This would have worried me back when Unity was crap a year or so ago. Now Unity is actually good, it doesn't matter if Gnome dies a slow death; we'll still have multiple good alternatives that are still being enhanced.
Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing Gnome or switching to Mint in droves.
One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what I have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing search terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be difficult -- and lots of times, you don't know the name of the application, because they have clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Shotwell, Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function ("image," "photo," "web," "email") as a substring.
Discoverability is particularly important for "control panel" type system administration applets, which are often vital to making your system function acceptably, and whose name, number, hierarchy, and division of functionality seem to mutate with every release.
Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am with Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.
Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding because they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances, or the difference between launching an application and switching to an instance of that application.
I want multiple instances of certain applications -- terminals particularly -- and it's a major pain point with Unity. So not only do I have reduced productivity during the transition period, it seems like Unity is actually going to decrease my productivity once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of core features.
Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour of use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.
I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once when it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was released, and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few incidental times when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)
In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a nightmare.
> Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing Gnome or switching to Mint in droves.
It works well on my laptop. Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier versions of it and hated it then (myself included) are pleasantly
surprised when they give it another look.
> One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what I have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing search terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be difficult -- and lots of times, you don't know the name of the application, because they have clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Shotwell, Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function ("image," "photo," "web," "email") as a substring.
This is hideously out of date. If I hit the windows key and type "image", then "gimp" and "inkscape" are in the list of choices. If I type "photo" I get "shotwell", "gimp" and "cheese". If I type "web", I get "firefox", "opera" and "chrome. "email" gives me "thunderbird".
> Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am with Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.
This is an argument against "change", not an argument against "unity".
> Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding because they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances, or the difference between launching an application and switching to an instance of that application. I want multiple instances of certain applications -- terminals particularly -- and it's a major pain point with Unity. So not only do I have reduced productivity during the transition period, it seems like Unity is actually going to decrease my productivity once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of core features.
It takes hardly any time to get used to this change. Personally, my web browser, email client, terminal and text editor all support tabs, so I us
ually only have one window per app anyway.
> Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour of use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.
I'm not interested in older versions of Unity. I already said they were crap.
> I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once when it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was released, and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few incidental times when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)
> In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a nightmare.
So you're qualified to state that Unity was a nightmare. Not that Unity is a nightmare.
> Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier versions of it and hated it then (myself included) are pleasantly surprised when they give it another look.
I don't understand this, because I have used it off and on from the beginning and it really looks completely the same to me.
A number of my coworkers use Unity, and I do too. We're all programmers. Other than it being frustratingly buggy and with a klunky visual design, the general consensus is "meh, went better than I expected".
Granted, programmers have a simple workload: web browser, text editor, terminal, done.
One thing I like about Unity is how keyboard driven it can be: the application search is not too bad, and the "HUD" feature actually seems appealing except that it stole my right-hand-alt, which I use as an emacs's "meta" key. But other than that, I played with it a bit and thought it was a great way to get away from the hierarchical pull-down menu, which I loathe.
"One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps."
This. It's the one reason I can't stand Unity. I can never find anything. I can never know what controls I can tweak. I don't even know where to look. I end up poking around in the shell or apt to find out what actual programs are available.
Why should I be forced to reach for the keyboard just to load a program? This isn't a C64. It's as backwards as Apple's move away from directories.
Bring up the Unity dash, go to the apps section (icon with ruler/pen), click "See X more results" in the Installed section. You can filter these results on category. Not perfect, but workable.
To get a second instance of the terminal, right click the launcher icon and select "New terminal". Or middle click the launcher icon. Or press ctrl+alt+t.
How can you say that Unity is still crap, if you haven't tried it in 12.04?
Note that Unity 2D is based on Qt and also works pretty well these days. It seems that they have spread the risks somewhat.
I do thing the general developments in the ecosystem are somewhat worrying. Nokia's involvement in Qt is becoming more clouded, and everyone is distracted by tablets and smartphones (and naturally, the money streams go into those directions).
That said, that's also an opportunity for more consolidation, so if Canonical play their cards right, the open source desktop may become more single minded and effective.
When Unity 2D will not be available, does it mean that Ubuntu will NOT run as a VirtualBox guest? I recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 in VirtualBox - mostly for development. I start to like Unity. But Ubuntu 12.04 is much slower than 10.04, in terms of GUI and responsiveness.
What I find interesting in this article is the following:
"[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]"
"[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"
Nahh,
Evolution is not the default client anymore (sadly, i prefer it to thunderbird) and Unity is built on top of compiz, where gnome-shell uses mutter. :(
I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them.
(Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introduced into plugins since Natty--window previews and wobbly windows, I'm looking at you.)
Unity shares a lot of core infrastructure with Gnome. If Gnome has problems, Unity+Ubuntu will have problems as well. And Unity has the same bus factor and even less community developers or developers from other companies: if Canonical is hit by a bus (which is not entirely unlikely if it doesn't become profitable) the project is doomed.
The lion's share of complaints about Unity and Gnome have always been from users staring at pixels, not complaints about the underlying libraries. Even this post is about manpower, not the libraries being unusable.
One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what I have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing search terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be difficult -- and lots of times, you don't know the name of the application, because they have clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Shotwell, Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function ("image," "photo," "web," "email") as a substring.
Discoverability is particularly important for "control panel" type system administration applets, which are often vital to making your system function acceptably, and whose name, number, hierarchy, and division of functionality seem to mutate with every release.
Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am with Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.
Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding because they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances, or the difference between launching an application and switching to an instance of that application.
I want multiple instances of certain applications -- terminals particularly -- and it's a major pain point with Unity. So not only do I have reduced productivity during the transition period, it seems like Unity is actually going to decrease my productivity once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of core features.
Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour of use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.
I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once when it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was released, and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few incidental times when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)
In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a nightmare.