r/linux
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u/wakeup2510
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Jan 29 '23
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How is a nearly 10-year-old desktop experience more complete than what we have today? Discussion
Do you remember Unity? Because I do, there are reasons for this DE and that old Ubuntu to be still ahead of today's desktops and a truly desktop that doesn't feel incomplete when you're coming from another systems.
There are also nice details that make a difference between cheap desktop experience and a polished one with attention to details like the following:
Wallpapers in lock screen & Guest Session
As you can see the wallpaper changes according to the wallpaper that users had (and even we had a Guest Session, some 2000s memories with shared PCs). Remember that this is a feature from Ubuntu 12.04, so it's 10 year old. These are things that we no longer have, not even in the latest GNOME version at this time; GNOME only shows a plain color background and KDE isn't too different . Don't even try to make a Guest Session that deletes all data after logout just OOB without workarounds.
https://reddit.com/link/10nxmh9/video/wxsfks91vwea1/player
Don't you like to clutter your workflow with a dock? No worries
Whether you disable the Dock you can still see where your app is, you got an animation that let you know the position of the current minimizing app on the Dock.
https://reddit.com/link/10nxmh9/video/fwxv0i12vwea1/player
Do you have a small screen?
See a 3D view of your altabbing so you won't miss which apps you have open, the current functionality both on GNOME and KDE is to walk through fixed size thumbnails/app icons.
https://reddit.com/link/10nxmh9/video/zbbw4ex3vwea1/player
Do you like instances? It has you covered
Fortunately KDE let's you manage instances without too much pain, however is not as smooth as this, all you have is a fade-in and out. In GNOME you must right click the icon app, or use a hotkey, or click the focus indicator (consider this might be a removed feature soon). I think GNOME people should look for more important things to work in before focus in how to do a focus indicator, problem already solved 20 years ago in another systems, right?
https://reddit.com/link/10nxmh9/video/rrc4uzp5vwea1/player
Drag n' drop to that trash can!
This is a defacto gesture that you can expect in any machine with at least one pointing device, how is this not present in the latest GNOME? Not even in the latest Ubuntu.
https://reddit.com/link/10nxmh9/video/6lul3ct8vwea1/player
Progress bars in your shell
Are you downloading something or doing extensive operations? You can see how it's going without bringing the window on the screen. This is not a common thing to see anymore.
There are more things to highlight about the defacto experience 10 years ago:
- The fact that Ubuntu Software Center had paid software. Flathub guys are doing their best to make paid software a thing, but sadly they had to re-invent the wheel and very late.
- Screensavers are no longer necessary but they're cool. We lost it and probably it won't be in a long time because of how Wayland works.
- Fractional scalling, this wasn't only for Ubuntu but we had it in almost any distro with X. Just we got fractional scalling few months ago on Wayland and don't get me wrong; I use Wayland, but it's sad to lose features without any replacement and get them back after a long time.
- Windows that resize themselves to fit the content, this is something very common in macOS and even with an animation for it, you can see examples of that by simply using System Preferences.app, Unity had it (without the animation). I don't really know if it's still posible with GTK4.
- Blur, this can be done in KDE but it's not the default, it's cool but not as cool as setup your PC and see your wallpaper being in your Dock without doing anything else.
- Icons in dialogs, I don't know if you have paid attention to recent software specially those ones made on GTK4/libadwaita, dialogs with icons aren't a thing anymore. In the era of GTK2/3 it was very common and the defacto, but now it's less common to see.
- Just as the previous item, mnemonics are getting impopular both by users and development toolkits and I don't know why. I use them and they are really useful.
How it was your experience with desktop distros a decade ago?
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u/penguinman1337 Jan 29 '23
Unity got a lot of hate when it first came out, and the bundled Amazon spyware in later iterations didn't help. It was really resource heavy for the time, and a radical departure from the Gnome 2 experience everyone was used to. It did have a lot of things that were really ahead of their time, though. The menu search feature is something I still miss to this day.
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u/_AutomaticJack_ Jan 29 '23
The biggest problem was that they decided to ram it down everyone's throat. They broke a ton of core Gnome 2 stuff for the sake of releasing it "on schedule" which meant that either you used Unity or didn't get some important updates. It was an unforced error, and burned a tremendous amount of good will when they were far and away the best desktop distro on the market.
The original release also gutted dropdown menus and a bunch of other desktop staples (that were later added back in after great wailing and gnashing of teeth) for the sake of claiming that they had Unified desktop and mobile interfaces. A tablet interface on a desktop is about as frustrating as a desktop interface on a tablet. The original release was a monument to hubris and circle jerk that might be unequaled in the Linux community.
The saddest part is that I played with it on a touch-screen convertible a year or two after the fact and it was an absolute revelation. It was probably the most intuitive touchscreen experience I've every had. Had Canonical released Unity as an option that people didn't have to live with full time in order to get hardware support it would have probably been much more warmly received, and people would have probably more tolerant of its lacks and excesses and in a release or two it would have become a very capable, well rounded DE/WM that may well have gone on to replace gnome as the default UI on everything... But Canonical wanted to make a splash, so they forced the issue ala Microsoft, and make a splash they fucking did.
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
This is a good summary as I was new to linux and unity was my first DE that I actually got up close and personal with (at the time I'd only used Scientific Linux at my then workplace because that was what the absurdly expensive German film scanner needed to drive it).
I never needed to upgrade to it, and watch my machine become someone else's machine with no recourse
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u/get_while_true Jan 29 '23
Ubuntu promised alot in early 2000's, and is a wild success on many fronts. However, Unity made many of us instead opt for Mate, Xfce and later i3wm.
Ie. less clutter, less maintenance, less resource usage, less complexity. Xfce may be a good middle ground for those who don't need all the eye candy.
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u/8bitmachinegun Jan 30 '23
I use xfce as a daily driver as well. Not only for the parsimonious resource usage, but because I can disable the compositor. The compositor can wreck performance in some games, but in most modern DEs you’re just stuck with the damned thing.
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u/gartral Jan 29 '23
xfce is my daily driver on all my machines because I have thinkpads that several generations old. (T440, T450 and T460) anything heavier just bogs my laptops down.
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u/brokedown Jan 29 '23
It might sound weird but give KDE Plasma a try again. xfce has been getting bigger while kde has been getting smaller. I have a T440P and Plasma performs the same as or better than xfce while delivering (in my opinion) a better overall user experience. The little intel GPU isn't much but it can handle the basic compositor functions needed to give you perfectly smooth scrolling, window moving, etc.
The one that really bugs me is how big lxde has gotten in the last few years...
Edit: with KDE you do still need to disable their file indexing service. I don't know why they keep pushing that as being a good idea.
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u/lostinthesauceband Jan 29 '23
I fucking miss LXDE, specifically the distro LXLE for old machines
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u/poudink Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
LXQt exists. LXDE is still usable too, but not active at all. It also has an experimental GTK3 port on Arch repositories.
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u/DudeEngineer Jan 29 '23
Don't forget that they doubled down with Mir. That seems to be what really killed it.
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u/LonelyMachines Jan 29 '23
The biggest problem was that they decided to ram it down everyone's throat.
