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Comment by imharvey | Hacker News Reader

This gave me flashbacks to Gnome 2 and how much I loved it.

After Gnome 3 and the abomination of wasted screen real estate that was Unity released I switched to using XFCE on Linux environments and haven't really found anything better since. It's so snappy even on crappy hardware and is customizable enough.

I actually liked unity. Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at an age when screen started getting flatter and flatter.

The HUD(?) was a great concept allowing easy Dutch within an apps menus.

My problem was with the size of all the UI elements, it seemed to me that a lot of it was designed with a "touch first, M+K second" focus.

That's probably Gnome, Ubuntu was pretty manegeable as a KB+M desktop. I'd say it's as KB+M oriented as OS X. Gnome is more like the Ipad OS.

> Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at an age when screen started getting flatter and flatter.

That's hardly innovation though since most DEs over the past 2+ decades that I can think of would let you move the taskbar (if they had one) anyway.

Indeed even Windows 95 let you do that.

I agree - taskbar on the side is the best layout. It's very common on Macs and you can do it in Windows 10 now too.

The problem with Unity was that it was buggy as hell, and the launcher was really badly styled. Huge gaps between icons, the search filter was unusable, etc.

Weirdly enough I loved Gnome 2 but for whatever odd reason I prefer some of the other DE's out there. I use Budgie (on Ubuntu) at work though it has quirks, otherwise Gnome 3 is ok or I just go for KDE. It definitely felt like Gnome went from all these amazing customizations to being so limited though.

I was always a KDE 3 kinda guy. I tried TDE, which is to KDE 3 as Mate is to GNOME 2, and … boy, you really appreciate how the Mate project managed to keep everything good about GNOME 2 but modernise at the same time.

That is the idea!

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