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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.

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The thing is, Unity was great as a UI even on desktop. The main issue was poor performance early on.

I found it was horrible. It is similar to GNOME here - a design for tablets and smartphones. It simply does not work on the desktop computer.

I use standard GNOME as my desktop environment and nothing about it feels like it was designed for tablets and/or smartphones. Not that it isn’t capable of being used as such, but my desktop usage doesn’t indicate that tablet/smartphone use-cases were the primary goal. Is GNOME even in wide use for those contexts?

ya i was a GNOME hater for a long time after the GNOME 3 transition, switched between Mate and KDE for years. But gave up on those due to persistent video instability and went to vanilla Ubuntu GNOME and it's actually pretty nice. Not sure if it was good originally but I actually prefer it now.

In a bit of fairness to the haters, Gnome 3 used to have a lot of graphical glitches and was unstable in a lot of its early iterations, but I broadly agree with your characterization.

I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.

Years of fighting to restore basic features was funny the first time, but gnome 3 was not the first time; I do not blame anyone for not trusting that gnome won't pull the rug again, and soon.

I disagree with this characterization.

I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.

The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".

I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.

It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.

> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on

Anecdote time.

I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.

At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.

You're not the people I have an issue with, sorry for the ambiguous use of the word "everyone" there.

If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.

> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.

Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.

Understandable.

I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.

Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.

I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".

GNOME gets flak because they keep removing stuff people want for no good reason.

Can you give some examples?

Removing the option to shut down the computer from the session menu:

https://superuser.com/questions/267303/no-option-to-hibernat...

GNOME’s design philosophy apparently amounts to one developer (with no training or experience in design) saying “I don’t personally consider this feature to be important, and so it’s gone.”

Thanks for formulating this, as I’m too lazy to even start the conversation with the folks who’d like to have a lot of everything on their screens, with myriads of distractions and just ugly little everything. Otherwise ‘that’s tablet,’ and it’s ‘the Gnome team pushing their nonsense,’ not the particular user being used to something completely wrong from the UI/UX perspective. I’m having no issues with teaching Gnome anyone. It’s simple. Yet powerful, I can use it no issues, and it’s my second favourite after Sway. I feel those of us who actually appreciate Gnome should be more vocal about it, otherwise these weirdos with 2 mins of Gnome experience yelling too loud.

As one of these folks who want a lot of everything on my screen, I'm baffled by your declarations that my workflow is somehow objectively "wrong". Go convince Airbus that the cockpit can only have two gauges, and needs a lot of blank space.

It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.

The thing is with gnome, the default is the only option because they don't allow anything else.

It's nice that it might suit newcomers or average people but I'm neither and I know what I want.

Who are you to say they are wrong though if it works for them?

> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.

I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)

This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.

So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.

Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.

Vanilla Gnome user here. Gnome may look like it was designed for tablets but it has a keyboard shortcut for basically anything. So you don't do much of point and clicks if you know Gnome. You can but you don't have to. It just gets out of your way as they say.

It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.

But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.

I was also disappointed that they dropped Unity.

I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.

I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.

Resizing windows on xfce (most themes) is next to impossible though. You have about a pixel sized border to grab.

I used xfce since Unity came out. Switched to KDE Plasma about 2 years ago.

Plasma is the most "sane" out of the DEs right no IMO. Not perfect by any means but good enough.

To me, the killer feature of Unity was the searchable application menus. Wish that was still a thing

KDE supports this! It's called the "global menu", and has search built in. GTK app support is iffy, though

Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..

Sorry but no, the parent commenters looked for a global menu within an application (File -> Open, File -> Save, etc.)

by the way, on macOS the global menu is searchable, too. Shortcut is Command+Shift+/

> Sorry but no, the parent commenters looked for a global menu within an application (File -> Open, File -> Save, etc.)

KDE has such a feature, and yes "Global Menu" is the term for the application menu being pulled into system dock

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...

In Ubuntu MATE there's a mode that sort of emulates Unity.

Same here! Never found a replacement for it in Gnome Shell.

>They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it

I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.

> I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too.

I loved Unity in the desktop too (I had installed Ubuntu on an old Mac mini). I was disappointed when it was killed and then I switched to XFCE.