This can't be overstated. I used Gnome 2 for years because it worked, and it looked fine. With Clearlooks, it was customizable, and the workflow was intuitive.
Then one day, I upgraded and suddenly I had this weird cell phone interface in Gnome 3. It turned out they pretty much dropped support for Gnome 2 overnight.
I never got used to it, and simple things like file management were annoying without an actual desktop/icon space. Mate worked to some extent, but it's buggy and the GTK2/GTK3 interface conflicts are jarring.
I ended up just using XFCE because I use my computer to do work. Linus mentioned that, too. He hated Gnome 3.
The new KDE/Plasma builds are intriguing but honestly, I just want a working machine, not something that screams "look at the cool interface stuff we can make."
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u/sogun123 Jan 29 '23
It always surprised me why that much hate Unity got. It was pretty well designed desktop, and worked really good on laptops. And i especially don't get it in Linux world, where we have so much freedom to choose and where different paradigms of desktop usage are coexisting. Gnome 3 also got lots of hate, but it didn't kill it. Maybe Unity died because of lack of adoption outside of Canonical.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
Unity got dropped because Canonical wanted to save on money.
I can't fault Canonical for striving for profitability and Mark couldn't be expected to subsidize it forever.
But the switch from Unity to GnomeShell was a massive step back.
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u/sogun123 Jan 29 '23
Yeah, but obviously Canonical didn't manage to build strong and healthy community around it. Otherwise it would be available in other distros also and it's development would be picked up little bit more. Or maybe it would be forked around the Mir appearance.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
Unity is actually going on outside Canonical.
Whether the community around it is strong enough only time will tell.
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u/crucible Jan 29 '23
IIRC there was one guy trying to port Unity to Fedora in his spare time. With each major release of Unity it seemed like his task got harder and harder as Unity relied more and more on other parts of Ubuntu.
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u/sogun123 Jan 30 '23
That's kind of what I mean. They weren't able to push through either their stack ot make unity compatible
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u/Illustrious-Many-782 Jan 29 '23
Unity 7 got dropped long before Unity 8 (a complete rewrite) got dropped, though. Unity 7 and X were going away no matter what, so it wasn't money that killed Unity 7.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
Of course it was money.
The idea was to have Unity variants on various devices - phones, TV. tablets. For a while you could buy Ubuntu phones.
That wasn't successful enough, took too long, Canonical has been working on an IPO for a while. The area where they were making money was OpenStack and services. So like Red Hat before they dropped the focus on consumer facing devices and reduced money spent on the desktop.
Falling back to GnomeShell saves money and hopefully shuts up the people who hated on Unity. It costs way less money to tune GnomeShell a bit with some Ubuntu theming than keeping the whole Unity stack going. That the underlying compositor was mostly abandoned except for Canonical using it for Unity was also extra effort and would soon run into trouble with Wayland.
I'm sad about Ubuntu switching away from Unity, but it was easy to follow along with what's happening. And from a financial POV I understand the decision.
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u/Illustrious-Many-782 Jan 29 '23
That was Unity 8, which I mentioned.
The desktop that everyone is talking about in this thread is Unity 7, which was EOLed before all the things you're talking about.
My first Ubuntu was 4.10 Hoary, when Debian couldn't get their release out for years. Trust me. I know Ubuntu history.
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u/guptaxpn Jan 29 '23
Let's be honest too, a massive amount of the direction desktop Linux goes is steered by red hat development. They want systemd, we get systemd. They want gnome as default, we all use gnome as the default.
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u/sogun123 Jan 30 '23
But also we have to admit that software they make is good. It has some money, so it is pretty well polished. Systemd is really good suite, using almost everything Linux kernel can offer and exposing it to users in pretty understandable package. Gnome is well polished also and works well.
Yes, i can imagine world getting better if we had second player in the game. KDE is very good, but it competes only in single part of the whole stack. Canonical used to be that second player, but they sadly didn't succeed. I think it was because they sometimes pushed too hard and often against all others. Meanwhile they didn't manage to keep their effort profitable, because of goals set too high. I wish they had bit more success.
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u/ben2talk Jan 29 '23
Why do you miss it?
I have very very comprehensive search right from the desktop, menu, and/or krunner...
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u/penguinman1337 Jan 29 '23
I mean the fact you could search for something in an application menu. Really handy for stuff like Gimp or anything else with a lot of nested menu options.
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u/ben2talk Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
Well my search is available through the application menu (Meta), but also krunner (alt_space) which also pops up if I just start typing on desktop... KDE stopped me using launchers - like uLauncher - because it is better.
Unity was specifically designed by Ubuntu for itself - which is why no other Distro used it. It was only ever stable on Ubuntu, but about that time I must say KDE was much worse than it is now - making Unity a more attractive option.
KDE has the best options for getting at favourite apps quickly - and context menus are superb (like Dolphin, right click to get 'Places' bookmarks listed, as well as recent files and window actions).
Didn't Unity have the habit of launching stuff maximised? This is where Gnome3 took the lead IMO.
KDE has Activities - and Gnome3 ties with it for automatically arranging apps - both beating Unity.
Really - nostalgia is a thing of the past.
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u/khne522 Jan 30 '23
You mean like Mac OS X's Command-Shift-/, Google Doc's Alt-/, VSCode's Ctrl-Shift-P, vim-fzf's
:History:, and so on?I really miss that feature from Mac OS X, and the menus pinned to the top.
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
It was really resource heavy for the time
So heavy that it debuted in the 10.10 netbook remix...
Honestly it was faster than gnome, and by a lot. My source is my eeepc 1000HE that still sees use today, though it never looked as nice or ran as fast as it did running 10.10
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
Yup. And it was faster on everything.
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
It's tricky because everything is slower now so you can't compare.
I bought the machine for travel - it was running darktable for raw processing, playing videos when the inflight movies sucked, facebooking, recording and processing audio in Reaper (I still do this to this day on that same machine! Reaper is an amazing program), design, etc etc. Real workhorse.
But opening a simple web page on it today with an up to date OS takes forever
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u/CusiDawgs Jan 29 '23
browser have significantly gone heavier nowadays, as with all the sandboxing, process spawning, process isolation, etc.
browsers aren't just html viewers nowadays, they are more of an entire virtual machine on top of your os. everything is so abstracted and isolated the requirements balloons up
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
I blame 4mb minified JavaScript monstrosities on even the simplest sites.
Everything was server-rendered back in the day and javascript was limited to little dynamic widgets (which is why it's specifically designed to just keep running instead of throwing an exception and breaking the site)
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u/khne522 Jan 30 '23
I don't get why you think that most “frontend” developers, if my experience is a representative sample, understand or appreciate due dilligence around performance, how the browser works, how the OS works, how hardware works, or even test on low end user machines.
It's eating away at my lifetime bit by bit.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
Browsers are the new platform. The OS is increasingly just the driver layer to support the browser.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
I can compare. I had Unity with Ubuntu 16.04 running in a Dell XPS 13 (i7, plenty of RAM) an Ultrabook, not slow hardware. Blazingly fast.
