Ask HN: What is it that you hate about the Unity Desktop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is it that you hate about the Unity Desktop?

16 pointspkd39 comments

What exactly do you not like about Unity7?

The recent announcement from Canonical about doing away with Unity and Mir stirred up quite a storm in the Linux world; expected, given that Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distribution.

Mark Shuttleworth has since then also made comments like these, which signal towards a deeper issue:

"The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance."

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I dislike the persistent MacOS-style menubar. This UI choice makes sense on small screen sizes but not so much in a desktop environment with giant monitors.

That's really Unity's core failure; it was ambitiously designed to adapt to multiple formats (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) and in the end, the required compromises led to a UX that wasn't _great_ in any form factor.

Microsoft tried the same thing with Windows 8 and had the EXACT same result. They alienated their core market of desktop/laptop users and completely failed to find traction in mobile/touch. Much like Ubuntu, Microsoft backed off that strategy with Windows 10 offering more substantially tailored experiences for mobile and desktop use.

Apple was smart and never tried a one size fits all strategy. Their mobile and desktop UX is entirely different.

Circling back to Unity, I also hate the window controls on the left. Not that controls on the right are intrinsically superior, just that I'm more accustomed to that location from other desktops. It seems contrarian and I just can't get used to it.

> I dislike the persistent MacOS-style menubar. This UI choice makes sense on small screen sizes but not so much in a desktop environment with giant monitors.

What about it bothers you on large screen sizes? I think the integrated menu makes sense on any screen size and the GNOME double title bar looks icky to me in comparison - just a waste of screen space. But maybe I am biased because I am not a heavy mouse/touchpad user.

Unity was definitely one part of their convergence mission but I feel that Unity did convergence better than any other desktop environment (even Windows 10).

I think the dock positioning is a matter of personal choice but it can be positioned on the bottom since the past two Ubuntu releases.

You rarely maximize windows on large screens, so you need to move the mouse much further to reach the menubar.

I actually prefer the dock on the left-- I keep it there on MacOS also. That's preference too but it makes sense as most displays are widescreen with much more horizontal than vertical space available.

I hated that kind of global menu bar when switching from windows to mac.

when you have multiple windows open, only the window in focus will take the global menu.

I had the situation that I had chrome open on a web page that I want to print. and I had another chrome window open too and in focus. So the menu bar is actually that wrong window. when I print, I will print from the wrong window.

I may be wrong, but can't the single menu bar be turned off? I thought there was an option to turn it off.

Beats me, I've never used it.

I try not to screw with working infrastructure, so it can become invisible to me. I've been using X11 for 24 years now. It's nice that it gained 3D capabilities, but I don't play games much, so the largest daily impact is that there are shadows under windows. Big whoop. Smooth video-playing is a much nicer feature, and we've had that for a decade.

I used fvwm, rxvt and netscape browser for years. Netscape mutated into Firefox. I added Chrome because it turns out that having two completely different browsers is an advantage for me. rxvt became rxvt-unicode. I might still be using fvwm, but XFCE has easier configuration when I move to a new machine, which happens often enough that I value it.

It will be nice when I can get the RX460 downstairs to drive the 4K monitor at 60Hz instead of 30Hz, but it's only going to be a minor improvement.

There are two kinds of idiots: the idiot who says "this is new, so it must be better" and the idiot who says "this is old, so it must be better". I try not to be either kind.

> It will be nice when I can get the RX460 downstairs to drive the 4K monitor at 60Hz instead of 30Hz, but it's only going to be a minor improvement.

You can't now? I have no issues with my RX480.

Running Debian stretch (current testing); nothing I've done has made it work. I can verify that the monitor is happy taking HDMI2.0 4K@60Hz from a Roku.

That's a surprise. I haven't run Debian in a while, though, just Archlinux and NixOS. I haven't had any trouble with 4k@60 using DisplayPort or HDMI using my RX480 and AMDGPU.

First, Mir:

I believe fragmentation is a very big issue in the Free Software world. Since both Mir and Wayland wanted to work towards the same goal with minor differences in details, they should have banded together and have had proper discussions regarding both their ideas. It encourages better solutions and sometimes new things are born.

Mir was also never as performant as Wayland and didn't have any window manager apart from Unity to test with.

