Ask HN: What is it that you hate about the Unity Desktop?

I try not to screw with working infrastructure, so it can become invisible to me. I've been using X11 for 24 years now. It's nice that it gained 3D capabilities, but I don't play games much, so the largest daily impact is that there are shadows under windows. Big whoop. Smooth video-playing is a much nicer feature, and we've had that for a decade.

I used fvwm, rxvt and netscape browser for years. Netscape mutated into Firefox. I added Chrome because it turns out that having two completely different browsers is an advantage for me. rxvt became rxvt-unicode. I might still be using fvwm, but XFCE has easier configuration when I move to a new machine, which happens often enough that I value it.

It will be nice when I can get the RX460 downstairs to drive the 4K monitor at 60Hz instead of 30Hz, but it's only going to be a minor improvement.

There are two kinds of idiots: the idiot who says "this is new, so it must be better" and the idiot who says "this is old, so it must be better". I try not to be either kind.

Mir, don't know. What problem was it supposed to solve?

My guess is that people think Canonical should have been focusing more on general distro reliability (e.g. the infamous "/boot fills up with kernels" bug) than reinventing parts of it. Hindsight is 20/20 though, we'd be having a different conversation if Mir had proven a big step forward over X.

That's really Unity's core failure; it was ambitiously designed to adapt to multiple formats (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) and in the end, the required compromises led to a UX that wasn't _great_ in any form factor.

Microsoft tried the same thing with Windows 8 and had the EXACT same result. They alienated their core market of desktop/laptop users and completely failed to find traction in mobile/touch. Much like Ubuntu, Microsoft backed off that strategy with Windows 10 offering more substantially tailored experiences for mobile and desktop use.

Apple was smart and never tried a one size fits all strategy. Their mobile and desktop UX is entirely different.

Circling back to Unity, I also hate the window controls on the left. Not that controls on the right are intrinsically superior, just that I'm more accustomed to that location from other desktops. It seems contrarian and I just can't get used to it.

I believe fragmentation is a very big issue in the Free Software world. Since both Mir and Wayland wanted to work towards the same goal with minor differences in details, they should have banded together and have had proper discussions regarding both their ideas. It encourages better solutions and sometimes new things are born.

Mir was also never as performant as Wayland and didn't have any window manager apart from Unity to test with.

Unity:

I personally don't have a thing against Unity but there were (16.04 days) some inconveniences like being unable to customize the dock. The separate toolbar and menu bar. GNOME does have thicker titlebars but combines toolbars, menubars and titlebars in their native apps.

GNOME also has a rich ecosystem of extensions. (Please stop breaking them through updates GNOME!!!). GNOME has a better universal search than Unity, is comparatively faster and snappier than Unity.

GNOME suffers from the problem of poor defaults which are easily fixed by distribution vendors. (Kali Linux ships with a dock, topbar and other IMO necessary extensions.)

If I remember correctly, to get a list of installed apps, you had to click "view more..." at least twice from inside the Unity menu. Compare that to Windows 8, which required right clicking the background of the Start Screen and then clicking "All Apps...", which is similarly nonintuitive.

but my most usage of unity is just the left side bar. I don't use, for example, the search-and-find thing that much.

I like unity's color scheme too.

The only time I was pissed was when they enforced you to do amazon search in unity.

I actually don't think unity has lost to others technical-wise or design-wise. it loses, because it didn't follow the Principle of least astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

most people are reluctant to ui change. a small change would piss people off (ios5 to ios7, for example). unity just looks too different. the hatred is not necessarily rational I think.

if unity is going away, out of all the options, I like kde and xfce. I dislike gnome because of my early development experience with gdk.

> The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind...It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control

I don't even use Mir, but I hate it. I can see how that sounds irrational or political, but my opinion is based on my perspective of reality. Ideally, Mir and Wayland can be developed in tandem, but this clearly hasn't been an effective approach.

The fact is that we really don't need more than one display server, and from what I can tell, we shouldn't even try.

Working on Mir and Wayland means double the work to integrate each video driver. Until every video card has a performant and stable open driver, some of us have to rely on a manufacturer to give us one that works with whatever display server we intend to use, so those people can't rely on Mir or Wayland developers to get their preferred display server working.

Even if that were not an issue (looking at you, NVIDIA), it will be very helpful to have Canonical support Wayland. Neither project is really ready yet, and one of them just needs to be usable already. When hair news was asked what feature Ubuntu should work on, the top answer was DPI scaling. Replacing Xorg is the best way to accomplish that.

TL;DR: I'm excited to see what happens with Wayland in the coming months. We need it. Mir was just a distraction.

"Gnome 3 is doing it wrong, let's do it wrong too but our way."