I was never able to get it working on my Thinkpad. Might be me of course, but after days of reinstalls resulting in always transparent windows, I went with Mint. And stayed.

I also still have tons of issues waking from sleep mode on various PCs running Win10/11 so I wouldn't be so quick to label it an OS issue.

Yeah, it is a general PC thing. Steam deck sleeps perfectly, so it can be done properly, but manufacturers are lazy.

I suspect that's an Nvidia problem. Never been an issue for me using AMD.

It’s the only issue I have on my CachyOS install on an AMD 5900X+9070XT without additional peripherals. It seems like when I hit sleep it doesn’t manage to fully enter sleep (illustrated by the power lights) and then never wakes up anymore until a hard power reset.

I've had wake-from-suspend issues on plenty of non-nvidia machines, and I have had nvidia machines that have no issues.

I think it has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the motherboard chipset.

Agreed. AMD just works for me on linux. My problem is that I am addicted to 6+ monitors and top end gpus... nvidia just seems to hate linux for top end setups. Which is sad, windows just handles my dumb 5060+5090 setup easily. Gaming on linux has gotten way better, but I still can't gigure out how to get some games working. So I'm stuck between using linux + sway / i3 which I looooove... and not being able to get the value out of my $6k gaming rig. Sadly this is a tale that's been going on for 20 years for me.

Linux Mint works great with nvidia cards. It has a great driver manager. It is the only distro I found after getting a laptop with a RTX card that just works. It has worked flawlessly too after 8 months of use.

Does it work with two and sway though?

Is it also doing great with the 58xx driver series that is now mandatory on arch for models a couple years old? I've been having severe issues since then to the point where I had to borrow an AMD GPU from a friend just to get my working station up and running again

I personally like mint too for the past 10 years. They also decided to go against the grain of Ubuntu and not ship things like firefox in a snap, which I prefer.

People tease mint as being a distro for normies and grandmas, but it has worked flawlessly for me and really all I want is an environment which just works.

Many of the sleep issues these days are actually Microsoft's fault. They tried to impose AlwaysOn AlwaysConnected but did a terrible job of specifying it and quality controlling implementation.

I had a Dell Precision from 2020 that never woke from S3 sleep properly, because Dell didn't care about S3 because they expected AoAc (which Windows now defaults to) to actually work. Except A) people don't want laptops that act like phones, and B) it was terrible and munched so much battery it was way better to just hibernate all the time.

Switched to ThinkPad from 2020 and it has a BIOS setting for "classic sleep" and S3 sleep works perfectly.

And Fedora gets 3-4x the battery life than Windows did for general use on both, with much less heat and fan usage, right out of the box. Not to mention bullshit like Windows taking literal seconds to show a directory's contents in the file manager... I'm completely done with Windows for anything beyond gaming (but Valve is changing that rapidly), and dual-booting to a bare Windows install for corporate remote access apps or such, on everything in my house.

I remember them working on a hybrid OS that would run on your phone or tablet and then you could switch it to desktop mode. Actually looks like they're still working on that

https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/

Edit:

seriously guys, can we design product pages so they actually give you a sense of how the product actually works? That page sucks.

I found a video and honestly while I love the idea it seems that the implementation is the worst of both worlds. Who thought that this pull down menu style was a reasonable idea....

https://youtu.be/BuuW5X_ukAk?t=109

Ubuntu Touch isn't a Canonical thing anymore, it's community driven and was picked up by the UBPorts foundation, which is a non-profit.

https://ubports.com

    > It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025.

This has little to do with Ubuntu and probably much more to do with proprietary hardware that makes it difficult to a write a bug-free driver for Linux kernel sleep mode.

What device is giving you the most trouble with sleep mode?

Keep in mind there's a whole class of touch screen laptops that did need to be serviced by Windows and Linux.

I liked Unity! Especially the global menu that macOS also has. I was disappointed when Ubuntu stopped supporting it.

Wait, what sleep mode issues are you talking about? I've been able to wake my ubuntu machine up using my keyboard and mouse. I haven't gotten around to testing steam link wake on lan though, I'd be disappointed if that didn't work.

Wonder about power usage.

yep ubuntu lost me with the tablet ui and snaps.

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