Voice of the Masses: Will you miss Ubuntu’s Unity?
So Canonical has decided to “end investment in Unity”, abandoning its plans to make Ubuntu the ultimate “convergence” platform for mobile devices. For some people in the FOSS world, this news came as a surprise – but for others, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Android and iOS completely dominate the mobile space, and Canonical has been doing well in the cloud market, so its convergence offerings looked like a distraction rather than a long-term goal.
But anyway, for our next podcast, we want to hear your thoughts: will you miss Unity? Even if you didn’t use it yourself, did you find it a good starter desktop for new Linux users? And along these lines, do you think Canonical is making the right choice by switching to Gnome as the default Ubuntu desktop going forwards – or would KDE, Xfce, MATE or Cinnamon be better options? Let us know what you think in the comments below and we’ll read out the best in our next recording.
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I never tried it personally but I was sad to hear this because I was hopeful that it might become a FOSS answer to the touchscreen laptops market that seems to be totally controlled by Windows 10.
Gnome 3 should work quite well on a touchscreen.
Probably even better than Unity.
Unity, for all it’s shortcomings, is a useful Desktop and if nothing else, it is the only one that enjoyed a warm welcoming from people that had no previous experience with Linux. I would often visit businesses and offices and every now and then that orange/purplish background with the vertical dock on the left would make me think “Hey look at that, these people are using Ubuntu! Way to go!”. Can’t say the same about any other distro. Many companies adopted Canonicals Desktop/Server infrastructure package so that made sense and through this, Ubuntu found a penetration path to a more wide user base in the wider world of Windows and OSX. That was Canonical’s own path with the continuous momentum, from shipping free disks all over the world, to becoming a server and cloud key player, while always pushing the wide use of Ubuntu for Desktop use, and Unity always being the flagship on that. I have loved it from the start as it is intuitive and is implementing lots of friendly features. And as far as coolness goes on Desktop, I believe that Ubuntu is the most wonderful Desktop out there, period.
And now pulling the plug off Unity. As much as I am a believer and I would love to see Canonical pushing the Ubuntu even further on the Desktop, I think that this is all over now. I believe key decisions were made after Canonical took a vortex of bashing for those Amazon ads, the spyware theories and all that came with it. This was a way for Canonical to make a revenue from Desktop use, a thing that the community raised hell about. But this is actually how corporations operate, especially for something that is being constantly on R&D and then given away totally free. I believe that Mark’s thought was that this kind of thing would never work given the negative feedback Canonical got back. And that was a nail down the coffin for Unity.
By taking down Unity, is back to square one and worse. The Linux world may be tolerant to switches and changes on Desktops and all, but people outside of it do not accept changes, especially in such a radical way. Adopting Gnome will make little sense to people that got used to Unity this far, and will alienate the community even more. Sure, fans from all kinds of distros will come out and propose their Desktops as better candidates, but that was never the case. Unity, whether we like it or not, had it right on terms of friendliness and had that bling effect that was luring people outside the Linux world. It was because of Unity that we came to see laptops being sold with Ubuntu pre-installed. Unity was responsible for taking the Linux platform out of the shadows of “a nerd’s operating system”, and showcased that it was capable of standing side by side to Microsoft and Apple’s counterparts. But sadly, that is no more.
I actually feel like I am reliving the Commodore downfall once again.
Please no! I think I can only take one of those in one lifetime…
I’ve been using unity since 11.10. I had an asus eee at that time and unity worked well on such a small screen. And later when I installed ubuntu 12.04 on my work computer I’ve gotten quite used to it and used it ever since.
I tried several other linux distro’s and their default desktop like opensuse (kde), solydk (kde), xubuntu (xfce), and even bodhi (enlighnment), and I keep returning to ubuntu and unity.
* Kde always seemed difficult. A kde out of the box doesn’t seem to work for me. I know you can tweak everything, but you do have to take the time to do the tweaking.
* Xfce was good. I liked that, and I can’t remember why I didn’t continue using it.