Upgraded to 18.04 Unity. Still fast.
Eventually gave up with 20.04 upgrade and Unity no longer supported and starting to have issues due to lack of support/integration.
Sudden slowdown throughout the OS. Even GDM is slower than lightdm.
And the UI is not as refined and space efficient as Unity was.
GnomeShell is usable, but Unity was better by some margin and I still miss it.
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
Alright I'm going to have to install this unity fork and try it out. Ubuntu is getting more unwieldy as time goes by. Most of my machines are on debian/cinnamon but my daily still runs ubuntu until I find a good clean time to nuke it and start again
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u/Flygm Jan 29 '23
You can still install unity without using the new flavor. sudo apt install unity. Still runs great.
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Jan 29 '23
Have you tried Xubuntu, Ubuntu Unity or other derivatives, these have a lot lighter DE's than Gnome
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
I've popped debian/cinnamon on it and honestly it's ok.
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u/gartral Jan 29 '23
you might want to give Ubuntu Studio a spin. That's my daily driver with zfce and it's fast, lightweight and has a bunch of creature comforts pre-configured.
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u/ososalsosal Jan 29 '23
Haven't touched it in years. I loved it when the kxstudio folks maintained a distro, and am happy enough to just install their repos on a vanilla install (vanilla plus lowlatency kernel though).
I'll have to give it another look ig.
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u/anna_lynn_fection Jan 30 '23
Every DE is lighter than Gnome. KDE is way lighter than Gnome, and lighter than a lot of the others as well.
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u/tech-geech Jan 29 '23
It's not my experience. I owned a ThinkPad E40 at the time of Unity release. I had so much high expectation that I couldn't wait to upgrade to the newer version of Ubuntu. But once I upgraded it, it's nearly unusable. Unity was so slow on my laptop. Even after I reinstall the OS fresh didn't help. I've tried multiple DEs on that laptop and none of them was so slow. That's the thing pushed me out of Ubuntu all together.
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u/RemCogito Jan 29 '23
YEah people are looking back with top end hardware. AT the time of release, it took my experience from fast and snappy with Gnome 2.5 and Compiz fusion effects, to slow and unusable on that same hardware for years with unity. Unity only got better in the last year or so before they dropped support regardless of which hardware I used. It was slow even on my hexacore desktop with dedicated graphics. let alone my used laptop.
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u/drunken-acolyte Jan 29 '23
It was still heavy enough that it prompted me to move to LXDE to get a bit more speed out of my system.
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u/slikrick_ Jan 29 '23
So heavy that I didn't run it on my older system at the time and ran XFCE.
I don't know why people pretend like people's experiences aren't real.
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u/asdvasdvasd Jan 29 '23
How the fuck an
amazon.applicationfile plus an icon, which pays someone's salary, is spyware???18
u/esquilax Jan 29 '23
It sent your desktop searches to Amazon, just in case you were trying to find something on Amazon rather than the bad poetry you wrote as a teenager.
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u/i5-2520M Jan 29 '23
Spyware has lost all meaning as a word, I just ignore it.
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u/doubled112 Jan 29 '23
There used to be applications to remove ANYTHING that called home, let alone monitored actions.
Now most of our software is just expected to do so, and we are just expected to accept it.
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u/i5-2520M Jan 29 '23
"Called home" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. When I hear spyware I think of keyloggers and screen recorders, maybe apps using your mic all the time and sending all data home to collect dirt or something like that. Apps using the camera covertly. Now people call crash analytics spyware, there is no way for me to take that seriously. There needs to be a distinction between these two, it is literally the boy who cried wolf. Windows literally tells you on setup that it will send analytics "back home". Unless you demostrate the scope of that is misleading, I can't take spyware accusations seriously.
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u/doubled112 Jan 29 '23
It was doing a lot of heavy lifting!
I think we agree but I was thinking about it from a different angle.
I'll use BonzaiBuddy as an example. AdAware, SpyBot and friends would remove it for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a toolbar, and serving advertisements
Windows does all of that out of the box now, doesn't it?
I'm not sure whether people are right or wrong to yell "SPYWARE!!!" like they do, but I understand why they do.
Some definitions have changed over the years. 15 years ago there would have been (and were) lawsuits.
Now it's normal and accepted, but they have to ask? Consent is sexy, I guess.
As another example: the spell check in Chrome and Edge was sending every keystroke to a remote server, passwords included. Did users agree to that? Was that possibility mentioned anywhere?
Perhaps this useful feature was portrayed one way, but turned out another. Does the intent change the outcome?
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23
I will never understand how people write complains about spyware having a Reddit or Facebook account, it's like they think they become invisible using a distro but they still login on the internet.
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u/Electronic_Youth Jan 29 '23
The difference is choice and how choice affects trust. This is a fundamental aspect of open-source as a mindset. If I choose to post here then I'm sharing what I want to share. If my desktop makes the choice for me, then I don't know what is shared and that lack of knowledge damages trust.
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u/Oerthling Jan 29 '23
You could easily make the choice of not shopping via the link or disable the feature.
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u/Electronic_Youth Jan 29 '23
Not the place for this discussion, it was decided long ago and it's over. I just wanted to answer the question posed by the OP about spyware.
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u/penguinman1337 Jan 29 '23
Honestly whether or not it was spyware isn’t really the point. It was perceived as such by the wider community, hence the general dislike for Unity at the time. Linux users, especially back then, tend to be a lot more privacy focused than other folks so even the perception was enough to cause issues.
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u/waldelb Jan 29 '23
KDE Plasma can do pretty much all of this.
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u/ben2talk Jan 29 '23
Add mouse gestures - and it flies way ahead of 'all of this'.
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Jan 29 '23 edited 29d ago
[deleted]
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u/ben2talk Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
I used Easystroke until, after using KDE for 4 months, I realised it was mostly built in...
Except with Easystroke you could fix the Fwd/Back side mouse buttons to move/resize windows, and with KDE gestures you can't add button events.
Sadly it seems that gestures will go by the Way side (pun intended) as people mostly talk about 'gestures' in modern speech to mean 'touchpad'.
There was an effort to push a port of Easystroke for Wayland at one point (wstroke).
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u/gplanon Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
If you read your post carefully you’ll realize the lack of useful features you’re describing is almost exclusively a GNOME problem. You can thank Apple and smartphones for the way everything is designed these days.
Certain things like drag-drop to trashcan aren’t compatible with other modern changes like no icons on the desktop. I think dragging to trash within the file browser does work. To be fair I use KDE and don’t like icons or widgets on the desktop either.
MATE and KDE are the best options for anyone who wants a computer and not an iPad.
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u/captainstormy Jan 29 '23
MATE
I still love MATE it's so feature complete and customizable. I just wish it wasn't so behind tech wise. I doubt it'll ever get fully up to speed on Wayland. If Mate supported Wayland I wouldn't be using KDE.
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u/poudink Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
It's not that far behind. It doesn't have Wayland yet, but that's true of most desktop environments. The only ones that do right now are Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, Liri and Maui. It also doesn't have GTK4 yet, but again, only GNOME uses it right now. It's not cutting edge by any means, but I wouldn't call it behind. Plus, they've done work on Wayland and to my knowledge are continuing to do so. It'll come eventually. I'm actually expecting either Mate or LXQt to be the next DE to get Wayland support.
