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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

That's exciting. I must be one of the few who actually liked Unity a lot, probably better than Gnome. From what I understand, a lot of the underlayment was 'hacky' and abandoned. While I don't like most NIH that Canonical does(snaps, upstart, mir), I really wish they'd have kept Unity.

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When Gnome2 was finally removed from Ubuntu, I tried Unity desktop for a while, didn't like it and installed Gnome3...

...

... 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.

Gnome3 and Unity drove me to use MATE, and though I give KDE, Gnome, and XFCE a shot every six months or so I still use MATE.

AFAICT, for someone who prefers verbosity, purposeful display usage and textual clarity over all else, it doesn't get much better on the Linux desktop than MATE.

How is MATE these days? I switched to Xfce when the Gnome 3 debacle hit, and after spending about 10 minutes arranging things to look like Gnome 2, have never looked back.

It's a nice Gnome 2 experience. If you're set up with Xfce there's little reason to switch, but if you want to go Gnome 3 -> Gnome 2 then MATE is the best option imo.

I've just read the wikipedia page and was delighted to find they have a fork of gedit which doesn't hide the menus! That's now installed on my system.

I've been using MATE for several years now. It's very solid and they've improved and modernised it nicely since gnome 2 times.

It might be worth trying gnome 3 again, and opening gnome tweaks.

There’s a couple size settings that makes stuff feel good. I have moved onto KDE and honestly KDE is way less smart about screen real estate (it makes up for it in functionality fortunately)

Agreed - def worth trying again. Gnome 3.x was what - Windows Vista era? I switched back to Gnome after the 4x series was released a year or two ago. A bunch has changed for the better.

> When Gnome2 was finally removed from Ubuntu, I tried Unity desktop for a while, didn't like it and installed Gnome3...

Gnome 3 was never known as an improvement over Gnome 2. But didn't Gnome 2 continue as MATE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)

It was picked up by an interested party and then attracted a community, after the Gnome folks dropped Gnome 2 like a hot coal when they announced Gnome 3 (no we're not supporting it any more, it's deprecated, no, there's no way to make 3 behave like 2, no, you can't have 2 and 3 on the same box, that doesn't work).

So it continued after a short period of discontinuity, during which time I think a lot of people moved to Xfce, and Mint built their "Cinnamon" DE.

There was a several year hiatus between end of gnome 2 and beginning of mate, and even longer (a year or two) before mate was solid. During this time I remember a lot of attempts at gnome 2 replacement (fallback, flashback etc) and people jumping ship to xfce. I spent a while on ubuntu 10.04 LTS beyond security support then crunchbang before hearing of the mate project, then moved to linux mint and ubuntumate, which is where I've stayed. Those years were a bit disrupted and I stopped recommending linux to friends during that time.

> Almost every change Gnome3 did over Gnome2 was a change for the worse or for far worse.

At first it felt like they just went for change for a sake of change so they could be unique among the DEs but now, it seems the long-term goal wasn't just creating a combination between desktop and mobile environment but aiming at being the mobile environment first with optional support for desktops.

And indeed, reading all experiences people had with devs working around Gnome nowadays it seems they forgot they're an open-source community and decided to play corporation card, where it's totally fine to ignore the end-user and their feedback.

> but aiming at being the mobile environment first

I'd say, being 'touch environment first', not mobile. And it resulted in a very poor UX for mouse users, while touch GNU/Linux computers never appeared (except androids, but they have no use for gnome anyway).

GNOME has excellent support for keyboard based navigation BTW. Almost anything can be done with the keyboard. Most shell actions has a keyboard shortcut.

They could have done it without taking away convenient menus. Previously all apps had standardized interface, now everyone invents the bicycle for themselves.

Gnome’s focus has been creating a desktop environment that is consistent and easy to develop for. Which requires minimal testing and is not exceedingly buggy.

Which is why Gnome is extremely popular across the spectrum. With users, distros and developers.

Gnome makes Linux an OS that can compete with the likes of Macos and Windows and actually best them.

If you didn't give gnome shell a second chance, maybe it's time to do so. When it was released many defaults made gnome 3 awkward to use, mostly wasting screen estate for huge icons and so on.

Meanwhile it's all configureable and at least with Manjaro also comes with sensible defaults that work well on a 28" as well as a 15" notebook.

You are not alone, Unity was my desktop until it was dropped by Canonical. I ended up moving to Windows after that as I did not like the replacement. The main thing I remember was that it was quite fast and worked well with Vmware which is what I used to host client's VMs. Maybe I will give it another go now.

It was always there, just apt install unity? It even asks you which greeter to use and, unlike when Canonical was trying to monetize it, you don't have to remove the adware "lenses" such as Amazon.

I was aware of that but, at the time, there was a lot of uncertainty and I value continuity and stability for my main development machine.

Gnome was always faster than Unity. Which is not surprising considering Unity was a bunch of hacks on top of Gnome.

> Unity was a bunch of hacks on top of Gnome

Where do you get this shit? Over 11 years ago, Shuttleworth abandoned the vision of Unity as a shell for Gnome.

I was the same until I started using popos[0]

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

0 https://pop.system76.com

I've recently installed this plugin on my own distro. It sucks that default gnome can only tile 2 windows per monitor. This plugin is great

Unity fan as well, nowadays I use XFCE on my surviving Linux netbook.

Upstart predated systemd. I never understand the negativity that surrounds it.

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