Some people get used to a workflow. They have an environment set up just how they like.
All of a sudden Gnome release Gnome 3 - which breaks a lot of that workflow, and also means that people wanting to stay at Gnome 2.x are going to drift slowly into dependancy hell. And Shuttleworth plays his benign dictator card, saying he doesn't care what the community thinks, they're wrong, and Unity is the way forward. Unity also breaks the workflow.
Now those users are kind of stuck. KDE also has an example of dramatic change, so people might be reluctant to move there.
LXDE or XFCE aren't yet mature and there are some frustrating features with both. (But they've picked up some users.)
And then you're left with self-built desktop environments - one of the *boxes or some other WM + file manager + etc etc.
XFCE is great. I switched to xubuntu and loving it. It might be lacking. but I find it far more enjoyable to use than Unity or gnome3. I tried to use both gnome3 and unity. and both had me very frustrated.
After Gnome2 was discontinued, Canonical _could_ have listened to their current users and instead of Unity, developed something similar to Mint's MGSE. But Canonical suddendly decided to discard their current target group, desktop users, which made Ubuntu popular, and suddenly switch everything to tablet users.
People hate on Unity for two reasons:
1. Because they feel betrayed by Canonical for switching to another target group and letting desktop users Gnome2-less alone in the cold. It is like Apple completely giving up on Macs and OSX and fully going iOS.
2. Because Unity is, hands down, simply less usable for day-to-day desktop use than Gnome2. It may make sense on tablets, but it is a step backwards on PCs. If Canonical wouldnt aggressively push it by making it a default, probably nobody would voluntarily install and use it.
My personal reason is that it felt like beta-quality software at best. The UI would hang almost every time I tried to log out, for example, forcing me to go to a tty to kill the lightdm service. As lysol says, it seems like things that used to take a mouse click or two now required a lot more effort (but I'm willing to admit I probably didn't try hard enough to figure out the "new way" to do them).
Beyond the UI, stuff that "just worked" before (like my wireless network adapter) now didn't work at all without manual intervention.
All told, it was just too much hassle on a machine where I just want to get some work done. Yes, I should probably know better than to upgrade a Linux distribution on a machine that I use to actually get some work done, and it will probably be a while before I upgrade again--I'll just choose something usable and leave it alone until I have a week of vacation to spend fussing with updates.
Some people have legitimate complaints, there are a couple minor bugs and glitches in Unity still. But mostly what I see is knee-jerk resistance to change; even if Unity is a better UI, they hate it because it's different from what they're familiar with.
It's exactly the same kind of hang-wringing we saw from a lot of the GNOME 1 users when GNOME 2 came out.
Sure, some of it is resistance to change, but that's not all of it. It also has to do with users, particularly power users, having their workflow broken. That was essentially Linus Torvalds' complaint about GNOME 3 being a mess, and why he's now back on GNOME 2.
* Stability: I've had issues on multiple different hardware setups. Trying to configure compiz plugins -- hung. Reboot then failed to re-log in to "3d" Unity. Only "2d" unity, where all the key shortcuts were different. Sigh.
* Stupid UI design: Maximized windows get the top panel as their title-bar, but that panel displays a different name if a different window is active.
* UI glithces: Double-click of title usually [un]maximizes. That is, unless you're trying to unmaximize a non-active window.
* Winkey behavior: Type the full name of an application, hit <return>, and a different application is executed! That is because the search happened to find that different application, and not my application yet.
* Slowing me down: The time it takes to un-hide the bar is extremely long and slows me down.
* No fast way to minimize a window with the mouse (I used to be able to click a task bar item)
* No easy glance to see which windows I was working with
* Crappy workspace switcher: requires multiple clicks to switch workspaces, cannot drag&drop windows between desktops, etc.
I really cannot hope to remember the hundreds of annoyances I've had when trying to use Unity. I find it to be really incompetent design.
Apple may be competent enough to decide to throw everything away and design something nice. The Ubuntu guys are not. They should have stuck to incrementally improving the Linux desktop as it was. I think that now, they're going to become irrelevant.
For me its the menu bar on the top of the screen except for libreoffice. On a 1920 by 1080 its a bit of a trek to the top of the screen from a small Gedit window.
The rest I can deal with, I tend toward 'end user' tasks plus a couple of ssh sessions, and about 10 applications over four virtual desktops.
Hibernate works so I can keep the setup between sessions.
Have you used it? The principal thing is that it's different and offers less customization than gnome2 and even gnome3 with gnome-shell. Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done. These sorts of things are self-evident when you've attempted to use Unity for any length of time.
The author is referring to the fact that the taskbar/dock in Unity doesn't offer the same affordances as the old Gnome2 taskbar. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, there was no way to open a new terminal from the dock. You had to click on the terminal icon, then click File->New Terminal. As someone who routinely opens a number of terminals for various tasks, that one regression was a source of significant slowdowns.
In addition, Unity is slow on any system that doesn't have a separate graphics card or the latest generation of integrated graphics. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the graphical effects to speed it up. Combine that with the usability regressions, and Unity was a definite no-go for me.
That's not to say that I "hate" Unity or will never use it as my desktop environment. I think Unity has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like all too much software out there, it was released before it had been fully finished. I look forward to trying Unity again when the next Ubuntu LTS (12.04, I believe) is released. Hopefully it'll be far more usable and "finished" by then.
Can't you just middle click the icon in the dock? Middle click launches a new instance of the app instead of bringing the current instance to the foreground.
for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.
personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.
There are a bunch of slightly off-center use cases that Unity doesn't handle well at all (or at least not yet). For me it's multi-screen setups, which it didn't cope with well for me as of 11.04 ...
because nobody likes to be treated like a four year old, I personally hate ubuntu's approach on this: "THIS IS GOOD FOR YOU! USE IT! WE KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR YOU".
Unity might be the next big thing in the desktop environment phenomena but forcing it down through our throats is very obnoxious.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You're free to use a different desktop or distribution. The source is even provided to you free of charge to modify as you see fit.
Complaining that someone else is not doing free work just to suit you personally sounds like acting like a four year old, honestly.
-Lack of bottom taskbar... I greatly dislike the combination launcher/taskbar style of Unity/Mac (Win 7 pulled it off better.) I could fix this except for item #1.
All of a sudden Gnome release Gnome 3 - which breaks a lot of that workflow, and also means that people wanting to stay at Gnome 2.x are going to drift slowly into dependancy hell. And Shuttleworth plays his benign dictator card, saying he doesn't care what the community thinks, they're wrong, and Unity is the way forward. Unity also breaks the workflow.
Now those users are kind of stuck. KDE also has an example of dramatic change, so people might be reluctant to move there.
LXDE or XFCE aren't yet mature and there are some frustrating features with both. (But they've picked up some users.)
And then you're left with self-built desktop environments - one of the *boxes or some other WM + file manager + etc etc.