* I liked moksha/enlighenment (bodhi), but that was because I accepted there would be limitations; and there are quite a few of those… Not a distro I would use for day to day work.
I haven’t really tried gnome since version 3, but I don’t like what they did to nautilus (removing usefull and handy features. I switched to nemo after they removed the tree view), and other tools (I remember searching where to choose the screensaver in the beginning of ubuntu 12.04, and found that it was removed from gnome for no clear reason other than simplification). I’m afraid I won’t like it. I can only hope that the united forces on gnome will improve gnome in a way that makes it close to what unity brought.
Quite simply no. When you do a job you use the best (for you) tool in the toolbox. I had grown up with the Windows 95 GUI and found no reason to deviate from this formula. When I upgraded to Linux I found the SUSE 10.3 Gnome desktop suited me best as it mimicked the W95 desktop. I later moved to Linux Mint (because Pulse ruined SUSE at that time) and found their version of Gnome 2 to suit me best. There was a bit of turmoil whilst Gnome 3 came in but, now the dust has settled, I’m back with Mint and the Cinnamon desktop. It just works and that is all I need thank you.
I was never really a fan of Unity. I used pretty much every incarnation that came with an LTS and always found it to be slow.
But what Unity did was to make the Linux Desktop that little bit more user friendly (ignoring the privacy mis-steps). It provided a good solid UX while both Gnome 3 and KDE went through their transitional stages and got to the point of being usable.
Now that Gnome 3 is fast, stable, and very usable I think the move from Canonical makes a lot of business sense, although I can certainly understand why people who have invested a lot of time (and potentially money) into Ubuntu Linux would be annoyed because of the suddent pivot!
Yea, for Mir and Unity
Herewith an humble eulogy
On phone, tv and other screens,
Suppos’d to converge,
Or such was the dream
Seven years of not quite there
And droves of users fleeing elsewhere
A new display server caused consternation
“Not unity, but fragmentation”
April, cruellest month indeed
with an evening post ’twas decreed
“Next year we go back to Gnome”
Nevermore, the Ubuntu Phone
The dream of convergence–a bubble burst
And look, Samsung got there first
So yea, for Unity and Mir
We shall shed at most one tear
No. I won’t miss Unity at all. It’s the reason I switched from Ubuntu to Mint. I tried a couple of times to use Unity but it just never seemed right.
I love Cinnamon. Everything just feels right. It’s very easy to switch to for former Windows users (like myself). It would make a great successor to Unity.
Those are my thoughts too.
The only thing I’d add is that despite Unity’s ‘failure’, full marks to Canonical for pushing the envelope and trying something new.
In general, yes. I first used Ubuntu (and Linux in general) with 11.10, so all of my experiences have been with Unity. And I’m going to miss that. I’ve tried GNOME, but never for any amount of time. I’ve gotten used to Unity and I’m going to miss that distinctive sidebar. I’m also really saddened by the dropping of convergence. I wanted so badly for that to succeed, for something to challenge Windows in the mobile computer market, and all of the demos I saw were really cool. We’ll see what the future holds, but Unity will be missed.
Nop.
I think Ubuntu should ship with something like Pantheon, it’s much more usable than Unity, perhaps some kind of uncluttered/simplified Gnome?
In Gnome, the constant switching between activities/apps/windows is annoying, it should be simpler.
The news came as a shock to me, it was the very first news article I read in the morning. I felt like someone punched me in the stomach. I will miss it very much!, To me it was elegant and functional, such a pretty desktop to look at, and such a same it died prematurely. I look forward to the future, the first google search I did was “how to use gnome?” Let’s hope for a bright future! Best of luck to Canonical and the Ubuntu community.
I was useing Gnome Shell on Ubuntu when Unity started, but eventually gave up and accepted the Unity. So very pleased that Ubuntu is going back to Gnome. I think the more important change will be adoption of Wayland rather than the Mir. This means that development effort is concentrated in one place, and we will gave better graphics drivers and performance as a result. The unity user interface could be produced as a extension on Gnome, but hopefully some of the good parts of unity will be incorporated.
