I've used kde and Gnome on ubuntu since 7.04. When Miguel de Icaza wrote his piece on the death of desktop Linux a few months ago, discussions on Unity as the "

I've used kde and Gnome on ubuntu since 7.04. When Miguel de Icaza wrote his piece on the death of desktop Linux a few months ago, discussions on Unity as the "doom" of Ubuntu crept back up and I got curious about it enough to give it a try and see for myself. My conclusion is that although many people feel the way you do and are pretty vocal about their discontent, they apparently don't represent a majority and some of the comments are increasingly out of touch and are even becoming misinformative. I've ranted about the dumbing down of UIs previously on HN (re: Windows 8 Metro/WinRT, OS X Launchpad), but none are as terrible as Unity. It's impossible to find what you're looking for with it, it's terribly unintuitive, it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings, makes it impossible to find out what applications you have This is an example. It's been my experience as a full-time user that the launcher does a great job to help you find what you're looking for. Not only can you simply type keywords and suggestions are most of the time pretty accurate, but if for some reasons you don't find what you want, you can use filters. For example, to find applications the old-fashion way (nowadays, most people just ask what they want and it comes up): - press super (brings up the launcher) - click the Applications button (2nd button). The app filter is now on - click on the second sub-header where it says "Installed" for installed applications. You should see all your apps. - if you need to further filter by type or other, open the filter and pick one (games, internet, education, etc). Otherwise, to do like everybody else, to launch firefox: - super - type fir[efox] <enter> or - super - type int[ernet] - click on firefox icon I'd like to share this little comment that I found the day I moved to Unity. It reflects pretty much my experience http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12042350&postcount=45 http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12042350&postcoun... It's not to say that Unity is perfect, far from it, the thing still needs work, but I think it's more than time for some Unity critics to accept that maybe they're opinions are becoming non-constructive, especially when they don't address the real issues of the desktop.