| > I think it was a case of an extremely loud minority who weren’t even using it that contributed to canonical abandoning it. As I recall it, the initial uproar was over the opt-out phoning home and web searches in the main menu/search integrated with the desktop. (Unity called this menu/search mechanism a 'lens'. Contemporary (10 and 11) windows start menus kinda resemble it, although they are worse when it comes to what people objected to in Unity.) Eventually Canonical relented and promised that the next (never finished?) rewrite of Unity would make those features opt-in. Then there were conflicts with GNOME, where there were difficulties upstreaming parts of Unity, and GNOME was resistant to changing its direction for the sake of the alternative visions of downstream projects. Both conflicts were unfortunate, but I don't think any of the big complaints were about the desktop experience itself. I don't remember hearing that Unity's vision for the desktop was a bad one, and as a user who was a very turned off by the whole shopping lens thing, I actually really liked the general lens functionality and desktop workflow, and I loved the global menu search. I feel like despite the controversies, the potential of the desktop experience was always clear. I'm sure they had their reasons for dropping it, but I wish Canonical had stuck with Unity, even if it wouldn't necessarily be my choice on all my machines, we still only have the big two when it comes to mature, feature-complete desktop environments on Linux and the free Unices. |