Not really. I use Kubuntu as my daily driver, so this won’t affect me much, if at all.
Yes, I tried Unity having not found their Netbook interface to be acceptable on those devices. I was so impressed I migrated to Mint Cinnamon.
When I discovered Ubuntu for me sometimes around 2011, I instantly liked Unity. I am not interested in tweaking desktop environments, it just has to work for me, and Unity always did. I was even able to convince & migrate some windows users to Ubuntu. Ease of installation and out of the box experience are key factors for a wider adoption of Linux. I will miss Unity.
Ubuntu and it’s ease of installation and use was what attracted me to Linux in the first place. I took an instant dislike to unity when it was introduced, and switched to Mint which has been my go to distro ever since. I would be very interested to see the new Ubuntu Gnome 3 incarnation but think switching to it is unlikely as the Mint Cinnamon desktop just works so well. I wonder whether the switch will improve the Distrowatch page hit ranking, they have been below Mint for a long time now.
No, it just felt annoying to use. I had to at least use a consistent icon and theme pack to ease the sense of wrongness, flip the close buttons over to the right side and auto hide the bar so I had to look at it as little as possible.
Never used it as soon as Ubuntu moved to unity I started to use Mint and when GNOME 3 came along I shifted to the Mate DE. However It would have been good to have seen a truly convergent device, but alas this looks dead and buried.
I think I’m ready for something new!
I have been using unity for a while but I was already thinking of trying something else anyway.
I’ll miss Unity. I backed the Ubuntu Phone because I thought they were following the right path. I used Ubuntu with the default desktop since the EEEPC in 8.04, and stuck with it until today. I have dabbled with alternatives, but always came home to Ubuntu.
I’ve seen there’s unity8.org which hopes to maintain the project, the ubports team plans to carry on porting unity 8 to devices and Mir is not dead, just dedicated to IoT devices… For now. All is not lost, but how long can the community keep Unity on life support?
For now, I’m trying Ubuntu Gnome. It’s definitely not as polished, but, that’s what Canonical was always good at!
I for one will miss Unity. Although it’s taken some getting used to, I much prefer it over Gnome 3. I worry that a lot of usability of my desktop will be lost with the switch.
Yeah im very much going to miss it. I dont mind them dropping Mir but at least give us Unity on top of wayland instead!
I often tell people Unity is the most productive desktop interface I have ever used. The HUD combined with keyboard shortcuts felt very natural once you took the time to learn it (it took me a while).
I would have been really cool if the HUD doubled as a terminal.
Sadly, Unity ate too much memory and it was not immediately clear to me how to customize the features I liked such as the shortcuts or search.
Speaking of search, the ads thing was right up there with forced Windows upgrades.
Oddly, yes (based on how much I hated it when it was first released). I have never particularly enjoyed using Unity, but it kept out of the way enough for me not to hate it when it came pre-installed on a laptop a couple of years ago, and I never really replaced it there. It is the only DE that I have tried that works well with a vertical panel, top and/or bottom panels seem to shrink widescreen monitors useful space; I have just tried moving both panels to the left in Mate, and neither works as well as Unity.
I loved the convergence idea and feel it is a shame that it is disappearing. It seems especially odd as Samsung has just launched DeX, which seems to be trying something similar, having a couple of companies pushing it might have improved the chances of it catching on.
Losing Unity is a real loss because it got a lot of people (including me) into Linux and convinced us it was a real-world option. But MATE, Xfce, and probably some others can replicate many of Unity’s features without KDE’s complexity or GNOME’s weirdness. Ubuntu MATE even has a Unity-like configuration (Mutiny) ready to go with a few clicks. Not sure why Ubuntu is going with GNOME instead of MATE. I like GNOME — in fact, it’s my daily DE now — but I would have hated it when I first switched to Linux.
