I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon.
I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.
>I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.
Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfce.
1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity).
2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View).
3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space.
>I think a lot of it just came down to performance.
Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
People (me) were just mad because seemingly in the blink of an eye they went from having a stable mature linux desktop, sometimes even approaching "it just works," to having that ripped away and replaced with a choice between [radical new desktop] or xfce. Unity or GNOME Shell might really be great, but that's a huge change to force on unsuspecting neckbeards.
Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
Lucid and maverick where possibly the best desktop experiences I've had. Going to Natty (and oneric), with its many bugs was such a huge shock that I pretty much stopped using Ubuntu and switched to Mint
I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash).
Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
> The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX
With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
Have they fixed the problems with Firefox on Cinnamon? I ran it for quite a while, and was thoroughly frustrated by dropdowns showing up in the wrong place on Firefox (this on 16.04). Moving over to XFCE was an effective workaround, but other than the Firefox problem, I preferred Cinnamon.
I've been running Mint Cinnamon as my primary OS for a few years on both a Dell Latitude E74xx and a homebuilt mini-ITX box with no such issues. The laptop is integrated gfx and the desktop is a 1050gtx at 4k. FF is my main browser and I have not seen any such behavior.
Hmmmm... I've had the problem on a 960/Ryzen 7 and an old 9600/FX-6100 rig, and also on a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with integrated Intel graphics. However, I installed Cinnamon from the Ubuntu 16.04 repos, so maybe they had a bad version there.
I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04.
So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1]
In his words
> Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable.
> The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all.
That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity.
Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it.
I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it.
Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings.
In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source!
I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud."
So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source, but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu:
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-th...
- At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself.
- In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015.
- That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day.
Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less.
(Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)
I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well. I tried very hard to use (and like) GNOME Shell for a while, and put it on my wife's computer as well. I always ended up finding completely wrong for the way I want to interact with my computer. And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
> I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well
I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
> I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
I've recently started playing with i3. It is very nice. I don't know how to do a lot of things. I have to Google how to connect to a new WiFi connection every time on my phone. However, I like it a lot. Worst case scenario, I have to reboot and log in with gnome.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
I haven't used i3 in a long time, but if it's got support for systray icons, you can run the NetworkManager applet and manage your network settings there as you would in any ol' desktop environment.
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
> You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
I'm interested to learn why they chose to switch to Gnome instead of KDE plasma. What was the thinking behind it? Why wasn't the community involved in the decision? Gnome has the backing of Redhat and is the default DE on Fedora, so Canonical backing an alternative would have been desirable.
I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices. Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously. Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try : kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.
For Canonical: I suppose it sort of makes sense from a historical perspective in that before Unity they used Gnome, so they were returning to Gnome. But given that Gnome appears to be a single-threaded Javascript engine with memory leaks, I'm not convinced it's a great choice. Still, Gnome is backed by Red Hat and just got a $1 million donation ( https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1... ), so in theory it should get better....but I've been thinking "it should get better soon" for a while, so who knows.
I think the point of the article wasn't to argue which desktop env is the bestest, but rather that as far as canonical is concerned the desktop can go DIAF (except as a gateway drug for their server/iot stuff). They are focusing on cloud / iot.
So they dumped their own thing. Since unity was partially based on gnome, they used gnome before, and somebody else (rh) keeps pumping resources into it, it seems like a natural choice.
> So they dumped their own thing. Since unity was partially based on gnome, they used gnome before, and somebody else (rh) keeps pumping resources into it, it seems like a natural choice.
Of course. But unfortunately I think that what makes sense from a historical and resource-evaluation standpoint ends up falling down in terms of real-world usability.
I'm a GNOME loyalist, but if I was going to set up a system for a non-technical user today, I would go for MATE and set the theme that emulates the OS that they used before, or to suit their preferences. MATE has really impressed me with the last couple of releases.
I may be old-fashioned, but to me, GNOME 2 was the best desktop environment I ever used, no matter what OS. GNOME 3 was basically the main reason I switched from GNU/Linux to a Mac in 2013.
Then I discovered MATE. =D I have switched back to GNU/Linux with a MATE desktop since, and I could not be happier. To my taste, it gives both Windows and macOS a run for their money.
Out of curiosity: what is that "nice interface you use" your wife asked about?
MATE/Mate (I'm unsure of the current preferred typefacing) seems very nice, and I don't fully understand why Canonical chose to go with GNOME Shell rather than Mate, especially as one of their own employees (Martin Wimpress) is own of the driving forces behind Mate. I suppose it's because they figure GNOME has the financial backing of Red Hat. But I think in this case the financial position of GNOME Shell is misleading as to the current state of its technology and usability.
The 'nice interface I use' which I switched my wife to is AwesomeWM. Not that user-friendly to configure, but really pleasant to use.
"I'm now convinced a lot of the people who demanded its demise never used it."
I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel -- for starters.
Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.
Should delivering "OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place" even something that is considered an accomplishment? I have heard such statement from Canonical but I don't understand why it's something to talk about. Why not in an afternoon? One of their competitor products, Sardina FishOS, can be delivered in an afternoon. Our experience was that the whole process in FishOS was automated. From conversation with one of their customers (a European bank), we were told that in their case, they deployed a bank-wide OpenStack cloud in a day, including Ceph. With this in mind, Canonical's two weeks would seem 13 days too long? Of course, that would cut 13 days of services revenue for Canonical ...
