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Thanks for this comment. I personally think Unity kicks ass. It is the best out of the box experience I ever had with a desktop os.

Of course my heavily customized gnome 2 were better suited for me, because every detail was tweaked by myself. Unity I can use out of the box and it is working really fine.

I sell laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 and I have a return rate of 3%, normal return rates are 20 to 30 %. It can't be that bad for normal users.

How can you live with having to search everything? Gnome-shell gives you a nice list of all your applications and you can switch between categories. The biggest bug since the introduction of Unity besides trying hard to make you remember application names is that F1 no longer opens help. The question mark symbol has also disappeared from the top panel.

After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible. Here's how:

  Right-click the Ubuntu logo*
  Choose applications
  Click "Filter results"

The buttons presented are individual toggle-buttons, not the usual switch buttons. Turn the next category on, turn the previous category off. Madness. And on top of everything that's badly designed, it's also unresponsive. A lot of clicks are missed and this is especially noticeable with the workspace switcher.

For now, there's the option of installing gnome-session-fallback. It introduces a "GNOME classic (no effects)" option in LightDM which works well and has the old, functional workspace switcher. Still no F1 for help, but it sits under Applications > Accessories so it's relatively discoverable. The panels can be customised by holding down ALT+Super while right-clicking them (thank you again, Google).

Sadly, Gnome is deprecating the fallback session in favor of a software rasteriser ("llvmpipe") to run Gnome-shell where a hardware rasteriser is unavailable. The next release will also see the lock screen moved into the shell so it'll look pretty, but it better be the most stable release they've ever had since the last 2.x. Sorry to be cynical, but I doubt it.

*: This doesn't work in Unity 2D. Tough.

How can you live with having to search everything?

(Disclosure: satisfied Unity user here)

If you interact with the machine primarily through the keyboard, "search everything" is a plus, not a minus. It means you can easily launch new applications without having to take your hand off the KB and move it over to the mouse. Launching applications is much faster for me in Unity than it was in GNOME 2.x, simply because typing ALT plus the first three characters of the application name (or a generally descriptive word: ALT + "music" finds Rhythmbox, for instance) is faster than rooting around a multi-level menu.

After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible

This is because "listing applications" in Unity is a failure case. Users don't want to list applications; they want to launch the one application they were looking for. The point of Unity's launcher is to make digging through a long list of apps to find the one you wanted obsolete.

So it takes Gnome Do and makes it more complex? I think that would make Ubuntu quite unique and thus back it into a corner they invented. It's not like the GUI is a new concept these days, designs have long been ironed out. Old Gnome was fine and I would've settled for something that resembles Android 3.0+, sorry to rant.

"listing applications" in Unity is a failure case

My desktop takes the logical next step, before I moved back to gnome-panel I simply dragged the applications I used out of the overlay thing onto the desktop. I keep the icons organised, so they're always in the same place. Anecdotal observations from "normal" people show that they use their Windows Vista/7 desktops much the same way, not even bothering with the start menu except to shut down. They get grumpy whenever anything is different at all in which icons are shown and in what order. Their allegations that I broke something weeks after I accidentally left, say, a copy of unzip on their desktop is of course laughable at best. But the concept of having shortcuts on the desktop, certainly not. Makes me wonder why Unity bothers with a separate desktop at all, it could benefit from the screen real estate when that overlay screen sits at the bottom of the stack as the root window. I loved the netbook-launcher it grew out of, too bad it was discontinued.

Users don't want to list applications; they want to launch the one application they were looking for

The Gnome consensus used to be that users don't care which application they're using, they just want to carry out a certain task. Which is why they all have boring names such as "document viewer" and "web browser". How is a user going to know to find evince and epiphany or firefox? In Unity, search quickly breaks because of this. If you know the name of the application, it can find it. But if you don't, it doesn't map keywords to application names. It would be impossible to maintain appropriate keywords for all applications in Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) so it doesn't.

Fortunately, all the current desktops run a terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+T. It's the one failure mode they all support equally well, supports tab completion and isn't limited to applications with a .desktop file. This is what I do for most tasks besides web browsing, so even after all these years of developing desktop environments the main purpose is still to run multiple terminals side by side. If only twm had niceties such as network manager and removable media.

So it takes Gnome Do and makes it more complex?