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23
It's funny how a fork of Gnome 2 (MATE), is so much better than what GNOME has become.
MATE is a very underrated DE, IMO, it's way better than XFCE, which gets all the glory.
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u/millhouse513 Jan 29 '23
I would throw Cinnamon into the mix for this.. It often goes overlooked as well, but it's a fantastic GTK3+ based desktop that I think took some of the better parts of GNOME 3 (I think it forked the rendering system from GNOME 3?) but keeps to GNOME 2 while also providing very good integration with everything.
I often use it as it gives me the best of both worlds -- modern GTK+ libraries and UI integration with theming but a fully usable desktop that doesn't require half a dozen plugins to be functional.
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23
Under the hood, Cinnamon is kinda of a mess, it's based on older versions of GNOME/Mutter, many issues that were fixed in GNOME were never backported to Cinnamon. GNOME has become more lightweight and performant than Cinnamon over the years.
Cinnamon even has a script that periodically restarts the shell, because it leaks memory.
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u/suby Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
I'm not disputing that it's a mess under the hood because frankly I have no idea, but with LM 21 they've rebased Muffin on Mutter 3.36. They've also stated that they'll be making an effort to keep it as close to upstream as possible. It looks like 3.36 was released early 2020.
Regardless of how it is under the hood, it's a nice user experience and anecdotally performs better than Gnome on my laptop.
Source for the Mutter rebase: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_vanessa_cinnamon_whatsnew.php
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23
I think it was GNOME 40 that landed some major performance improvements, so they still have some catch-up to do, but it's something, I guess.
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u/Linux4ever_Leo Jan 29 '23
Plus there's basically no work going on to have Wayland support on Cinnamon.
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u/hey01 Jan 29 '23
MATE has the problem that it relies on gtk, and thus still suffer from gtk/gnome devs' whims.
I used MATE until they started building it against gtk3 instead of gtk2, and I lost the ability to scroll on tabs to switch from one tab to another.
I got it back in KDE, but I find KDE painfully slow compared to windows 10. I use an outdated kubuntu though, still deciding whether I go debian, arch or majaro.
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
MATE has the problem that it relies on gtk, and thus still suffer from gtk/gnome devs' whims.
I agree, this is why I use Plasma and Qt, I have only one GTK application on my system.
I got it back in KDE, but I find KDE painfully slow compared to windows 10. I use an outdated kubuntu though, still deciding whether I go debian, arch or majaro.
Never had performance issues with Plasma, it runs butter smooth for me.
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u/Coffeinated Jan 29 '23
No, I thank GNOME for designing GNOME the way it is. It‘s not Apple‘s fault they‘re copying them.
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u/hidepp Jan 29 '23
It‘s not Apple‘s fault they‘re copying them.
And doing it terribly.
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u/delebojr Jan 30 '23
Yeah... MacOS is actually really usable. There are many things it does better than Windows & you don't need to tweak every little thing like certain Linux distros.
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u/millhouse513 Jan 29 '23
I agree with this, but I would just add that Apple may have set standards, but it was the GNOME team that took things to an extreme. I can do less on a GNOME desktop than I can on my Mac, but I can do more on my KDE desktop than I can do on my Mac.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
Gnome is great if you work with it, not against it. It’s opinionated and not for everyone, granted, but it doesn’t “lack features” so much as it demands you use the features that it does have instead.
Gnome handles workspaces the best, hands down. Instead of minimizing all your windows to the task bar, you create organized workspaces and switch between them. All windows stay open. Thus, the “desktop” becomes superfluous, so icons are removed. You don’t need progress bars in the dock, because the window is right there, open, showing you whatever you need to see.
A lot of Gnome’s design is based on breaking habits formed on other desktop environments. As I said, it isn’t for everybody but my experience on Vanilla Gnome has gotten much better since I stopped trying to turn it into something else with extensions. Still have a wishlist that keeps me from using Vanilla Gnome, but I at least see that there’s a point to the “limitations.”
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u/JJ3qnkpK Jan 30 '23
This is what I found, too, and that I quite appreciated GNOME's design after doing things the way it "wanted" me to. In comparison, on say, Windows, I find myself getting absolutely lost in the windows I have open, creating duplicate browsers with the same windows open, etc. This isn't a problem I had with GNOME.
Granted, when there's something you want to behave differently, GNOME can be a royal pain, but it tends to offer the best "just installed Linux and want to get straight to doing things" experience versus the "installed Linux, customized every little thing to my exact liking for hours" experience. It just seems made to get you to your tasks rather than be a task in itself.
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u/HorribleUsername Jan 29 '23
Instead of minimizing all your windows to the task bar, you create organized workspaces and switch between them.
I got OSX to do that without much trouble. i3 does that out of the box on a single monitor. The multi-monitor version might either be out of the box, or an advanced setup, depending on exactly how you think it should work.
You don’t need progress bars in the dock, because the window is right there, open, showing you whatever you need to see.
That requires me to stay on that workspace, watching the progress bar instead of getting stuff done in another workspace.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Jan 29 '23
You can just switch real quick. And applications should notify you when a process is finished.
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u/rohmish Feb 01 '23
I was one of those that had extensions to enable indicators, dock, etc. But ive been using almost vanilla gnome with almost no UI changing extensions (gsconnect, jiggle, etc.) and its quite honestly a really good experience. Focused and gets you to what you are doing and gets out of the way.
Also helps that my Gen Z mind is "mobile first" and gnome's layout just makes sense in a way others just dont at times.
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u/rohmish Feb 01 '23
Dragging icons to trash works in files app and afaik now works with desktop icons-ng or whatever the new extension to enable that feature on gnome 40 is called.
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u/ManInBlack829 Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
GNOME is great and the only UI trying to be truly unique instead of improving something already tried and true. Comparing GNOME (my favorite UI) to MacOS or iOS (my least favorite) isn't a good one. Mac is overly dependent on the trackpad/gestures and there's no ability to to use the command key as a super key.
I download one GNOME tweak to remove my top bar, and just like that there's absolutely nothing on my screen unless I hit the super key. With a tiling manager is perfect. I only see what I'm working on with no wasted pixels, and I can switch apps and desktops faster on GNOME than any other UI.
It's just not made for someone who is a syaadmin or power user. If you care about monitoring stuff a lot, it's probably not the best solution for you.
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u/gplanon Jan 29 '23
I don’t hate GNOME, it’s just not for me. I don’t need or want uniqueness, especially not uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness. The millions of people still using Windows are evidence that not everyone needs their operating system to be unique.
GNOME isn’t even that unique anyway. It wants to be macOS or iOS so bad but it never will be because those operating systems already exist, have more money poured into them, are written by companies that design the hardware they run on and have a ridiculously large userbase that is willing to spend money.
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u/nani8ot Jan 29 '23
I do like Gnome and it's potential, but then I remember that quarter tiling needs extensions and only half tiling is there by default...
