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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

To provide some historic context: Unity was released in times when there was this "Netbook" trend, started by Asus EeePC with 7" display, followed by a lot of other cheap Netbooks in the 7"-10" display category. Additionally, Canonical pushed to become a mobile/smartphone OS vendor. These constrained display sizes were some of the main factors in the UX design of Unity. Fast forward to today, Netbooks were a short-lived hype to be replaced with Ultrabooks (13" and up), and Canonical failed to become a mobile phone OS vendor and went back to Gnome as a default DE.

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The make or break moment for Unity was Canonicals failed crowd-source campaign for their phone. Work on Unity 8 was underway and would have succeeded Unity 7, and would have been the DE for both their phone and desktop.

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

This is nowhere near the historical truth. The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project. Those were cancelled several years (2017) after the Ubuntu Edge as a result of a business decision to make the company more profitable for investors. There is zero money in desktop, and Canonical continues supporting Ubuntu only as enabling technology for their server and IoT product lines.

> The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project.

The failure of Ubuntu Edge to meet its lofty ($32M) crowdfunding target did not immediately result in Canonical abandoning their convergence aspirations. But it was part of a broader trend of failed attempts to monetize mobile and desktop users. Had more those attempts been sufficiently successful I doubt they would have abandoned OS convergence.

Nowhere near you say? Mir and Unity 8 dev were put on the back burner not long after the Edge campaign. Remeber that no release with them was ever made. Formally terminating dev work a few years later seems to fit in very well: there suddenly was no need for Mir, and the shift in focus to the server fits well with dropping a custom DE.

Mir is still a product that Canonical ships and supports. The converged desktop/phone project was cancelled 4 years (many "not longs" in move-fast-and-break-things timescales) after the Edge proposal was cancelled and really really had nothing to do with the Edge proposal.

I know and understand that I'm an insider with actual information and facts but the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet is not enough to change the experience I had when I was there.

> the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet

Funny, based on my inside info you look to be one :) Maybe should shouldn't assume so much, since you are obviously keenly aware of of how one might look on the web.

It was amusing to read @bregma's comments here, because they said what I was thinking at each point.

The dates are a matter of public record, and trivially Googled. It is not "insider knowledge" to have a memory.

The phone flopped in 2014; the desktop and convergence projects weren't cancelled until the HN thread four years later.

IMHO as a Unity user, the phone deserved to flop. It offered no new compelling features. If it had had some big-ticket selling point, like a slide-out hardware keyboard -- something that used to be a widespread feature in smartphones before the iPhone -- then I would have backed it. I did back the Planet Computers Gemini and I have one. It's a lovely device.

But it didn't. To conflate these things is entirely bogus.

Amusing that you seem to have ignored to read other comments. And that you missed their contradiction: mir was formally cancelled (as if there was nothing between the phone and that) 4 years later and is still on shipping.

Anyway.

Mir was not formally cancelled. It's still being developed and it's still shipping [0].

[0] https://mir-server.io/

OK, I'll bite. What do you think I missed?

Should be noted that compared to Unity, GNOME 3 is an even more extreme variant of the phone/netbook UI.

I'm wondering why more people are not using KDE. It is a honest desktop environment which does not try to pretend phone/netbook or parrot Mac OS X.

Many of KDE apps are the best in a given category. Konsole certainly is.

I think I'm in a minority here but I prefer Gnome to KDE because it feels like it takes more inspiration from macOS than from Windows.

Different strokes for different folks but I don't enjoy the OS/2, Windows, KDE way of doing things.

I'm thankful we have choices.

I am in the same boat. Windows 95 like desktops are simply not the most optimal way to work anymore.

The reason I like gnome most is because it is so out of the way. I am enjoying maximal screen estate while switching apps is just as easy as it is supposed to be.

When gnome shell was new some things were buggy, especially on low power machines, but that changed really quick. I can't think of a single issue.