No. I had doubts last year about the wisdom of Canonical starting from scratch with Unity rather than just building on GNOME Do (see http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2011/04/ubuntu-11-04-everything-ol...), but the last couple of releases have put my doubts to rest. Unity is everything GNOME Do is/was, but now with the possibility to extend even further into things like the new HUD (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD), which does to application menu bars what Unity does to application lists.

They get grumpy whenever anything is different at all in which icons are shown and in what order. Their allegations that I broke something weeks after I accidentally left, say, a copy of unzip on their desktop is of course laughable at best

You seem to be under the impression that the Unity desktop can't have icons/files/launchers/etc. on it. It can, mine does. It's accessible via the usual "Desktop" folder in your home directory.

If you know the name of the application, it can find it. But if you don't, it doesn't map keywords to application names. It would be impossible to maintain appropriate keywords for all applications in Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) so it doesn't.

You're incorrect here too. Unity does support searching by keywords, and all you need to do to hook into it is create a standard freedesktop.org-style .desktop file for the app (http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/a...) and fill in the "Keywords" field inside it. Unity will pick up those keywords and use them when searching in the application lens. Most of the commonly used applications already have the most obvious keywords provided for them.

(Putting the keywords in the desktop entry file means that Ubuntu/Canonical don't have to maintain a master list of keywords for every application; app developers can just provide relevant keywords for their app in the DE file they ship, and users can tune them if needed just by editing the DE file.)

I get the feeling from your complaints that you checked out Unity briefly early in its lifecycle and haven't checked back in on it lately. You should try it again now, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Unity is everything GNOME Do is/was, but now with the possibility to extend even further into things like the new HUD

I never got the hang of Do, either. In order to do things with do, you have to learn its vocabulary. Whenever there was something I didn't know how to do with do (or it didn't have a certain plugin), the old way of doing it was still there. This made me reluctant to ever press the button that triggers it. Maybe I'm bad for not investing time into making it work better, perhaps desktop environments are not being treated fairly in this regard. To clarify, maybe it's hard to unlearn the ways of interfaces which came before. I was taught how to browse the web with Netscape and today I'm still bitter about certain changes in Firefox (I know there's seamonkey but it's a second-class citizen nowadays). This doesn't hold true for all user interfaces, but I'm not sure if age plays a significant part (as in, learn UI X before age Y => forever stuck with the concepts of X), prolonged use or a combination of either along with not having any alternatives (thus, not building the required mental abstraction layer to differentiate the underpinnings of various UI concepts). I have only myself to sample and given that people are using user unfriendly (or even hostile) window managers such as evilwm, fluxbox and xmonad, there have to be wildly different "mental operating systems" in any representative sample group.

Gnome usually worked well despite this psychological hellhole, I could introduce people to it and it generally wasn't met with contempt. They knew their users so well that I, for one, was shocked and baffled when at the first command I entered in the preferences of the panel applet Fish, it berated me for trying to make it useful (there's only 1 command which does that).

Most of the commonly used applications already have the most obvious keywords provided for them.

I see, that's great. Sadly this hasn't worked for me, but I'll keep this in mind whenever I'm searching in Unity and something is missing. I hope seeing how it works hasn't skewed the way I use it too much.

app developers can just provide relevant keywords for their app in the DE file they ship

Yes, I hope package maintainers will do this too. This can be useful for a11y and other desktop environments, nice.

I get the feeling from your complaints that you checked out Unity briefly early in its lifecycle and haven't checked back in on it lately.

This is false. Although I have tried Unity in each Ubuntu release starting from 10.10, I've tried hard to work with it (instead of replacing it outright) in 12.04 over the course of months. I turned to Google just to figure out where my applications are for starters, instead of flipping tables. What recently drove me away is the instability, not the glaring usability quirks. At some point, compiz flat out refused to start but compiz 2d still worked (for a while). Compiz stability is very hard to fix as it can even depend on obscure GPU bugs only found in serial number x through y of model z manufactured by {.

However, I did manage to find one improvement over gnome-panel: it's easy to use the keyboard to navigate panel applets/indicators. Just by pressing e.g. Alt+F, you can move (using the arrow keys) all the way to the power button. A lack of pointer input always renders gnome-panel useless.

> The Gnome consensus used to be that users don't care which application they're using, they just want to carry out a certain task.

Still just press the Super key type in "doc" and you will see the "Document-Viewer" which is evince.

For Help press ALT + F1.

You can see most shortcuts with holding down the Super-Key for a few seconds.

Thanks! In gnome-panel, this brings up the left side menu.

I'll try the help whenever I'm in Unity again.

