all desktop OSes are? It works most of the time, and then sometimes you run into things that are bafflingly broken. For me, it's the Windows desktop at work. I'm accustomed to Windows spawning windows fully or partially out of bounds, though at least that's something that you can fix with the "Move" option from the Ctrl+Space menu. But for a few weeks now, there seems to be a bug where the affected window just stops being rendered entirely. It's in the taskbar, I can start Ctrl+Space "Move" and see the movement cursor, but there's nothing there. I don't know what triggers it yet. Meanwhile, my Linux desktop has no problems at all.
    - noisy_boy 4y ago
      Having made a sibling comment lamenting issues with my Linux desktop, I have to sort of agree with you. Sort of because, I have seen issues like what you mentioned on Windows in the past, but not that often. I use Linux desktop not only on principle but also because of open source and the flexibility is unparalleled, but I do feel like things break more often than they do on Windows (maybe due to the amount of flexibility and therefore the use cases/scenarios it has to deal with). Having said that, Pop!_OS was also problem free for me for quite a while until the desktop blanking issue started happening - right at the time of NVIDIA driver upgrade. Linus was right shitting on them - my next laptop would not be using NVIDIA for sure.
    - christophilus 4y ago
      Yes. I had easily as many issues with Windows and OSX when each was my d at driver. I don’t really have anything bad to say about Fedora + Gnome except that occasionally, my 5k thunderbolt monitor is finicky when waking from sleep. It’s a simple enough fix, but it’s still a minor inconvenience maybe once a month. Linux package management alone puts it ahead of both Windows and OSX in my book.
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    I would have disagreed with you except atleast once a day (usually more), my monitors go blank and once the display is back after few seconds, all the windows get shoved to the smaller monitor on the right, all resized to the monitor size. I move the windows again one by one to the main monitor, resize them to how they were and curse NVIDIA while praying that this doesn't happen again too soon. Even changed from Pop! desktop to KDE which didn't help (that's why my unsubstantiated choice is to curse NVIDIA instead of the DE). Cherry on top if I'm connected to the work machine over Citrix so I have some more windows to resize and reposition over there too. Close to two decades of using Linux desktop on a daily basis and I still have to deal with these issues. As someone who doesn't have any intention to leave Linux due to these issues, I don't think there EVER will be a 100% rock-solid time for Linux desktop. Wayland will stabilize and then people will point out issues with it, come-up with another component and we will wait for that to stabilize - and on and on, forever. Ironically, such issues rarely happened, if ever, when I was using Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
- pxc 4y ago
  > KDE also had a transition disaster. That time was not a good time for Linux on the Desktop. KDE's transition disaster came a bit earlier, with the release of KDE 4.0 in 2008. By the time GNOME 3 came out in 2011, KDE 4.x had seen 6 or 7 feature releases, and had (imo) largely recovered from all the rewrites in terms of feature parity. I was pretty happy on KDE in 2011.
- dm319 4y ago
  That period I stopped recommending linux to friends as I felt burned by the experience of losing gnome 2. I remember going from ubuntu 10.04 beyond support, to xfce, gnome fallback, gnome flashback, linux mint cinnamon, crunchbang (stayed a while), linux mint mate then ubuntuMate, where I've been for several years now. I'd say UbuntuMATE is functional, boring and pretty, and frankly should be the modern standard for a work environment linux.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I much prefer modern GNOME and KDE to their older counterparts. I believe modern DEs definitely lack a certain polish, but the old, clunky late-00s UI is incredibly unappealing. I can see why existing Linux users may have resisted the change but I wouldn't have even tried Ubuntu long enoughto switch to Linux had they stuck with the old system. Windows 3.11 is a terrible fit for productivity, Win95/98/2000 were immensely better. The Windows usability only improved until mscursed themselves with Windows 8 (with the exception of Vista which was released before it was done and was almost as buggy as modern Linux, though SP1 fixed most of that).
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  The biggest deal was that you couldn't have old and new and many distros with a rapid release cycle adopted new versions as soon as they became available. For instance KDE 4.0 which wasn't really ready came out 11 January 2008. Fedora 9 came out in May. Had simply choosing 3 or 4 beta as it might accurately have been called been possible at login I think there would have been zero issues. 4.0 wasn't actively broken but it lacked polish and it was missing features from 3.x that hasn't been implemented yet.
simion314 4y ago
>If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users Of course GNOME fanboys complained that someone dared to replace their precious DE with a nicer Qt based one instead of kissing the ass of giant ego GNOME designers. Even when Ubuntu got back to GNOME Canonical listen to the users and put features back in on Ubuntu.
- ginko 4y ago
  Actually, I think most Gnome 2 refugees eventually settles with XFCE or Mate. I did at least. ..wonder what I'll do after the Gnome team kills XFCE by enforcing Wayland for GTK.
  - simion314 4y ago
    I am not sure if most, but there were a lot of happy Unity users , but the DE got of lot of hate , much more hate then other GNOME forks or alternatives, Probably Ubuntu/Canonical haters just found another project to attack and seen it as Canonical inventing something new instead of letting RedHat inventing shit and kissing TH ass and follow them.
    - reidrac 4y ago