Unity:

I personally don't have a thing against Unity but there were (16.04 days) some inconveniences like being unable to customize the dock. The separate toolbar and menu bar. GNOME does have thicker titlebars but combines toolbars, menubars and titlebars in their native apps.

GNOME also has a rich ecosystem of extensions. (Please stop breaking them through updates GNOME!!!). GNOME has a better universal search than Unity, is comparatively faster and snappier than Unity.

GNOME suffers from the problem of poor defaults which are easily fixed by distribution vendors. (Kali Linux ships with a dock, topbar and other IMO necessary extensions.)

"Since both Mir and Wayland wanted to work towards the same goal with minor differences in details, they should have banded together and have had proper discussions regarding both their ideas."

Thats an ideal world... but we know that the egos that drive open source projects are not keen on banding together... they need THEIR project to be the best one, even if it only differs in completely minor ways that are all but hidden from the user.

I agree. It's not just limited to software development. Take politics, food or business partners splitting off companies for example.

But it's something that has a higher chance of happening in the open-source world than anywhere else.

I think Wayland development was lagging when Ubuntu started with Mir. That did light a fire under Wayland's behind because it has seen considerable improvement since. The way Canonical handled the announcement of Mir is debatable but I think Mir has been a positive influence as a whole.

Mostly small things like "stickiness" when moving mouse between monitors, or the conflation of apps & windows on the launcher bar that always seemed to make it hard to switch between different windows in the same app, or launch new windows of the same app. My memory is a little vague though since I tried it briefly when I got it at work a few years back, didn't like it, and switched to Cinnamon which I've been using since. To be fair to Canonical, that switch was painless and Cinnamon hasn't been without it's little idiosyncrasies as well.

My guess is that people think Canonical should have been focusing more on general distro reliability (e.g. the infamous "/boot fills up with kernels" bug) than reinventing parts of it. Hindsight is 20/20 though, we'd be having a different conversation if Mir had proven a big step forward over X.

I think there is a setting to turn the stickiness off and you can switch between windows of the same application with Alt + Tilde. I guess people were impatient with Unity and found it easier to just switch DE's than to try to figure out how to customize it.

Yup, I'm certain there would be a setting to change for the former and a solution for the latter. I was unlikely to sink time into customising it though given that I had nothing invested in learning it and the switch was easy.

It's not unity we dislike in particular (though, I never was a fan): it's Mir.

> The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind...It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control

I don't even use Mir, but I hate it. I can see how that sounds irrational or political, but my opinion is based on my perspective of reality. Ideally, Mir and Wayland can be developed in tandem, but this clearly hasn't been an effective approach.

The fact is that we really don't need more than one display server, and from what I can tell, we shouldn't even try.

Working on Mir and Wayland means double the work to integrate each video driver. Until every video card has a performant and stable open driver, some of us have to rely on a manufacturer to give us one that works with whatever display server we intend to use, so those people can't rely on Mir or Wayland developers to get their preferred display server working.

Even if that were not an issue (looking at you, NVIDIA), it will be very helpful to have Canonical support Wayland. Neither project is really ready yet, and one of them just needs to be usable already. When hair news was asked what feature Ubuntu should work on, the top answer was DPI scaling. Replacing Xorg is the best way to accomplish that.

TL;DR: I'm excited to see what happens with Wayland in the coming months. We need it. Mir was just a distraction.

Mir, it never delivered the performance that was promised, and I've never liked unity it's a hassle to use. I just wanted my applications, I don't want to be online 24/7 searching from my app launcher for things I know are on my hard drive. I don't care for eye candy, it's cool to look at the first week or two, but I quickly find myself disabling every transition effect I can find to get those few ms of performance I want from my OS.

Latest version of Unity made it impossible to switch to LXDE. Most despicable. Previously if you somehow managed to find Unity terminal window (not easy) and install LXDE, then if you logout, there was a menu where you can uninstall Unity for all eternity. This time I could not figure out what to do, so I installed ready made Lubuntu instead.

"Previously if you somehow managed to find Unity terminal window (not easy)"

Are you saying its difficult to open the terminal in unity? Its on the right click menu on the desktop (common feature across WMs) as well as CTRL-ALT-T, another common shortcut (though some WMs are simpler and use CTRL-T). Its also called "terminal" so searching in the app menu or with the super key is trivial.

I honestly feel like Terminal might be the easiest to open app with the most shortcuts built in by far in any unix WM, so that comment completely confuses me...