This does not actually work, it merely highlights the Ubuntu button in the dock. According to the shortcuts overview, it's "Open Launcher keyboard navigation mode". I ran unity --reset to make sure it's not just me.

What really bothers me about Unity is that I haven't seen it work. I've got a quad-core machine with a decent NVidia GPU and 4GB of ram, and I was seeing multiple seconds of UI lag, even on the 2D mode.

I switched to Xfce and haven't looked back. Everything is snappy, and everything is configurable.

I love Xfce myself, but Unity on 12.04 feels really snappy on my System76 laptop.

Maybe a config problem ? It works perfectly fine on my old Core2Duo laptop, with 4Gb RAM. Almost never experienced multi-seconds lag (but I do admit I see some crashes here and there) in the latest Ubuntu release.

This, IMHO, is the problem right here in a nutshell.

Maybe it's a config problem. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's sunspots. Who cares? It doesn't JUST WORK and that - more than anything else - is what will doom Desktop Linux.

I run Ubuntu on what essentially amounts to a media desktop. It does work, but that's because I spent hours on researching the simplest, cheapest hardware config that would work seamlessly with Ubuntu without requiring me to compile my own drivers, etc. The fact is that I, even as a power user, really don't want to spend hours messing around with that stuff... so I can't imagine the Average Joe would want to.

Oh, but that has been an issue since the ancient times of the beginning of Linux. Being it monitors/screens, (win)modems, audio, etc.

Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work.

Predictions of Linux's doom have also been there since the ancient times of the beginning of Linux.

Actually, back then there was much more reason to doomsay, as there really wasn't a desktop to speak of (CDE on Solaris was far more sophisticated than bare X on Linux), no hardware manufacturers even bothered to provide even closed-source drivers for their hardware, hardware support was miniscule, there was no such thing as auto-detection of hardware, web browsers didn't even exist so apart from a handful of applications with pitiful GUIs by today's standards, every user was forced to interact with the system through the shell. There was no OpenOffice or LibreOffice (ie. no option to use a Word/Excel/PowerPoint alternative on Linux), no web browsers, no desktop environments, no way to configure your system through a GUI. The list goes on and on.

Since those days, Linux has improved by many orders of magnitude. And it keeps getting better every year.

I think most people complaining about Linux these days really don't appreciate how bad and comparatively unusable it was in the old days. Back then you could not even dream of making any kind of comparison between Linux and Windows or MacOS in terms of ease of use for an average non-technical user. Now from an average user's perspective, they're all quite similar, with some minor differences on the periphery.

Sure, Linux still has some problems, but it's not like the competition is without its own problems.

Yes, sometimes a user who bought some obscure peripheral (made by a manufacturer who does not care about Linux compatibility) doesn't bother to check to see if the peripheral was listed as being Linux compatible. So they may have problems getting it to work.

But how do you think the typical Windows user likes using a virus and trojan infested system? Even Mac users are starting to fall victim to this problem. Or how do you think a typical Windows user enjoys having to reinstall the operating system every couple of years because it's slowed to a crawl through Windows-bloat?

"Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work."

Slashdot is not representative of the Linux community as a whole. And my experience in asking questions of Linux users has been quite different from yours. Virtually all Linux users I've encountered anywhere, from usenet to web forums to irc to mailing lists, have been exceedingly helpful. Even on Slashdot, there's quite a lot of help to be found.

And what could be more helpful than volunteering to write whole applications, whole operating systems, and even the documentation to go along with them for free? Countless Linux users have dedicated years and even decades of their life to helping the community by doing this.

The mercenary, closed-source culture that dominates in the Windows and Mac worlds is shamefully lacking compared to the vibrant open-source world that thrives in the Linux community. As a Linux user you are gifted with an entire free operating system, tens of thousands of free applications, hundreds of free device drivers, your choice of free desktops, etc. In the computer world, is this not the ultimate in generosity?

HOw can it spell the doom of Linux desktop? Even if it does not worth with 100% of the folks, it works for a certain % of people, and the total installed base is growing over time as more people try it and find it works for them. That is why you see the share of Linux desktop not GOING DOWN, but being stable or growing a little, while the overall internet population is growing from year to year.

Please stop the "Doom predictions". It won't happen. It does not need to be the MAINSTREAM system to exist.

Ok, perhaps my usage of the word "doom" was a tad strong. I should have said that it will relegate desktop Linux to a tiny (miniscule) percentage of the mainstream.

