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Comment by dvdsgl | Hacker News Reader

I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.

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When Ubuntu first switched to Unity I hated it. But over time it got better and I got used to its concepts and I'm daily driving it to this day. Now I even fear the day Compiz and therefore Unity stop working - it has become my DE of choice. I love its space efficiency: the global menu bar and the local window menus (I have it configured to show the window menu when I hover the title bar) and the "task bar" on the left: I use my displays in landscape mode, so width is abundant but height is at a premium. The grid layout shortcuts just work, something that Gnome 3 couldn't really do when I last tried it a couple of years ago. I don't often use the HUD to activate menu entries, but it can be very nice for programs like GIMP when you remember the name of an entry but can't find it in all those submenus. I wish Canonical would still maintain it, over the years it seems to have regressed a bit. Nowadays some (I think mostly SDL2) applications tend to slow down the whole UI and window transitions "take forever". But apart from that it has served me well. So thank you and everyone who was involved with Unity!

So true! I loved Unity in the late 2010s. Unfortunately, now where it is no more maintained and GNOME3 does not really provide the same features, I switched to KDE. What I miss most is the space efficiency and the global menu bar / searchable HUD. I miss so much time digging in menus instead of just typing and hitting enter.

Well, if nothing else hopefully someone else notices this witness statement exposing the above-linked revisionist history for what it is--a fabrication.

On the topic of Unity: I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2.. I don't have much anything constructive to say about it. I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked.. it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2. It wasn't too long after that I landed on xfce. I still wonder what gnome2 could've been.

All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise/lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config. I still feel as though we were sold out. I don't think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover. It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.

I wrote the article. The legal threats I cited were not and are not a fabrication.

I did not write these other articles covering it:

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...

The problem is you're still failing to demonstrate a causal link between threats of legal action and GNOME3 or Unity.

I was around during this time and early adopter of GNOME Shell (i.e. 2.31.x); there was and is zero evidence indicating that legal issues were even a consideration.

There is, on the other hand, mountain ranges of evidence indicating this was driven by everything but legal issues[1][2][3].

[1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/FAQ#What_problems...

[2]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-...

[3]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Summit/2008/GUIHackfest

Thank you, I appreciate the behind-the-scenes context here. Unity ran well on my low-spec low-res hardware that choked on Gnome Shell almost instantly. It was great for making full use of a small screen and hand-me-down computer; meanwhile Gnome was throwing blank space and memory around like they were nothing. My impression at the time was that Unity was designed to be able to run on embedded devices and netbooks while Gnome was expecting a fairly new desktop or laptop.

I think that’s just polish that was missing at a time for Gnome. Check out gnome now, it is very fast on even low-end laptops, and has better input latency than a goddamn mac.

Is that polish, or is it just the moving target of low-end machines catching up to the system requirements? I recently tried Ubuntu 22.04 on a computer with minimal graphics hardware and experienced extreme graphics lag until I switched to XFCE. I haven't tried other DEs on that machine so the story may be the same, but I still wouldn't use Gnome on any but my newest machines.

There may have been some misconfiguration there, but it is buttery smooth on a low-end iGPU for me.

Okay, could just be my machine. I was just so appalled by how badly the default install ran. It's a production server now, and runs great with XFCE, so I probably won't be messing with the configuration.

This is indeed much more believable.

The idea of having a UI that works is any device messed up not just Ubuntu but the entire industry. Windows 8 and up is also a victim, and even Apple couldn't resist.

Desktop computers and smartphones and TVs and cars are entirely different. Desktop computers (and laptops) have keyboards, a large screen and an accurate pointing device, smartphones have small screens and fingers are inaccurate, calling for big buttons, gestures and minimalist interfaces, TVs have a large screen but seen from far away, so not that much information can be shown, and are typically operated from handheld remote controls with limited pointing capacity, cars displays should be operatable without looking at the display, in an environment with lots of vibrations, so we need very big buttons, predictable, static interfaces, physical controls and limited gestures.

Many contradictions here, and for me, trying to unify all that requires too many compromises.

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