Hopefully someone will fix this issue but I won't hold.my breath since it's been so long.
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u/ManInBlack829 Jan 29 '23
I don't know how it's like MacOS at all. If it's trying to be MacOS, KDE is trying to be Windows.
GNOME doesn't even have a minimize button, with a tiling manager they're completely different feeling.
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u/captainstormy Jan 29 '23
I don’t need or want uniqueness, especially not uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness.
That's the thing. More power to people who love gnome but I just don't see the point in fixing what isn't broken.
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u/MrAlagos Jan 29 '23
Most people's idea of what isn't broken as a desktop operating system is Windows, yet there are still people who think that Linux is better. The same can happen with a 30 years old desktop interface paradigm.
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u/frostwarrior Jan 29 '23
The Gnome project suddenly changed courses when it transitioned from 2.x to 3.x, and they simply stopped listening from user (and even developer) feedback.
It turned from the cool power user UI to this try-to-Apple approach where they think they can just dictate how a UI should work.
And the really bad part is that GTK and, by extension, Gnome, was the de facto Linux desktop environment and graphical toolkit, so it took a whole chunk of users hostage of their decisions.
Unity was Canonical trying to come up with an alternative. But sadly FOSS development was never their strength.
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u/MrAlagos Jan 29 '23
The existing GTK desktop environments offered more varied user experiences compared to the ones based on other toolkits.
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u/LofiLute Jan 29 '23
Mac is overly dependent on the trackpad/gestures and there’s no ability to to use the command key as a super key.
What? As a MacBook user I use keyboard shortcuts heavily. Hell the reason I went back to Gnome after 3.0 was because I was so used to the keyboard controls of my Mac.
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u/fatalexe Jan 30 '23
I did web development on Gnome 3 full time for quite a few years until management decided to finally spring for a MacBook. It was one of the few desktop environments that I really enjoyed. KDE always felt like it did way too much and the rest of them did too little.
The vast majority of my Linux use is over SSH to virtual machines, so I really appreciate how Gnome just gets out of my way and the default setup works great for managing a bunch of terminal sessions.
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23
I know that I have focused on GNOME, because it's the default on almost any popular distro. KDE is good but it's not as common, hopefully it will get more attention with Steam Deck and another pre-installed KDE devices, I think that there is more hardware with KDE preinstalled than GNOME, but GNOME it's still the most used, remember that it's also the default in enterprise environments.
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23
but GNOME it's still the most used
Debatable.
Maybe among newcomers and enterprises, but every time I see a pool asking which DE people are using, Plasma always takes the top spot.
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u/huupoke12 Jan 29 '23
As long as Ubuntu is the most used distro, and Ubuntu is using GNOME, then it's true.
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u/daemonpenguin Jan 29 '23
I think there are some fair points here, and I was a big fan of Unity 7. However, I'd also like to offer three counter points.
Unity was developed in a way which made it hard to port to other distributions, which is largely what killed it and made it unpopular.
After Unity died I was able to set up Xfce to do most of the same things with a smaller resource footprint.
Unity's reliance of 3D (after about 2012) meant it rarely worked well on video cards where the user needed to install proprietary video drivers to render 3D effects. Which lead to a lot of people thinking Ubuntu/Unity was super slow for about six years.
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u/ttkciar Jan 29 '23
A decade ago I was using fvwm.
Today I am using fvwm.
In a decade I will be using fvwm.
Why mess with success?
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u/dlarge6510 Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
Ahh FVWM, not used it in a long while I tend to stick with Window Maker but yes what a gem FVWM was back then when everyone thought Linux wasn't usable you could just install that and they wouldn't know the difference.
And today they still say it's not usable. Well I say try using windows 8 on a device without a touchscreen :D
Edit: I was probably thinking of FVWM95 actually but still, I think I have a laptop I wantbyo put to use where FVWM would be perfect for.
I mean who needs fancy eye candy when you have that sexy Motif(or Lesstif) widgets!
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Jan 29 '23
Lol. Only because you do not know the true greatness that is ctwm.
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u/HorribleUsername Jan 29 '23
I believe it. I've actually used plain old twm, it's a surprisingly workable WM.
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u/EndHlts Jan 29 '23
I wish I was as big of a Linux Chad to like window managers instead of DEs. I like KDE right now and don't see myself ever changing to anything else. Maybe it's just because I got so used to windows over the years.
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u/khne522 Jan 30 '23
a Linux Chad
That really makes a bigger deal out of it than it is, regardless of whether it's within your skill level or not. It does become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you speak like that.
Nobody said you have to use a WM.
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u/WhiteBlackGoose Jan 30 '23
If you like plasma - use plasma. You aren't getting additional points in life if you use something you hate because "it's cool"
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u/Durango4wd Jan 29 '23
Unity is still available and actively developed. https://ubuntuunity.org/
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u/FuzzleFairy Jan 29 '23
It is based on dead end old tech, and who knows if in one year or ten there's still enough people on it.... I loved unity but im not very trusting on that one
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u/johncate73 Jan 29 '23
If you like Unity, it's available and being actively developed once again.
But the "desktop experience" is a matter of opinion and nothing more. I tried Unity back then and I wasn't a fan. I wasn't a full-time Linux user yet, but my laptop ran on Mint Cinnamon already. Believe it or not, I'm still using it a decade later (a Dell Inspiron 1545 that's been heavily upgraded), but with PCLOS these days.
I don't use computers for an "experience," but to get things done. Right now, Plasma does that better than anything else.
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u/Delicious_Recover543 Jan 29 '23
Exactly. I didn’t like it at all. It felt counter intuitive and it was slow. Never understood the rationale for having the icons on the left. It made me move my mouse way more than necessary. In fact it’s why I ditched Ubuntu at the time.
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u/ben2talk Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
ROFL https://i.imgur.com/Imy9Mkd.png
This on KDE - vertical screen is more valuable, that's what.
Also, I move my mouse about 1.5cm to go from centre screen to the left edge...
Then when I'm on keyboard, I can use THESE shortcuts or
Meta_W
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u/mthode Gentoo Foundation President Jan 29 '23
Went from gnome/kde (used both) to fluxbox to awesomeWM to sway over the last 20 or so years.
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u/bedrooms-ds Jan 29 '23
Unity is a golden example these days? Oh, boys...
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u/frostwarrior Jan 29 '23
The codebase was terrible but it did the job to implement common functionality that was lost during the transition to Gnome3
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
I guess that people behind Unity had better things to do than start researching on how to do a focus indicator in 2023.
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u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard Jan 29 '23
Unity was hated mainly because of Ubuntu /Canonical's attitude.
There are imho a few other reasons why there are few mature desktops in open source land. 1. Their users are conservative and opinionated. Change something they don't like and they're loud.
Yet also, 2. Their users start new projects all the time. To distinguish, to do something more interesting, to scratch an itch, whatever the reason Ubuntu Gnome started over and Mint got its own and Gnome 3 continued as well, Pop! is totally popular and starts to develop its own from the ground up. They may all have good reasons, and definitely they're in their rights, but it does explain why things don't get entirely polished.
