For all it's faults and annoyances I have never once considered gnome, kde, or even cinnamon inferior to unity.
People talk about it's consistancy in the comment section but as someone who has had to use different DE varients over the years, any features unity had a claim to fame for were implemented and then superseded by gnome a long time ago.
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?