Why is Unity so popular?

[Guest]

I was about to wipe my drive and install Windows I was so fed up with the lack of intuitive usability with Ubuntu's Unity.  Installed KDE today (previously used KDE with Mandrake, Suse and Redhat) and holy crap it so much smoother.  

 

Yeay yeah... It's "more like Windows" and maybe that's why people like Unity (the anti-MS folks), but Windows is used in the majority for a reason and ease of use is ease of use. 

 

Thoughts?  Am I missing some golden nuggets in Unity or is it ready just praised by anti-Windoes folks because it's very un-Windows like? 

[Guest]

I've always disliked it. Gnome was the go to until KDE dropped plasma. Been my go-to ever since.

 

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, Genwyn said:

Ubuntu went Gnome in 18.04, it was a disaster from the start and nobody wanted it to become the norm.
Personally i dont think Gnome is much better but whatever.

 

tiling wm's are where its at though, i3 for life

Absolutely love i3 on my ultrawides, but I can't on a laptop.

[Sauron]

I think you're getting the wrong impression, Unity is in fact not very popular and right now it's virtually dead - despite the huge weight Ubuntu can throw around in the Linux community it never really caught on. Right now there are some people who started using Linux with Unity who might be a little nostalgic, but the community as a whole has always panned it. I personally thought it was ok but it was never my first choice.

12 hours ago, jonnyGURU said:

Windows is used in the majority for a reason and ease of use is ease of use. 

Eh, I would disagree that Windows is inherently easier to use than a lot of Linux distros - I'd say it's mostly people just being used to windows after using it for years and finding anything else unintuitive as a consequence.

 

Either way Plasma can be as much like or unlike Windows as you want it to be, hence why I always recommend it if you don't feel ready for the jump to a barebones WM.

12 hours ago, Genwyn said:

tiling wm's are where its at though, i3 for life

i3-gaps-next is where it's at tbh

 

also there were talks of merging the functionality in regular i3 so pretty excited about that

[Dat Guy]

Ubuntu's Unity - no matter how much I dislike Ubuntu and most things spawned from it - is an evolutionary step forward from NeXTStep which was (arguably) the most user-friendly desktop of its time. Later, Apple bought NeXT and gave NeXTStep more colors, it became the Aqua user interface of today's macOS. Roughly estimated: Unity with its dock (et cetera) is the closest approximation to macOS.

 

After Unity's demise, there are still AfterStep and (the awesome) Window Maker to fill that niche.

[Guest]

17 hours ago, Den-Fi said:

Absolutely love i3 on my ultrawides, but I can't on a laptop.

Yes.  To be clear, I use Ubuntu with KDE Neon on a laptop.

[wasab]

I hate desktops with panels

[DavidKalinowski]

I liked unity after a couple updates. Then i started using mint with XFCE.

[Lukyp]

 

On 9/5/2019 at 1:58 AM, Genwyn said:

Ubuntu went Gnome in 18.04, it was a disaster from the start and nobody wanted it to become the norm.
Personally i dont think Gnome is much better but whatever.

 

tiling wm's are where its at though, i3 for life

As he said now you are using GNOME, and it's pretty known to run like *****
Thanks god the ubuntu developers shipped a couple of really big performance patches (I personally tested them) and it's starting to become decent.

Still, I'm not using the "Unity" experience, the first thing I do on my Ubuntu installs, is to install dashtodock GNOME extension and customize the panel. I don't like KDE for a variety of reasons, but I admit it's a TON lighter (500MB of ram less than GNOME or Windows)

[wasab]

10 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

 

As he said now you are using GNOME, and it's pretty known to run like *****
Thanks god the ubuntu developers shipped a couple of really big performance patches (I personally tested them) and it's starting to become decent.

Still, I'm not using the "Unity" experience, the first thing I do on my Ubuntu installs, is to install dashtodock GNOME extension and customize the panel. I don't like KDE for a variety of reasons, but I admit it's a TON lighter (500MB of ram less than GNOME or Windows)

I always use docky for dock.