4 ms·

I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage, but funny that I'd never bothered to read up on the history and background of exactly why, so this is illuminati

by jrm4 1y ago

I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage, but funny that I'd never bothered to read up on the history and background of exactly why, so this is illuminating. For me it generally lines up with what it felt like was going on with those projects, aka "5 mediocres in a trenchcoat will never add up to a Steve Jobs, but lets go ahead and try and beat Apple at their own game." Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"

haunter 1y ago
> Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!" huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times
thewebguyd 1y ago
> I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26). Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device. Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while. This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.

by jrm4 1y ago

haunter 1y ago

> Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!" huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times

thewebguyd 1y ago

> I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26). Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device. Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while. This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.