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posted by Fnord666 on Friday June 30 2017, @02:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the unity-was-so-cumberbatch dept.

Ubuntu's Unity interface is gone, which means there's one less desktop to choose from in Linux-land. And while dozens remain to choose from, Unity was one of the most polished out there. Many will miss its detail and design.

One of the desktops that is nearly as well polished, and therefore worth Unity fans considering, is the not-quite-as-new-kid on the block, Elementary OS.

Elementary OS actually began in 2011 as a theme for Ubuntu. It has evolved well beyond that now, with its own homegrown desktop environment dubbed Pantheon, 13 custom apps, and a distinct and very nice set of custom icons and themes. Under the hood it's still very much Ubuntu/Debian, so all the commands and basic apps you're used to will be there, even if you have to install them yourself. The Ubuntu/Debian underpinning also means you get the security and stability of those projects.

I've tested Elementary OS quite a bit over the last few years and I can say that, if you were put off by the bugginess of early releases, it's worth another look. The latest release, called Loki, has been very stable in my testing and features some really nice homegrown apps. The Elementary OS team is very good at getting the core of an app right and then polishing up the details over time.

Awesome. I really miss how Unity would slow my desktop to a crawl.


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  • (Score: 1) by gtomorrow on Friday June 30 2017, @04:34PM (4 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Friday June 30 2017, @04:34PM (#533542)

    I must be one of the 88 people worldwide who likes Unity and honestly am sad to see it go. I first installed Ubuntu with Unity back in 2008 on a netbook (Netbook edition IIRC) and for that size and form factor it was actually pretty nice. Admittedly it was pretty slow but I chalked that up to 1) it's a netbook! and 2) Unity had lots of help from the GNOME underpinnings and Metacity. Before that it was a Gentoo install (on another machine...from bootstrap no less!), with WindowMaker which I liked a lot, but I don't have the time nor the inclination anymore for such a setup. Presently I've got 16.04.2 LTS installed on this here Dell Inspiron...with Unity of course.

    Personally I just don't see it in Elementary. I tried it out a couple of years ago and while I did like the interface (ooh! MIller Columns!) I found the distro itself was just too flaky. Maybe I should give it another go...?

    GNOME 3? I tried that for a while with Debian setup I had going. It's okay...as in "Meh...it's okay." KDE: I am not a fan. XFCE isn't bad but reminds me too much of Windows 95/98/XP.

    I know I'm going to regret asking but...why all the hate for Unity? Please, if you feel compelled to respond, keep it intelligent. Please.

    In the end I'm probably just going to suck it up and use GNOME 3.

  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday June 30 2017, @04:49PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Friday June 30 2017, @04:49PM (#533552) Journal

    Slowness is one reason I tried i3: if I had a better memory, I'd probably dump xfce altogether for i3, but I use xfce for non-regular things, as in I don't have to remember to run deja-dup regularly for 'back-ups' and it reminds me of the manjaro updates.

    But I love i3 for running steam games, and browsing, etc.

    So, yeah... Speed is i3... Memory loss is xfce :)

    With a super fast machine, maybe I'd be on something like unity, but maybe not.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Beau Slim on Friday June 30 2017, @05:54PM (2 children)

    by Beau Slim (6628) on Friday June 30 2017, @05:54PM (#533584)

    You aren't a minority. There is just a vocal bunch of haters. Any desktop (on any platform) that doesn't hearken back to the Windows 95 to Windows 7 style gets people frustrated. OMG no Start menu!

    Of all the linux desktop environments I've tried, Unity is certainly the most polished, and you can tell that a lot of thought went into consistency and quickness of common tasks.

    With Unity going away, I tried quite a few options. I kind of like Budgie but they are moving from Gnome's GTK to KDE's qt and I'm not up for a lot of big changes.

    I've settled on Gnome with a few font size tweaks and addons like Dash to Dock, pixelsaver and gnome-global-appmenu so that gnome behaves more or less like Unity. I'm looking forward to seeing Ubuntu's customized Gnome.

    Keep in mind that Unity will continue to work for years to come. There just won't be any improvements.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:49AM (1 child)

      by driverless (4770) on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:49AM (#533871)

      Keep in mind that Unity will continue to work for years to come. There just won't be any improvements.

      Isn't that exactly what you want in a UI? For at least the last five years, probably closer to ten, UI "improvements" have actually been "hipsters randomly changing things to follow whatever hipster trend other hipsters have dreamed up this week". So a UI that's protected from any such "improvements" is a major win in my book.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday July 01 2017, @02:11PM

        by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Saturday July 01 2017, @02:11PM (#533908)

        So a UI that's protected from any such "improvements" is a major win in my book.

        This is exactly why people still want the Windows 95/98/XP style desktop with a start menu, etc. It works fine and no matter what O/S one sits down to, whether Windows or *nix, they can immediately find their way around with little effort. Something like that does not need to ever be changed unless it becomes entirely at odds with the operating system function, which on desktop computers is not going to happen.