Not many distros ship KDE as a main and first class DE. On the ones which allows KDE during install (meaning it was at least somehow tested, probably), in my anecdotal experience KDE 5 often run horribly with severe visual bugs. AND then community says this "why did you pick distroname+KDE, it is cutting edge, go pick Mate/Gnome/Cinnamon/XFCE". And both of these things together are rather frustrating.

I used Gnome for a very long time, switched to KDE and switched back. Recently I decided to retry KDE after hearing good things about Plasma, and I can say that it wasn't hyperbole. The desktop feels light and snappy, the settings have been cleaned up and organized while retaining the flexibility/configurability. It may not be as "clean" as Gnome out of the box, but it can be customized a whole lot more to how you want your desktop to be.

I'm basically on KDE for one reason, and that reason is dolphin. No other file manager even comes close in my opinion.

The common "simple, honest" narrative about KDE is unfair and unjust.

Xfce is simple. LXDE is simpler still, and LXQt simpler than that.

KDE is not simple. It is a complex and elaborate environment with extremely complex customisation options, and it still doesn't do things I want from a Windows-like desktop.

- I can't set (or limit) the size of the Start button or the clock.

- I can't have a panel spanning 2+ screens. (That was an option; it was removed.)

- I can't have a vertical taskbar that works as well as Windows.

- It does not use Windows keystrokes, which in a Windows copy is unacceptable.

- If it is so customisable, why can't I have BeOS tabbed title bars? Or side title bars, like in wm2?

- Why can't I tick a box that says ALWAYS show me a menu bar, because I hate hamburger menus and never ever want them.

I use some KDE apps (Konsole, Kdiff3, etc.) even when using a non-KDE desktop such as Pop Shell or Cinnamon.

At least on Debian-based distros, those KDE apps just require a lot of additional packages.

> Many of KDE apps are the best in a given category. Konsole certainly is.

Have you tried Terminator?

No, but

> Terminator on Mac OS X showing live search highlighting and UTF-8

Looks like something working around deficiences in Mac OS X's terminal app which just aren't there in modern X11 terms.

Judging from its feature highlights, the only one I did not see in Konsole is horizontal scrolling.

That was never the objective, nor the result. It's just an ill-informed meme.

I don't know which idea is worse,

(1) that they forced desktop users on a phone UI intentionally

(2) or that they weren't trying to make a phone UI but somehow ended up with the gross garbage that is GNOME 3+ anyway.

Either way GNOME 3+ stinks.

Even the GNOME developers had to concede and offer the alternative GNOME flashback (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback), which looks like GNOME 2 (but not customizable). Given how intransigent they are usually, the push-back must have been enormous.

Lol, because Linux users are the biggest whiners on the planet.

Almost no one appreciated Unity when it was around.

All this nostalgia for it is just that.

If Ubuntu switched to Unity tomorrow people would just start whining like mad about it.

I bet Gnome Fladhback doesn’t even get 1% of the usage of actual Gnome.

Unity wasn't appreciated because it wasn't better than what it was replacing (GNOME 2). Though at least it had a sort of window list you could use to quickly switch windows with a mouse. You know - the device people use on desktop PCs.

Nothing to do with whiners. Although I'm sure the world feels like it's full of whiners if you work on UIs at Red Hat. As is often the case though, that feeling is more a reflection of your situation than objective reality.

I was using Ubuntu but when Unity got dropped I went back to Windows... Now I'm on Fedora 36 with KDE, and :'( my new work laptop has to be Windows :'( so sad.

> Lol, because Linux users are the biggest whiners on the planet.

Gnome is even more of a loser on FreeBSD.

Considering how keyboard-driven Gnome Shell is this is a terrible take...

That Canonical designed Unity to be convergent (functional to both mobile and desktop) doesn't mean it wasn't a superb desktop environment.

There is also Ubuntu Touch for tablets etc., which was started by Canonical, but then dropped because of lack of interest.

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

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