[CarVac]

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

[shevy-java]

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

[tombert]

I disagree with this characterization.

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

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

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

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

[byproxy]

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

[dingi]

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

[drdec]

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

[fao_]

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

[Qem]

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

[blauditore]

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

[marssaxman]

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

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

[anonymouskimmer]

I was also disappointed that they dropped Unity.

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

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