Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

Fortunately, there's a PR for implementing such things in KDE Plasma. Here is the discussion [1]. Right now, you can use it, but it probably won't be merged into the main branch soon.

PR: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/breeze/-/merge_requests/126

There's also a KDE theme the PR draws inspiration on (which you can use for KDE now): https://github.com/Zren/material-decoration

> As a small example, the update makes right-clicking the trashcan in the Launcher to empty it work again, without needing to open the trashcan's own window.

I feel like that single line illustrates just how badly GNOME has lost the plot over the last decade.

On the other hand, that impression might be because the default GNOME apps back then had much more usable menus packed with features. Now it doesn't really matter whether your menu bar is global or not, because all those menu items are being killed anyway. Otherwise the multiple empty bars you see wouldn't have been as empty as they are.

Ultimately, I think Canonical just slowly realized that home users are going to cost money for everyone but Apple, while servers will make money. They shifted nearly all of their focus there and just package the same things everyone else does for desktop. Sadly, the one non-standard thing that they continue insisting on is Snap.

Well, yes, but "an extremely loud minority who weren't even using it" can have an important point about something: namely, that investing/focusing on polishing it, detracts from investment/focus on polish of the alternative they prefer.

Ubuntu GNOME was always a spin of Ubuntu; but when it became the flagship spin of Ubuntu, the polish on it got a lot better. (For example, previously, effort on an "app store"-experience application was divided between Canonical's "Ubuntu Software Center", and GNOME's "GNOME Software", with both being pretty janky as a result; with the switch, the "Ubuntu Software Center" was discontinued, and all effort of both parties went into polishing GNOME Software, and it became something worth using.)

I've been using this GNOME extension for years, and it's been very solid: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1287/unite/

It emulates Unity quite well (removing the titlebars on maximized windows, among other things).

As I recall it, the initial uproar was over the opt-out phoning home and web searches in the main menu/search integrated with the desktop. (Unity called this menu/search mechanism a 'lens'. Contemporary (10 and 11) windows start menus kinda resemble it, although they are worse when it comes to what people objected to in Unity.) Eventually Canonical relented and promised that the next (never finished?) rewrite of Unity would make those features opt-in.

Then there were conflicts with GNOME, where there were difficulties upstreaming parts of Unity, and GNOME was resistant to changing its direction for the sake of the alternative visions of downstream projects.

Both conflicts were unfortunate, but I don't think any of the big complaints were about the desktop experience itself. I don't remember hearing that Unity's vision for the desktop was a bad one, and as a user who was a very turned off by the whole shopping lens thing, I actually really liked the general lens functionality and desktop workflow, and I loved the global menu search.

I feel like despite the controversies, the potential of the desktop experience was always clear.

I'm sure they had their reasons for dropping it, but I wish Canonical had stuck with Unity, even if it wouldn't necessarily be my choice on all my machines, we still only have the big two when it comes to mature, feature-complete desktop environments on Linux and the free Unices.

Also I can recommend Ubuntu Unity. It's not that different from gnome, but works great.

He does amazing work. I did a little profile piece on him a few months ago: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/04/rudra_sarsawat_ubuntu...

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).

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

With the end of the campaign, it seems like all their desktop efforts ended too, and they shifted focus to servers, snap, snap-stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch

...

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... and after an hour decided, that Unity is actually not that bad. Almost every change Gnome3 did over Gnome2 was a change for the worse or for far worse. Unnecessary waste of space on meaningless panels, unnecessarily revamped menus, etc. Just no. I didn't dive in this matter in detail, but people were saying that Gnome3 team has a rather hostile attitude towards criticism, and it shows in the results.

Anyway, after a few years of using Unity I got used to it and was sad when it was killed. Hope it gets the second chance.

Based on gnome has tiling windows and very keyboard focused its very nice.

0 https://pop.system76.com

But eventually they had to face reality, and gave up.

I'm sure there were people who liked it. I never met one.

No need to blame HN crowd for this.

I was involved in the development of Unity at Canonical, just as I was involved in the development of the Eee PC at Xandros before that. Unity developers were very well aware that there was a small but extremely vocal minority of users who expressed their strong dislike and contempt for their work. We were also aware of the much larger and quieter plurality of people who liked and appreciated it, and maybe the majority of people who just turned on their computer and got to work without a second thought about the desktop environment. A part of my job was managing the negative feedback from users... I think would have been aware of any decision to change back to Gnome based on the strident and biased opinion of some rando on the internet.

For the record, Unity was discontinued as a business decision to make Canonical more profitable for its investors. Plain and simple. Normal everyday business.

I am astonished at what a short memory HN has.

The Ubuntu project manager did an "ask HN" post on what people wanted to see next. It is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821

The result was fairly overwhelming: stop Unity, Mir, the mobile stuff, etc.

So that is what happened.

I personally feel it was a huge mistake. :shrug:

Huh? Firefox hasn't released any improvements since 3.6 about a decade ago; I'm pretty sure they're dead.