The end of Unity suggests that the long-held interest in a linux operating system that has a future on consumer devices has ended. With the decline of the non-enterprise desktop, Ubuntu and other linux distributions would seem to have poor prospects for daily use.
I WILL MISS UNITY. And so will my parents and parents in law. I installed Linux on their machines when ubuntu had gnome2, they took to Unity without problems . . . . now to deliver bad news.
I myself though have tried KDE (6 weeks) and cinnamon (2 weeks) on my main machine but keep falling back to unity. It’s just the way the search hud thing works. Work flow seems better and getting to things is faster with unity.
I hope the way search works in unity gets adopted by gnome.
I must say though that Unity is a bit ugly compared to other interfaces but the Unity’s search and lack of menu and simplicity give it a big win for me.
Also check this out: http://www.unity8.org/
It might live on.
The part I’m dearly going to miss is that they were pushing developers to use Qt for making applications. All the good stuff that regular users want, like VLC or qBittorrent or Speedcrunch, is already written in Qt and has much better cross-platform compatibility. If this retreat back to GTK means there will be no decent non-FisherPrice Linux alternatives to Adobe products, Autodesk products, XYplorer, Outlook, Nitro Pro, Mediamonkey, SyncbackSE or other core media/productivity tools, then Linux will never attain the market-share needed for actual serious adoption and getting out from under the yoke of players like Microsoft or Google. Likewise, if big Linux players can’t muster a proper consolidated mobile push, their improved desktop privacy will mean nothing while all your data is still exposed on the mobile-side.
Sorry if I seemed a bit snippy … I just desperately want to move from the horrid Windows 10 situation but currently the platform isn’t viable for a professional users outside software development or basic Chromebook-like tasks. It’s not like the lack of quality software doesn’t come up again and again:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/52w6rs/linuxs_lack_of_software_is_a_myth/d7pbmbq/?context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/tech/comments/5viemk/windows_wins_the_desktop_but_linux_takes_the_world/de5t5zb/?context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/63quz8/what_mark_shuttleworth_should_have_done_instead/dfwb6xt/
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4qckob/i_urge_everyone_to_fight_back_woman_wins_10k_from/d4sbhri/?context=3
Once Unity became stable I found it a useful and productive desktop environment. I recently loaded Mate and I think a combination of a Unity/Mate desktop would be my ideal. Hopefully Canonical can modify gnome to have the productive and useful aspects of Unity. I will surely miss it and the prospect of an Ubuntu phone and converged device. There may be some good coming out of this as the UBports team mentioned combining forces with the Sailfish, Tizen and Unity8 Community port team. We may see a large enough community project to become a alternative like LineageOS. One can only hope.
Human beings are inherently change-averse. The Unity everyone loves (or hates, as the case may be) is Unity 7. This was on its way out anyhow, poised (until the bomb shell was dropped) to be replaced by Unity 8. Unity 8 was a very different beast to Unity 7. So the migration would have hurt all the same and Unity 7 would have been missed by its fans.
We had to adapt to the change from Gnome 2 to Unity, We will adapt to the change from Unity to Gnome 3. The difference this time around being that we will be switching from one mature desktop environment to another one, as opposed to some newfangled experimental thing with teething problems.
I use Unity, it works fine for me. i’m not a fan of Gnome 3 but i’m willing to give it a shot. If it doesn’t work i’ll probably switch to MATE or jump to Linux Mint xfce edition. i’ve used that a bit and i quite like it.
I’ve never taken to Unity. But I find it sad that Canonical have had to abandon so many initiatives. Unity, Mir and Upstart were heroic attempts to improve Linux and port it to devices beyond the traditional PC. It must be demoralising for the team to have them all fall by the wayside. If Ubuntu has no future on small format devices will Canonical put any further effort into a diminishing desktop market?
