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 b

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 :-)