      I profoundly dislike all that "hater" rhetoric. Sure, there will always be trolls, but by tagging any dissenting opinion as "Ubuntu/Canonical haters" I feel like there's a lost opportunity to improve. You can't please everybody, but both Unity an GNOME shell had some very bad ideas, and it took too long to correct course (and in some cases it didn't happen). I believe some of the criticism came from people that really loved those DE, and that's why they were passionate about it. When people don't care, they just use something else.
      - simion314 4y ago
        Come one, Arch users complaining that Ubuntu was not using SystemD was not honest, the Arch users were not using Ubuntu or Upstart to have a clue what they are talking about. And related with SystemD debate, you have alot of people that are not system admins or can't write a C program or a good bash scrip[t having an opinion because they read a blog post , I wish we all can't determine when we have no idea and just abstain. So about SystemD , I have no idea if is better or worse, my experience with init systems is almost zero so I should shut up. There were a lot of hather, sure there were some valid criticism but you can't invalidate the fact they were haters, and if we would want to waste our time we could read those old topics and find them but we have better things to do.
kkfx 4y ago
You memory is correct and incorrect at the same time: early Unity was rejected by many because too much rigid (like you can't move the launcher bar or the top bar) and "too alien" because at that time people was thinking in category-based menus not dashes and fear to loose the "overview ability" of menus. Than Unity mature a bit and such criticism disappear. In the end most power users at that time already have switched to side docks observing that they fit better modern 16:10 and then 16:9 screens instead of the old 4:3. Also Android at that time offer a substantially identical graphical concept with a dash-like menu, a fixed launcher bar on the shortest side of the screen witch happen to be the bottom one on mobile, have a small fixed top bar etc. Unity offer innovation and after much reticence people embrace it without even notice. Windows have copied Kde4 menus, most have copied Android and Unity desktop. Gnome criticism are a far older things about absurdity like nautilus spatial view the RH management want against nobody, the new rush was for GTk3 and the choice of going web-tech, against vala crap etc after with Gnome SHell criticism add to criticisms because Gnome SHell essentially copy Unity look & feel suffering from a secondary narcissistic design that put the desktop at the center of the world instead as a silent servant who appear only when needed. At a certain point Canonical decide that people are too reactionary and so there is no interest in innovate desktop anymore, it's time to make money and they loose much on the mobile finally find a room in IoT and server support. Nowadays desktops are left at that evolution point, with no further advancing for generic users, while power users have rediscovered past ideas like tiling WM and document-centric UIs. Generic users desktop is pushed to be a modern WebVM improperly named browser for legacy reasons, power users goes deep in the classic glorious and far more advanced past than today dark middle age of tech. Surely some choose XFCE, Fluxbox etc simply because they are born with such WM concept in the '90s/early '00 and do not want to move from that era, as many still want '60s cars instead of something else more older or more modern :-)
Twirrim 4y ago
I didn't hate Unity, but it had a bug (for me, and clearly a bunch of others based on the launchpad bug traffic for the bug I filed) that persisted for the entire time Canonical owned it, that meant I couldn't use it. I could repeat it very easily, just start the application using alt+f2 and use the keyboard to launch it (terminal, chrome, whatever). When triggered a window wouldn't be accessible over alt-tab. Was running, couldn't alt-tab to it. As someone that uses the keyboard a lot for navigation, it was a show-stopper. I have to be able to alt-tab between windows. Eventually filed in 2012, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/951929 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/951929 "Fix Released" but you know, still people reporting it later on in 16.04 In fact, even now, the number of "confirmed" bugs with long life on them on Launchpad is particularly disturbing, considering how many of them are fairly fundamentally impacting. Like, say, https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1126221 https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1126221. Filed 2013 by an at-the-time Canonical employee, confirmed in 14.xx and then 16.xx. If you had multiple displays, put a window on one and then disabled it, windows on the other screen get essentially stuck, can't be alt+tab'd to or anything. Or https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1619563 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1619563, hey I know, let's have two actions be on alt+tab. Switch windows, and close window! What could go wrong... or https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/49579 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/49579, reported 2006, still reported 16 years later. If you have menus like the Application open, the timed screen lock won't kick in. Over and over and over, what could have been a really good desktop experience was crippled by stubbornly ignoring the bugs filed against it (at least, I assume ignoring because the number of times engineers would actually comment on the tickets seemed to be few and far between). Canonical repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by not nailing the basics: the environment has to work.
- lproven 4y ago
  These are legitimate criticisms and some of the only ones I've seen in all these comments. The only thing I'd say is that as someone using Unity almost every day for a decade now, I've never encountered a single one of them. I am not saying that they are not real or did not affect you or anyone else. Merely that they are not widespread deal-breaker problems for all users, because I've never noticed a single one of them myself.