And that's a shame, because of the wealth of great, free tools (whether it's development tools, photo editing tools, audio editing tools, etc. etc.) in the Linux ecosystem.

I really don't think it's any problem with Desktop Linux. I accept that it's going to take a few hours to tweak a new machine to my liking. Linux makes it really easy to swap out a buggy or uncomfortable windowing environment. A lot of manufacturers seem to be going in the opposite direction, baking the windowing environment so deeply into the firmware you can't get rid of it. Linux has always been niche, and it's one I'm pretty happy in.

The Unity interface is incredibly cool. Love it, love it.

Performance was a bit choppy when I had 4GB ram, and sometimes compiz would freeze my system. However, upgrading to 8GB RAM (costs about $50) totally fixed everything for me. Just upgrade.

I'm sure they could optimize things better, but that would slow down their frantic pace of innovation.

Just upgrade.

Why? Why should someone upgrade their ram just so the UI works smoothly? We've had smooth UI's for twenty years, even back when 32 MB of ram was the norm - so why should someone upgrade to 8 GB just for the UI? Hell, if I upgrade my ram (I have 8 already, but anway) I'll want it to be to benefit all the applications I like to run and I expect the UI and OS to use as little as possible and still perform smoothly.

My old eee pc was able to run windows xp just fine before I installed Arch with a tiling window manager on it and everything ran well, everything was fast, everything was smooth - for about three years - and then I installed Ubuntu and Unity brought it to a standstill despite not using any different applications than I always used. Even switching workspaces sometimes took 15 seconds or so. Yes, it only has 1 GB of ram, but like I said, I used the same applications that I always did without problems. I struggled with it for a few months and switched back to Arch and haven't had any problems since (though I now use a laptop which does have 8 gigs of ram and rather than using that ram to make unity run smoothly, I'm using it so I can run windows 7 and linux at the same time with VirtualBox).

>Is it possible that Canonical is actually moving away from Gnome and taking things in-house to avoid exactly the problems that Miguel de Icaza is underlining?

I do think this is part of it though they probably wouldn't say it way. They certainly do want a consistent user experience - and they want one that rivals OS X.

I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet. It all takes some getting used to for a new user, including OS X. Now I can definitely understand the frustration though of someone who just upgraded their OS only to find they don't know how to use it anymore.

> I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet.

you shouldn't have to learn how to use the desktop! I tried out Unity, I really did. I didn't like it and my apps kept getting lost when minimized and I couldn't have lots of small windows open and it just fixed something that wasn't broken for me. Like everyone else, I went to Xfce.

But you do have to learn how to use a desktop. You even spent sometime learning how to use a mouse. I use xfce on my main machine and unity on the oops I need skype machine and I hate the switch, but that's because I have not invested time to use it well - and chances Are I probably won't, just like I won't learn the annoying parts of OSX

desktops are a tool like any other - the mentality that they should be intuitive or easy leads down the path of eye candy as opposed to functionlity.

when you learn to drive a car.... you can drive almost all cars... the biggest difference is with the manual o automatic gears.... when you learn to use a computer you should be able to use many of them whithout having to learn anything.

A car does one job. A computer does many jobs. Learning to do each job a little differently, adds up to a lot of learning. I don't know what "you should" has to do with it - I'm just pointing out that for all desktops that currently exist, you have to learn how to use it.

(a link you may like, from my blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... )

So you are going to make the claim that xfce does not require learning? Or just it doesn't require learning if you already knew gnome, or what? Because no learning is a pretty strong claim...

Yes, I agree, but they're going the same path as Gnome, the "we know better"

"one that rivals OSX" what a joke. Windows XP is a better rival to OSX than Unity.

Actually I think it is the other way 'round. OS X has preatty lousy UE by default.

People complain about such software because we live in a world where there is no such thing as a Computer Driving Licence. Many users are perfectly fine to live in as much ignorance as possible, and are actually quite afraid of traditional computers. These users can easily be spotted at a glance on both Windows and Mac as they invariably use their desktop as a horrifically chaotic filesystem, never delving deeper, and the internet is essentially Facebook.

Actually it does exist: http://www.ecdl.com/

The world is not better off with this, as it merely teaches people how to use MS-Windows and MS-Office. It doesn't go into any detail at all how a computer really works.

Wow, you learn something new every day! My thinking was more akin to a real life driving license, a mandatory thing you would need before being allowed on a computer unsupervised etc. Thanks for enlightening me though!