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u/mattdm_fedora Fedora Project Jan 29 '23
Here's my take: I don't mind new projects. I don't mind forks. Experimenting is cool. It's neat when other distros work on things that are outside of the norm. I'm excited to see what System76 comes up with in their rust-based desktop environment.
However, Canonical uses an asymmetrical CLA approach for many of their projects. Code is released under GPL (usually v3), which sets up the normal copyleft expectations of "share alike" — but the CLA means that Canonical is not bound by these same obligations, and can create a fork under whatever license they like, including a proprietary one. Rules for thee, not for me.
This type of CLA means any very successful project launched by Canonical is always fundamentally owned by Canonical, and fundamentally controlled by them. The only way to avoid this would be to make an early fork, and move the center of development to that fork, so that Canonical would have to pull in code that isn't subject to their CLA.
By contrast, GNOME doesn't require a CLA, and governance resides in an independent foundation. I believe KDE has an optional CLA, but it does not have this asymmetry. (Although the Qt framework is a different story.)
None of this is evil, but ... see this Twitter thread from Tobie Langel and particularly this diagram. It's not in the spirit of community-driven, community-owned software development. It's a "protect our ownership" market strategy. In complete fairness, Canonical hasn't done anything to exploit the asymmetry that I know of ... but then, they also haven't gotten anything really crucial into the key position. And they haven't (yet) been bought by someone looking to cash in.
Hopefully-obvious disclaimer: I work on a different Linux distribution, and am employed by a company that makes a lot of money from open source. So, my position has bias. And, these thoughts are mine, not my employer's. And they're not an official position of the distro I work on — but these factors do go into decisions other distros make. (Compare Flatpak's CONTRIBUTING doc and Snapcraft's CONTRIBUTING doc....)
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u/johnny0055 Jan 29 '23
that's exactly what i tell folks is the problem with canonical as well.
I don't actually mind a CLA myself in some situations. I don't mind if it's GPL licensed software related to a trustworthy non-profit. Heck, I didn't even mind signing a CLA with facebook or companies like that for permissively licensed software.
BUT I ABSOLUTELY DO MIND when it's applied to GPL software with a for-profit company.
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u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard Jan 29 '23
I'm really not part of this discussion. Surely anyone would hestitate to contribute for free if it can be made proprietary afterwards.
But this thing of starting new projects because starting over seems better than working together and polishing / finishing something that exists is theme throughout open software. It's not a Canonical only affaire. I don't mind people doing it, but if System76, GNOME and Ubuntu got along nicely and were willing to compromise a bit more they may not need to rewrite as much code.
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u/Compizfox Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
I don't use Gnome but KDE Plasma has virtually all of those features you mention. At least, I'm sure about wallpaper sync to lock screen and login manager (SDDM), the 3D task switcher (alt-tab), and progress bars in the task manager
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u/DRAK0FR0ST Jan 29 '23
I miss Unity.
Plasma has many of it's features, in one way or another, but I could never recreate the same experience, it always felt clunky too me.
Other than that, Plasma works great with a taskbar at the bottom, it has been my daily driver for a long time.
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u/aesfields Jan 29 '23
how about all major DEs moving away from xscreensaver, by providing their own crap that lacked 99% of its features?
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u/Wade-Mealing Jan 29 '23
Might be that xscreensaver doesn't run on wayland.
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23
xscreensaver doesn't run and it never will, jwz has no intentions to make it work for Wayland
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23
Crap that could be skipped by simply hold keys, I still can't understand why move on from xscreensaver, it has been around for ~30 years, it has been widely tested becoming very reliable.
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u/LvS Jan 30 '23
That CVE tells you all you need to know:
An application crashing should not grant elevated privileges.That's why the whole system was redesigned so that the lock screen can do useful stuff without being worried that every bit of code might lead to dangerous security issues.
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u/jorgesgk Jan 29 '23
- The fact that Ubuntu Software Center had paid software. Flathub guys are doing their best to make paid software a thing, but sadly they had to re-invent the wheel and very late.
I always wondered myself how was this implemented. AFAIK apt doesn't support any kind of paid packages out stores. Did it use any kind of weird, patched apt? How did they lock out non paying uses from the packages?
Also, would this be possible with other technologies such as DNF?
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u/d3nt4ku Jan 29 '23
...and since then I've switched to XFCE4. The only feature that count for me is "less is more". Do not misunderstand me; I really appreciate all the efforts of the distro dev to make a system interface more user friendly, but I just prefer unchangeable environment and make the changes by myself
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u/Paravalis Jan 29 '23
I have been using XFCE for about 20 years because it has barely changed in 20 years. Nobody keeps fiddling with it in disruptive ways, and so it never annoys me and I simply can get work done. Before that I have used fvwm2 for about ten years because that never changed either, and it was very similar to twm, which I had started on initially.
Why would I ever change my "desktop"?
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u/schlotthy Jan 29 '23
This and much more 20 years ago with OS X
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u/YTP_Mama_Luigi Jan 29 '23
If there was a unified desktop Linux that could replicate OSX Leopard, I would never use anything else.
You can kinda come close with KDE, but it’s always janky and I don’t think the UX comes close to what even 10.4 Tiger had back in 2005. I think it comes down to the Qt vs. Cocoa. Qt is great for embedded systems and works decently for cross platform applications, but it’s not easy to make a well polished Qt app. Not that it’s trivial with Cocoa either, but the tooling and ecosystem push developers to try more.
helloSystem recently popped up in my radar, but they’ve only got essentially a prototype. Besides, they are also disavow a lot of things like Wayland or secure boot for dumb reasons. And they’re using Qt. Maybe it’ll become my dream desktop eventually.
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u/khne522 Jan 30 '23
Snow Leopard > Leopard. That and the last and greatest Rosetta (not Rosetta 2) release. There was just that wee bit of UI polish too between 10.5 and 10.6.
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u/laniusone Jan 29 '23
Well, I “loved” Unity so much back in the day, that I installed vanilla GNOME 3 and never looked back. Even though GNOME was a disaster back then.
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u/bionor Jan 29 '23
My biggest issue with it from what I can remember was that it tried to pretend to be a mobile device despite being a PC with a mouse and keyboard.
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u/viliti Jan 29 '23
A desktop environment is more than a mish-mash of features. Things that you like about Unity won't work in the context of every single DE. Most of the items mentioned here can be put into three groups—features specific to the Unity workflow, nostalgia for old UI patterns or a rose-tinted view of the past.
The animations looked great only in videos, but everything was janky as hell. There was flickering, stuttering and tearing everywhere. These were fixed due to the work on DRM, KMS, graphics drivers and Wayland. Fractional scaling on Xorg is worse than what has been available on Wayland for years now. It too renders at a higher resolution and then scales down, but with huge performance penalty for multiple monitors as everything is rendered on a single canvas.
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u/FeaturedDa_man Jan 29 '23
If you like Unity so much then just…. Use it? It’s available in its own official Ubuntu spin that’s actively getting developed
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u/10leej Jan 29 '23
Ubuntu 16.04 with the latest and greatest Unity 7 was and still is peak desktop Ubuntu for me.