simion314 4y ago

I remember that at one point Canonical had done real user testing, bringing people to use stuff and watching them struggling. Big difference vs the other DE that they use now where some big ego dude instinct determines what is removed or changed for the sake of brand identity or futuristic design.

red_admiral 4y ago
Was that user testing on new users, or experienced ones? There's a big difference between how to make the onboarding as easy as possible for someone who's never used your system before, vs making it efficient to use for power users. The former gets you Ribbon UI and similar - which is really really good at that - but it means that people like me get annoyed when something they have to do 50 times a day now takes 3 clicks instead of one. I can understand that I'm on the losing end of a tradeoff that's a global improvement, but I still get annoyed. When you're building bazaars and not cathedrals though, there's no good reason why everyone should be using the same UI. Maybe I'm part of a 5% or less of the population who wants the title bar of the active window and only that to be my accent color, but the solution here is to just let me configure that. And I don't mean in the sense of "I can spend a summer learning and editing the source code and build a custom distro that looks the way I want", I mean that I remember the old days where this was either a switch, or the default, or a couple of lines in a config file. I gave up on GNOME when everything became "sure, you can do a term project on configuring the CSS files" if you really don't like THE ONE true design choice.
- Avamander 4y ago
  Unity had a lot of features for power users as well (good default shortcuts for ex.) and the global menu was a godsend on smaller screens. So I wouldn't say it's really an either-or scenario, just that tastes differ.
- simion314 4y ago
  I think there wee people that used computers before, user testing will usually identify situation you describe where doing a task takes too many clicks. My issue is with big ego people, they use the excuse of casual user to impose their views, I have a KDE example too (so GNOME users can stop downvoting this without any comment explaining why) , on KDE4 the big ego dude added a thing in the corner, "the cashew". the users asked for an option to hide the ugly thing but the dude refused to add an option, he refused patches,. Now some people will say that we the users do not understand that adding options is adding complexity but this is not the case here and in the end KDE removed it https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbox-icon https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbo... probably after the big ego dude left. This is not the only KDE example, t was the same with scrolling on some widgets, options to disable it was refused by same dude. No user testing, no group of people thinking about it, just one big ego person thinking that because he read half of a book he is a big visionary.

bmacho 4y ago

> boring I always found it neat, especially with the ubuntu colors and fonts. Aesthetically stimulating, really.

akagusu 4y ago

As a company it made sense to develop their own desktop experience instead of relying on the default experience provided by Gnome, since the majority of developers in control of Gnome are Redhat employee or ex-employee or affiliated to Redhat in some way, and Redhat is their main competitor.