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Comment by nothatscool | Hacker News Reader

Unity’s global menu system was wonderful and once getting used to how well it used vertical space switching to gnome was like going back 10 years. Seeing multiple empty bars across the screen makes it completely unusable to me not to mention their need to replace simple menus with seemingly random icons scattered everywhere. I’m using kde plasma now with a global menu set up. It’s good but isn’t as hassle free as Unity was.

I’m really sad that canonical abandoned Unity. It was so easy to use and was really easy to recommend to people. I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it.

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I am same there (using KDE Plasma with global menu). Recently, with VSCode's menu on title bar, it seems to have started a trend doing so. For example, JetBrain's IDEs are also designed that way. I found the term for that, it's called LIM (locally integrated menu). Now, Unity has done that many years ago. If I remember correctly, the behavior was: when maximized, it behaves like a global menu; when not, it's a LIM.

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

This seems like a weird half-step between "headerbars" / client side decorations / hamburger menus. KDE Maui is going that direction: https://mauikit.org/apps/

Sadly it just seems to be more like a custom window decoration that only does shadows (no actual title bar) and regular KDE headers, no actual window controls / CSD.

I felt much the same way. The global menu also fixed the issue of people shoving menus into hamburgers that I hate. Unity additionally had their search feature that doubled as a run box which was awesome. Tap meta and type the application name and hit enter. Unity really maximalized productivity in my opinion. It’s a shame that Canoncial abandoned it, but being open source the community seems to have quietly continued.

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.

> Unity additionally had their search feature that doubled as a run box which was awesome. Tap meta and type the application name and hit enter.

Gnome Shell does the same thing...

...as does KDE Plasma with Krunner: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

and FVWM when you asign a key combination to open an xterm.

That is not even similar. Come on, play fair.

Which is a feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" nearly 20 years ago, under the name Spotlight, and now implemented in Windows Vista and almost every OS or desktop since then.

>Sadly, the one non-standard thing that they continue insisting on is Snap.

Snap was and largely is mainly for the server crowd, that they've shoved into the desktop. So in that regard I suppose it's at least consistent for them. That said, snap is still terrible, but Canonical always just does their own thing.

Docker won the server market years ago; Snap has no chance there.

Docker is a (declining) container format.

Snap is an app-packaging tool.

This is like saying that trumpets have won over bananas.

Who in the server crowd is using snaps?

From the article:

> 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.

AFAIK GNOME doesn't really do desktop icons and the ones Ubuntu added were actually a GNOME extension. Ubuntu chose to bundle that extension so the burden on creating a unified experience should be on them.

> AFAIK GNOME doesn't really do desktop icons

So the GNOME people are taking their inspiration from Windows 3.x?

Windows 3.11 docked applications onto the "desktop" when you minimized them so no, not really.

It's not really taking inspiration as much as trying new things. Everyone has copied over the desktop because everybody else did so, all the way back to when Apple first ripped off Xerox's GUI. Even on Windows I disable all the clutter of desktop icons that programs will randomly add to my desktop because they deem themselves important.

I personally don't see the benefit, but people who do can pick a distro that writes a well-integrated desktop icon addon (apparently, not Ubuntu).

Apparently so does every recent OS, e.g. Windows, Mac, ios, Android,.... . They all feature an app drawer/launcher/start menu quite prominently and that is always not the desktop.

Having one window of the files app always open, removing all window decorations and calling it "desktop" can be good, but I won't pretend that there isn't an overarching movement away from that.

Not true.

GNOME 1.x, 2.x and 3 from 3.00 to 3.27 supported desktop icons.

They were removed in 3.28: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/gnome-desktop-icons-remo...

It was only in 2018. https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.28/

This is not ancient history. It's less than 5 years ago.

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04. Right clicking the thrash can icon works as intended.

Are you using Unity in 20.04, though?

I am; it is possible, but it is not the default. You have to manually install it. Even upgrading a 16.04 machine to 18.04 removed Unity by default and replaced it with GNOME.

> I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it

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 think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it.

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.

I wasn't a fan of Unity when Canonical was pushing it, but I totally agree that it was better than the GNOME Shell version we're left with nowadays.

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.

When Ubuntu moved to Gnome I remember getting so frustrated at how much screen space Gnome wasted that my old laptop became difficult to use. I gave up on the Linux desktop after that

I remember a lot of the same sentiment about GNOME 3, but if you recall, were you aware of WMs or other DEs at the time?

There was a short lag between when 2.32 was deprecated and when Maté and Cinnamon were released, and I remember XFCE and KDE still being pretty excellent. I used tiling WMs on my other TTYs so changing the defaults didn't affect me.

This is very unlikely to get you back on board, but a tiling window manager like i3 gives you all the freedom and space you could possibly want.

Unity was a great project, but not all is lost.

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).

It only provides some of the cosmetic look of Unity. It doesn't provide any of the functionality, such as global menu bars, keyboard controls, a dock with both keyboard and mouse controls, and so on.

I suppose you and I cared about different aspects of it.

But at least some of the things you enumerated should be possible to add. Maybe file an issue, see what happens.

No, it can't.

You can't move all the app's menu bars into a global menu bar when the new UI guidelines means that GNOME-conformant apps do not have menu bars.

You can't have a search tool that searches menu trees that aren't there.

You can't have add-on status icons in the top panel when the developers have removed the APIs for add-on status icons and combined their own status icons into a smaller number (gods know why, but they have, and it sucks.)

You can't make intelligent use of title bars, for example optionally putting menus into the title bars, or hiding them for full-screen apps, when the GNOME guidelines say don't have a menu bar, use CSD and put dialog buttons in there.

KDE can fake up a global menu bar; GNOME cannot and the GNOME team actively seek to prevent such things.

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