Honestly, whenever I use windows it feels "okay" but I could not point at anything to say "oh, neat".

But I am typing on it right now, and it does a bunch of things better than any other desktop I've tried.

The global menu bar is easy and efficient. It reduces onscreen clutter -- an unfocused window simply has no menu bar. If you click on it, it appears in the panel. I have 3 monitors here and each of them has several apps on; this means that for each monitor, there is a separate menu bar, but only when I am using it.

(In this respect it is like AmigaOS, not macOS: Mac menus are always visible. AmigaOS ones only on a right-click.) Unity menus appear when the mouse is over the panel; otherwise, I see the current app title, and the window title if it's maximised.

In compliant apps, menus are navigable with the keyboard alone, using the same shortcuts as on Windows. This is a win for accessibility. Sadly it's succumbing to bitrot now.

With a pointing device, menus are super-easy to hit, because they are on a screen edge. This is called Fitt's Law and it is a law of ergonomics, not some preference. To hit in-window menu bars, you have to aim, and the target is vertically very small, but at least it is wide. With a hamburger menu as in GNOME, Pantheon, and modern KDE, it is a single character cell, hard to hit both vertically and horizontally, and with zero visual clue that it is important.

Unlike macOS or AmigaOS, windows are manageable with keyboard shortcuts as well, and again using the same standard keys as on MS Windows. This is a boon for accessibility. If you wish you can have an MS Windows/Motif style window menu, and the buttons are easily rearranged for a Windows-like layout if you wish.

The app launcher/switcher is vertical, which is more space-efficient on widescreen displays. MacOS can do this but it's an option; it's the default here. But it's better than the Mac one, because:

- it shows how many windows you have open;

- it's trivially easy to open a new empty window: middle-click the dock icon.

Windows snap like on recent MS Windows, but not on macOS without add-on apps.

So we have a happy combination of some of the best Mac, Windows and Amiga features:

- a global menu bar, very easy to hit, more space-efficient on small displays and easier to hit on big displays;

- keyboard accessibilty, like on Windows but unlike the Mac;

- a space-efficient layout for widescreens that exceeds its inspiration;

- which is also efficient on large screen and multiscreen layouts;

- and a dock that has more utility than the macOS dock.

It's a really good combination of the best features from Windows and macOS (and others), plus additional tweaks.

Compare to the competition:

- KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXQt can't handle vertical taskbars properly. KDE doesn't honour Windows keystrokes, and in recent versions is removing the menu bar from apps altogether.

(Pictures to illustrate this point: https://imgur.com/gallery/fLeAy )

- LXDE does do vertical taskbars and keystrokes, but the layout is rigid and can't easily be customised.

- Xfce does vertical taskbars well and honours Windows keystrokes, but can't do a global menu bar. Its customisation is excellent and it's low-resource.

- GNOME has its own wholly new set of keystrokes and is conspicuously poor at window management ansd multihead displays. It's not designed for people who do their own window management or want multihead; it's designed for keyboard warriors who want a few full-screen or tiled console windows. It has an empty wasted panel with a few small combined controls that can't be separated. It is poor for keyboard access, and has no menu bars by design. Features are being removed from the file manager. It's bad if you know the dominant platform's keyboard controls. It's bad if you use a screen reader. It's bad if you want rich multihead -- e.g. I can't put the panel on 1 monitor and the dock on another and the virtual-desktop manager on another.

Some but not all of these things can be fixed with GNOME extensions but this 100% always breaks on a GNOME version upgrade. Extensions must and can only target specific versions of the desktop. There is no safe mode to load without extensions. Theming has been intentionally removed in version 40+.

GNOME CSDs also destroy a hallmark feature of desktop GUIs since the Apple Lisa, which is that almost all human languages and scripts read from top to bottom. So you start at the top with a title, then you read the content, and then at the bottom are the buttons which you use to decide what to do with it: OK, cancel, close, apply, whatever. GNOME inverts this in all its dialog boxes: the main action buttons are at the top, before you've read the content. You must skip them, read down, decide, and then maybe click a button at the bottom and maybe go up to the top and find a button in the title bar. This is not obvious and so designers resort to making that button brightly coloured so it stands out. Unless you are using a non-GNOME non-Gtk app, in which case the buttons will probably be at the bottom, perhaps, maybe.

Also, a time-honoured feature of xNix window managers since the early 1990s is that you have a 3-button mouse and can middle-click the title bar to push the window to the back of the Z-stack. GNOME CSDs break this. One of the developers promised me personally that it would not be broken; it was broken anyway.

GNOME has new features that its fans love (like the overview, a combined app-search screen and tiled window preview). Non-GNOME fans find this hard to understand or see the appeal. KDE is adding it; other desktops ignore it.

Would you like more?

But I think it says good things about the environment that different users found their own things they liked about it.

I have not tried it, but Rudra Saraswat's new Unity-like desktop, UnityX, is also available in an Arch version: https://9to5linux.com/you-can-now-install-the-unityx-desktop...