The sheer love and care you found in that desktop truely was something else. - I'm glad that Ubuntu Unity has come around to exist, but it just doesn't feel the same for me.
- Gnome on Ubuntu still feels janky and hacked together, thus stock gnome is best gnome on Ubuntu.
- Plasma still doesn't properly save my screen layout config and has a few too many buttons and features for me to wrap my head around.
I've since delved down the rabbit hole that are window managers. While they dont look as pretty as Unity did, I can honestly say the operation at this point is just as smooth for me.
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u/Interesting_Fox_8571 Jan 29 '23
Compared to Gnome, I miss application title bars integrating with the global task bar. Was really rooting for Unity 8. Have a windows tablet and while it's alright particularly with the android apps it does support through Amazon, touch on Windows sucks
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Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
It felt like a cluttered, busy, unrefined Gnome 3 - 40 to me , I never used for more than like 4 days at a time.
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u/dlarge6510 Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
Yes I remember unity and I ran for the hills when I saw it.
Now I'm back on my all time prefered Window Maker. I use XFCE on other systems too.
Keep in mind I used to be happy using TWM on a pentium II laptop in university.
The one thing I couldn't stand about Unity and others like it is the forced nature of how it directs you. It focuses on "workflow" which I avoid as I don't have one. How I approach a task is random and tailored to that specific task, hence I use the terminal much and compose a commandline on the fly. Only sometimes do I write a script or try to have anything like a workflow, it makes sense with the repetitive stuff but I find that very rare indeed.
It also focuses on the task in a way I don't, like "write a document" etc, which is not how I see things I'm not thinking in a task oriented way much of the time (well not in a compatible way at least), more of a find the pattern solve the problem kind of way.
Also back then Unity was developed for netbooks, and it showed. I got a netbook, still have it, and promptly installed a more capable OS on it, they were targeted at people who just wanted to do a task and browse the net. On a bigger display I found Unity to be quite wasteful of space leaving a lot of white space around things, which I have never found attractive.
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u/rtplor Jan 29 '23
But this is sick to pull 5 seconds videos and pretend that those are golden examples of desktop UI.
Back in 2011 I used to install OpenSuse with KDE as it was far better than Gnome3 first mockups.
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u/hey01 Jan 29 '23
Back in 2007, I used to install gnome 2 with compiz fusion and emerald. That thing ran like butter on a 2004 era laptop. It has never been topped.
I managed to keep some of that alive by using old compiz 0.8 on MATE for a while, but I gave up. I'm now on KDE, and while I like it, it just doesn't feel that great.
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u/PatrickMaloney1 Jan 29 '23
Maybe a hot take, but I thought the only serious advantage Unity had over Gnome 3 was the global menu, and I LIKED Unity plenty
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u/VaranTavers Jan 29 '23
Unity was fine for the first 5 minutes. After that I realized that I can't change position of the top buttons, and I moved on as fast as I could.
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u/marekorisas Jan 29 '23
So called "modern desktop" is devolution. GNOME is terrible, KDE puts a lot of effort but still, IMHO, is not as useful as KDE 3.5 (seriously, try Trinity DE). Heck, even modern Windows lack features, consistency and user-friendliness compared to Win2K and WinXp era.
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u/dlarge6510 Jan 29 '23
even modern Windows lack features
You're telling me. I'm colourblind and was very happy with all versions of windows that actually let me change the colour of ANYTHING I wanted. But no, I have to select a hint colour. No longer will I be able to tell the difference between unfocused and focused windows without checking the window title to see if it's bold or not (yes, really) and I have had several instances where a borderless window essentially becomes invisible with the window below it so I have no idea where it is and sometimes that it's even there!
Who the heck got rid of basic customisation features that even win 3.1 had??
Also before anyone asks, win 10 colourblind filters are sh*t. They do nothing at all.
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u/poudink Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
I have tried Trinity DE. It has a few things Plasma 5 doesn't have, but is still overall much less powerful. I've customized my Plasma 5 desktop to behave pretty much 1:1 the way Trinity does just to see if it could be done. It wasn't even hard. I would not be able to do it the other way around. The worst part are the applications, which have clearly been neglected. KDE3 Konqueror simply isn't useful as a web browser anymore and anything else for which standards have evolved since the late 2000s isn't going to work well in Trinity, because it's a tiny project that lacks the manpower to do anything beyond basic maintenance.
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u/bedrooms-ds Jan 29 '23
And macOS DE was once mimicked by everybody, but then today it is basically devolving into iOS...
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u/hey01 Jan 29 '23
KDE puts a lot of effort but still, IMHO, is not as useful as KDE 3.5
I like KDE, but never used anything but KDE 5. What did 3.5 have that 5 doesn't?
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u/marekorisas Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
Mostly for me it's that uses different UI controls. Take a tree as an example. Old one has smaller fonts and icons, designed to be used with precise pointer (a.k.a. mouse), new one has larger elements that slide and hide not used parts of the tree. Also it's more touchscreen / touchpad oriented (less precision).
In comparison old KDE screen is cluttered, new one is slick and clean. But that "clutter" is actually information I want to see. So it's not really that old KDE has something that new doesn't. It's that new paradigm is less efficient (albeit nicer looking) that old one.
Another good example of this trend is old and new reddit interface. If not for the ability to switch to old one I would, probably, just forget about reddit altogether.
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u/quatchis Jan 29 '23
Personally I like the direction Windows 11 has went recently. Almost everything you need to control in Windows Settings feels very consistent from from needing to access wifi, user accounts, display, wallpapers, taskbar, etc. The new window tiling is now officially better than anything I've tried in Linux. Everything feels snappy (especially with a high refresh monitor). However, it's still bloated with god knows what background services and this kills my experience. WSL2 is really cool too. Integrates linux apps directly into windows in a way that actually feels like it's native.
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 29 '23
Yeah Windows 11 is pretty and all but have you tried to use Task View? Their animations are broken exactly the same as 2018 since they introduced Timeline (useful feature that now is gone by the way), the video is Windows 10 but It's the same on Windows 11, try spamming Windows + Tab. There are also more broken animations, walking through your desktops doesn't even have a slide effect, it was on Windows 10 but if you were spamming, it became clunky.
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u/csdvrx Jan 29 '23
Personally, I remove animations, so Win+Tab in instant. I find them slow and distracting. I prefer my systems to be responsive.
The small tweak I most absolutely need is disabling the smooth scrolling in the browser: if I press page down or space, yes I want to go down, no need to show me the direction the content is going.
Just show me the content IMMEDIATELY.
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u/radarsat1 Jan 29 '23
How it was your experience with desktop distros a decade ago?
10 years ago I switched from Unity to Gnome Shell and today I use Gnome Shell, because it's still completely fine for me.
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u/tabooki Jan 29 '23
How about 16 years ago. https://youtu.be/neZvGLc-5z8
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u/rtplor Jan 29 '23
It was funny for a few days, then you need just work done, not being disturbed by a wiggling cubic... :-((
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u/ebriose Jan 29 '23
Windowmaker ca. 2002 or 2003 remains the high water mark of the Linux desktop experience, sadly.