In my experience Debian has considerably older packages.
However if one installs everything with docker the underlying OS has very little importance. It stops at sshd, systemd and vim, anything else can be dockerized.
A lot of people run Ubuntu inside the container. There are many libraries today that officially only support some Ubuntu LTS (Tensorflow, for example).
Ubuntu has a more stable schedule of LTS that is 2 years apart but Debian is only "roughly" 2 years which makes it easier to plan when to make the upgrades.
Also stuff like having root disabled and letting normal users use sudo by default and having had unattended-upgrades that does automatic security update installed by default makes you feel there's actually someone who cares doing the QA.
And it has great number of packages along with PPA in case there isn't one pretty much allows you to handle most software without manual compile/install/update process which is a nightmare from admin perspective to do.
And the fact it had worked great on me over the last 10 years against 100 or so servers makes me feel confident using it.
You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source, but what really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that.
No more vanity projects for the desktop version of Ubuntu is what I got out of it. He’s probably referring to the spirit in which Ubuntu desktop was originally released (the Linux desktop for everybody) and now the focus is on things that can assist virtualization and containers in the cloud.
Sure, it's a bummer to see potentially cool stuff get canceled. But Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start. I wouldn't mind seeing twice as many canceled projects, because it's a sign that you're willing to put yourself out there and fail often. Innovation has a cost, and if part of that cost is "we can't support netbooks but other distros will, heck you can even use Xubuntu if you want" that's fine with me.
That would be fine if they were choices on the side, but most of these were foisted on users as the default choice, only to be canceled later. Making the whole exercise a complete waste of time rather than an interesting experiment.
For example, they could have instead contributed to MATE for the last decade, and it might finally be as good as Windows 2000.
Challenging on new things needs courage. He has paid for all the cancelled projects. Did it cost you any?
Any you complaining just because you can't catch up?
60 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] threadI realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.
Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View).
3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space.
BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1]
In his words
> Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable.
> The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all.
That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity.
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it.
Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings.
In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
Good grief. Presumably that should be "Fond as users... are of the Linux desktop"...
Looking at the site: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition
The numbers haven't changed in the last 2 years, looking at "Popular Images": http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular
The top listed image is Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") from 2007...
.. and looking at recently added the most recent is from 1 year ago: http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded
So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source!
I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud."
So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source, but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-th... - At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself. - In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015. - That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day.
Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less.
(Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)
I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
What did you switch her to?
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
Also good for volume control applets :)The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
I mean I still can't get over the asinine comment covered here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757077
Very poor choice of words which will hurt us for a long time.
Archived at https://archive.fo/NbzkY
This is the opposite of the standardization and cooperation across desktop environments and window managers that I want!
I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices. Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously. Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try : kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.
For Canonical: I suppose it sort of makes sense from a historical perspective in that before Unity they used Gnome, so they were returning to Gnome. But given that Gnome appears to be a single-threaded Javascript engine with memory leaks, I'm not convinced it's a great choice. Still, Gnome is backed by Red Hat and just got a $1 million donation ( https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1... ), so in theory it should get better....but I've been thinking "it should get better soon" for a while, so who knows.
Modern KDE (e.g. 5.12+) is amazing! It's slim, it's fast, it lets you configure tons of stuff and it looks beautiful.
If you haven't used it in the last two years you should give it a try!
So they dumped their own thing. Since unity was partially based on gnome, they used gnome before, and somebody else (rh) keeps pumping resources into it, it seems like a natural choice.
Of course. But unfortunately I think that what makes sense from a historical and resource-evaluation standpoint ends up falling down in terms of real-world usability.
Then I discovered MATE. =D I have switched back to GNU/Linux with a MATE desktop since, and I could not be happier. To my taste, it gives both Windows and macOS a run for their money.
Out of curiosity: what is that "nice interface you use" your wife asked about?
The 'nice interface I use' which I switched my wife to is AwesomeWM. Not that user-friendly to configure, but really pleasant to use.
I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel -- for starters.
Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
Also stuff like having root disabled and letting normal users use sudo by default and having had unattended-upgrades that does automatic security update installed by default makes you feel there's actually someone who cares doing the QA.
And it has great number of packages along with PPA in case there isn't one pretty much allows you to handle most software without manual compile/install/update process which is a nightmare from admin perspective to do.
And the fact it had worked great on me over the last 10 years against 100 or so servers makes me feel confident using it.
What is he even talking about?
Oh you're supporting netbooks and doing a distro related to it? Cancelled.
Oh you started a cloud service that stores files forever? Cancelled.
Oh you created a competitor to X and Wayland for compositing? Cancelled.
Oh you created an alternative window manager to replace Gnome She'll? Cancelled.
Did they cancel their phone yet?
Didn't they have some kind of $30,000 server they were talking about for a while that wad cancelled?
It's hard to keep up with all their cancelled projects.
I thought it was about making a distro that was approachable and accessible?
Source: vaguely remembered "What does ubuntu mean?" promo videos from many years ago.
For example, they could have instead contributed to MATE for the last decade, and it might finally be as good as Windows 2000.