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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

The fun thing is that there was never such consensus outside of, seemingly, Redmond and wharever place Unity was developed at. Everybody else did not even expect general-purpose Tablet to be a thing and were frustrated OSes tuned for hardware that wasn't even available.

And pushing that agenda tooth and nail.

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You forgot about GNOME...

Gnome 3 is where I lost faith in the Linux community's ability to cohesively come up with a solution to user experience. Every time I log onto a system with Gnome 3 it give me a feeling of dread and anger. Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time. But Gnome 3 was just a complete FU to all the current gnome users. How arrogant.

KDE seems to keep it together. KDE plasma 5 seems an incremental upgrade from what came before, getting rid of some of the weirdness and converging on something sane. Progress at least. I can respect what they're doing.

Microsoft, in all it's bullshit, every few years seems to give the users what they want. Licensing is a headspinner, and privacy is questionable, but otherwise they still make an operating system that feels good to use.

I just can't agree with this. I used Gnome 3 with excitement when it came out. I found that it was unpolished back then, and probably not ready for general use. I switched to XFCE for a while, then openbox, fluxbox, and a number of tiling window managers, then to MATE and finally back to Gnome.

I've been using Gnome now for about three years. I find the hot corner UI to be intuitive (and I find myself trying to use that and the meta-key expose function on other OSes). The favorites dock and the search are things that I use frequently, and the title bar menus make sense to me.

I was a Gnome 2 user for years as well, and yes it was polished and predictable. But it wasn't attractive. I think Gnome 3 was the next logical step for the project as far as contemporary UI patterns go, and it feels very "ergonomic" to me.

> "Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time."

I would suggest that Pantheon (the DE for Elementary OS) is more polished compared to Gnome 2. Cinnamon (the DE for Linux Mint) is another solid choice if you wanted incremental improvements over Gnome 2.

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