I think he's talking about the Linux console (the VT). GNOME has Ctrl+Alt+F2 to open the VT.

It is available on the same shortcut on Unity as well.

I like unity overall. I kinda hope they keep it.

but my most usage of unity is just the left side bar. I don't use, for example, the search-and-find thing that much.

I like unity's color scheme too.

The only time I was pissed was when they enforced you to do amazon search in unity.

I actually don't think unity has lost to others technical-wise or design-wise. it loses, because it didn't follow the Principle of least astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

most people are reluctant to ui change. a small change would piss people off (ios5 to ios7, for example). unity just looks too different. the hatred is not necessarily rational I think.

if unity is going away, out of all the options, I like kde and xfce. I dislike gnome because of my early development experience with gdk.

Personally, without Unity, the draw of Ubuntu is significantly lessened.

Except for the color scheme, I actually liked Unity a lot. It was a sad thing to hear that Mark decided to shut it down.

Unity was terrible for the same reason Windows 8's original (pre 8.1) UI was terrible: search was considered "the" way to access applications, and therefore there was no easy way to access installed applications for which you didn't already know the name.

If I remember correctly, to get a list of installed apps, you had to click "view more..." at least twice from inside the Unity menu. Compare that to Windows 8, which required right clicking the background of the Start Screen and then clicking "All Apps...", which is similarly nonintuitive.

Hm, how often do you need to use an application that you don't know the name of? I find search a great way of starting applications, especially since it doesn't require me taking my hands off the keyboard... (Press the super key, type the first few letters, hit enter. Done.)

That is the way for one off applications. Applications that you use once in a while, like a DVD writer. Or applications that you set up once and forget it, like f.lux. I usually have to install several applications before finding the DVD writer that works for my setup and file type. After 5 months, I doubt I will remember which of those I used. A reliable way of navigating to a section on the menu where all installed DVD writers would be listed will be a God send. Of course, I can key in "DVD" or some other term and pray it shows up. It will work if the DVD is in the same of the app, or if the developer thought through the use cases of myriad environments and had included DVD in the description. Unfortunately if I had installed an app for some use other than its primary purpose, remembering that and searching for it certainly made me pull my hair out.

Exactly. Open by search is a great addition to the user experience, and it's how I open apps most of the time on my computer.

However, it is not a complete replacement, and breaks down for several edge cases like the one you describe.

Hm, how often do you need to use an application that you don't know the name of?>

I'd say this is a weekly occurrence for me. But it is every single time they use the computer for those who are normal or beginner users.

Isn't the application launcher you can use from the keyboard a common basic feature of all linux desktops ? Though it is better when it is optional and people who wants to use it can, instead of being mandatory and in your face and feels like a workaround for a badly designed UI/UX as it is in unity.

To me Unity always felt like it was designed for people using laptops with trackpads, because they go to great lengths to make sure you don't have to move the mouse pointer very far. All the shortcuts based on the super key are another indicator of this. However if you have a proper desktop computer with a mouse, keyboard and ample screen estate a lot of these shortcuts often just stand in the way of your work.

I prefer Unity to Gnome. I prefer Windows 10 to both. I prefer a tiling window manager to all of them. So I use Xmonad on Ubuntu.

I tried unity back then and it keeps getting in my way and tries to shoehorn one non-optimal way of doing things for everyone.

"Gnome 3 is doing it wrong, let's do it wrong too but our way."

The lack of thought for UX: the point of icons is to be visually distinct: adding the same shiny shape because Unity devs liked MacOS circa 2005 defeats the purpose of that.

No one asked for Unity, it was just dumped on us and later iterations became harder and harder to remove. So I jumped ship to Mint.

Mir, don't know. What problem was it supposed to solve?

If I remember correctly both Unity and MATE came out as a response to GNOME 3's launch. GNOME 3 had a lot of bugs and was rightly shunned by the overall Linux community when it came out. Some people decided to fork GNOME 2 and create MATE, Canonical thought it was easier to use the underlying GNOME core to add the features they wanted in their desktop. Both options are free and open source software and nobody is locked into using either of them.

Answering a different question, but what I liked about it was the Mac-like global menu bar.

Forcing the window kill, iconify, and maximize buttons to the top left bugs me.

What I dislike: It makes me feel like a user.

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