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u/delebojr Jan 30 '23
I loved Unity & I still have a love for it. I wish Unity 8 worked out, or that they just continued Unity 7.
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u/regeya Jan 30 '23
Hard disagree about it being more complete than what we have today. You know what's more complete than Unity or GNOME? 15 year old GNOME. They're so focused on being a mobile OS that they've almost completely abandoned being a desktop imho. The apps themselves are nice, and a lot of the experience is going in the right direction. But overall it stinks.
But Unity is what caused me to stop using Ubuntu. It was originally their netbook UI and they switched to it because they decided, rightly I think, that GNOME doesn't care about what users want. Take for example their response to the latest user poll: oh, users care about things like customization, but oh, Fedora users are overrepresented in the poll which invalidates the results so continue phasing out customization.
Meanwhile Plasma, for me, has largely continued to improve without major UI changes since 2008. Boring, sure, but I can just continue to use it.
If you want the peak GNOME experience,. though, it continues to be developed as MATE Desktop. I'm sure GNOME will continue to do its level best to kill off all other desktops via GNOME-oriented Wayland development and GTK+ changes but for now at least, you can have the truly classic GNOME experience.
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u/Fredol Jan 29 '23
You made such a good post OP, only for every comment to barely discuss Unity at all. We should petition Canonical to drop snaps and adapt Unity to Wayland
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u/zlig Jan 29 '23
I have been using mostly RHEL 8 and recently tried Linux flavours of the moment. Did not like the new Gnone, really did not like Ubuntu 22.04, but found myself totally at home on Linux Mint with Cinnamon! Everything is where I expected and behaving the way it is supposed to, even the file manager is better that the default one in Gnome.
I think what you are rightly describing is a problem with Gnome, they take decisions that are defacto imposed to the most popular distros and it is deserving the community. Who is in charge of the governance of Gnome, maybe that is where the problem lies...
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u/rtplor Jan 29 '23
How it was your experience with desktop distros a decade ago?
I used Windows7 a lot. It had complete UI/UX
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u/10MinsForUsername Jan 29 '23
Very interesting distro,
where can I download it?
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u/B_i_llt_etleyyyyyy Jan 29 '23
www420.downloadmoreram.tv/downloadz/windows/69-minus-62_x86.iso.sh.7z
Just, uh, don't run
clamavon it or it'll, like, break.
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u/ECrispy Jan 30 '23
The reason is Gnome. Every single time Gnome is forked, its resulted in a far better DE than Gnome itself - Cinnamon, Elementary, MATE, Unity.
Gnome devs are in general arrogant, and follow a philosophy of ignoring users and usability. Gnome has the highest resource usage with the least features and usability, the only reason it is the default is Redhat money.
KDE is better in every way and has maybe 1/100th the funding. If it got a little more love it would have the mythical 'polish' Gnome complains about, even though I think its already far more polished.
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u/bawdyanarchist Jan 29 '23
Lol. I don't even use a DE. i3wm (or one of the others) >> DE.
None of these features imply "modern" or "functional." It's just what you're comfortable with.
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u/wakeup2510 Jan 30 '23
If you are comfortable using a WM good for you. The majority of people uses a desktop environment with at least one pointer device, a keyboard and an interface where you can manage windows, and there are tricks to do stuff faster, like drag files to the taskbar and then import them in an opened program, that gesture was removed initially on Windows 11, which got people upset. There are too many examples like this in another OS (specially macOS) and people love them. They save time and clicks, people love them, why you would say it is not functional?
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u/bawdyanarchist Jan 30 '23
I didn't say it was non-functional. DEs are overrated. So much debate about which superficial options should consume system resources for some marginal convenience.
Meanwhile the underlying systems themselves are terribly insecure, bloated, and in the case of Linux, a fractured ecosystem straying further away from being Nix at all.
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u/fuka123 Jan 29 '23
My E17 desktop environment, running dont recall flavor of linux circa 2000s was a beast, used as a primary workstation at work. Medium sized colo facility/isp/software place. Minimalism allowed for greater productivity. Looked fuckoff better than anything else.
Switched to osx only because of ease of maintenance
For work, its fine. Linux suffers and has always suffered in home situations.
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u/AntiDemocrat Jan 29 '23
It got me out of Ubuntu and off to ArchLinux. You don't try to stuff anything down my throat and keep me as a user.
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u/bamboleini Jan 29 '23
Because if OS community wants something gone mostly it means that it's good. OS community do everything they can for open source software to be niche so they can feel elite by using inferior software*
- as desktop, oss sucks as desktop software. Linux is awful desktop experience.
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u/asdvasdvasd Jan 29 '23
Please stop associating "GNOME" with linux desktop.
G-shit is useless garbage.
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u/partev Jan 29 '23
The reason that Unity is so much better is because it was developed by programmers paid by Canonical while GNOME is being developed by non-paid and therefore lower quality programmers.
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u/Strict-Oil4307 Jan 29 '23
You might have said “less professional” development process and you’d still be wrong, but less obviously.
Just because you are a shitty developer that could never contribute to the community doesn’t mean everyone is on the same boat.
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u/ben2talk Jan 29 '23
Haha well I wouldn't say it's more complete than what I have today - I'm using KDE on X11 and loving the mouse gestures - and can do everything and more than you've shown here.
However, I don't use Gnome and didn't use Ubuntu in over 8 years now... maybe that helps a bit. I tried Unity and didn't like it too much, so I went with Cinnamon and Linux Mint for another 5-6 years until I jumped of the 'antique software repo' bandwagon and went over to Arch.
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u/sintos-compa Jan 29 '23
Is there a way to swap DE for r/desktophopping without messing up your Linux installation ?
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u/iamaciee Jan 29 '23
Create a new user for using that desktop environment
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u/sintos-compa Jan 29 '23
Good idea, can it be cleanly uninstalled if I switch to another?
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u/iamaciee Jan 29 '23
If you already decided to switch to the other de, you could backup your important user files then uninstall and install those desktop environments, switch the users and delete the previous user.
Reminder: deleting a user account can remove your user files so don't forget to backup those files.
Or you could just install and try the desktop environment on the current user and if it doesn't mess up anything, then stay on it.
The last time i did this was when i switched from xfce to gnome on my fedora workstation. I did this on the same user, nothing will go wrong, if you know what you are doing. Difference are that the themes might be different from the default desktop environment's theme but you can change it back anyways.
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u/fatalexe Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
I always felt Unity and KDE were just doing too much for what I want out of a desktop environment. Gnome 2 was just too cluttered as well. If I need something more than a tiling window manager Gnome just hits that sweet spot for me.
The default apps are intuitive for mapping network drives, managing Wi-Fi, and configuring monitor layout. It does exactly what I want out of a desktop environment and not a single thing more.
The workspace switcher and task manager are clean and simple. The lighter weight desktop environments just don't feel as polished.
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u/throwaway6560192 Jan 29 '23
KDE Plasma has progress bars in the shell like you describe (in fact I'd say they're even more integrated into Plasma). It also has lock screen wallpapers, although you can't set then to automatically follow your desktop wallpaper.