I believe Canonical is over and out with any kind of Desktop effort. Mark Shuttleworth’s words were that when Ubuntu became mainstream, Canonical got hatred bashing from certain people that urged communities to do the same. Any person with half a sane mind would see that it is futile, when the least you are getting is support from – supposedly – all the Linux users that still dream a worldwide Desktop establishment. Canonical got so close to make what millions of us have always been dreaming, yet we are the only ones to blame that brought it all down.
Its been the default linux desktop in Ubuntu and the only desktop I am used. So yes I will miss it. I think it will be a loss as most users do not understand this concept of choice when it comes to desktop front ends. Maybe Ubuntu should have stuck with Gnome in the first place but rolling back on Unity is pretty unacceptable. Its not like Tiles on Windows 8 ..it would be like Micro$oft abandoning Windows and using OS2
I have only one qualm about advising everyone to try KDE. That reason is amarok. I have about 4gigs of ram on my current PC and *at* *least* 1gig of which is consumed by amarok when it is properly responsive.
I’ve used it for some time. But had to replace it because it slowed down my old desktop computer too much. To be totally honest, I never missed it.
That being said, I’m sad that such a good looking desktop environment will be discontinued. It’s polished, looking professional and able to compete with commercial equivalents. Not to mention Canonical successfully introduced something different – something else than the eternal win95-inspired bland desktops everybody seem so keen on. We’ve got so many of them, virtually identical. Why not discontinue one of those ? 🙂
I consider this a huge step backward for Ubuntu really.
Can’t say I’ll miss it, good desktop though it was. My preference is to aim for utilities and programs which are ‘portable’ between different distros (both Linux and BSD) so that I don’t get tied in to one particular distro / OS. I’m using Xfce at the moment as the devs seem keen to keep the portability aspect (light WMs are good for this as well). I was never too keen on the concept of a disto-specific DE (although, admittedly, Unity can be used with other distros etc.).
I’m really sad it didn’t happen for them, but no I won’t especially miss Unity. In fact I’ve already switched to Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 and have followed a very simple guide to give it a more Ubuntu-ey theme. GNOME is the better desktop imho.
I won’t miss Unity, but did find it a good desktop UI for beginners. I wish that Canonical would move to Cinnamon since I believe it to the best desktop UI for teaching new users of Linux.
I will not miss Unity, because I don’t believe it will vanish. I tried GNOME 3 and I really don’t like the workflow, style and structure. Unity will stay and it will be maintained by the community. (hopefully)
I was a happy Ubuntu user until Unity came along. I could not understand the point of making such radical changes to a user interface I found intuitive and functional. What really got up my nose was the “Hot Corner” actions that just moving the cursor into a given section of the screen invoked. I packed my bags and moved to Mint and haven’t looked back.
But that’s the “Linux Advantage” (TM) – we always have a choice. I realize that anything I think is truly great appears to someone else as seriously flawed. So, yes, I’m going to miss Unity, even though I personally hate it with a passion. It should exist for the folks who prefer that sort of thing. I don’t like watching a competitor fail, because someday it could be me…
No, I won’t.
(Though I’m not particularly happy about it being dropped.)
1. Icons not labeled.
2. Installed programs not categorized.
3. Icons squished when too many added.
x 11 desktops seems to be popular and I can´t understand why. Ubuntu supports wayland and you have a few modern desktops to choose from. I don´t understand this X 11 hype and all X 11 desktops like Pantheon, Budgie, XFCE, etc. I hope x 11 will die so IBM, Oracle etc has to start to think how to get a desktop to work without x11. Everything else is better.
I will miss Unity a lot (I mean Unity 7.5 not 8), it’s nice, clean and very very efficient, I can’t switch to Gnome at this point. I tried several times but at this end I came up to Unity. I hope that Unity will not die, but for sure I will not upgrade my Ubuntu 17.10 for a while ; It’s sad because each updates were exciting for me and I will not have this feeling anymore. IMO Canonical made a mistake giving up Unity, except if they can offer the opportunity to Gnome to reach and surpass Unity level ; for that we will have to wait couple of years.