No more Unity for Ubuntu

[TrashyMG]

Also, proprietary games only support Ubuntu.

SteamOS has been based on debian Jessie for some time now. Also before going in fully on Debian, I used to run Steam and many other games on Fedora It ran everything flawlessly. Supported = most likely the only tested platform.

 

[veloknight]

I've been using Debian Stretch with Cinnamon as a DE for several months now. It is actually a quite excellent experience. I actually installed -all- of the listed DEs on that machine since a few GB isn't really a big deal. I started with XFCE, but the menu options hadn't been updated to match Stretch very well yet, explored Cinnamon - and stuck there. I haven't even bothered to open a session Gnome or KDE on it yet.

I'm surprised by this as well, since, frankly, I always had tons of bugs and performance issues with Cinnamon. Since I actually pretty much always liked Gnome Shell, even the 'bad' early ones, I mostly wound up splitting time between it and Unity, and found myself wishing for Unity - or at least Unity innovations like the fullscreen globalmenu-titlebar merge and the HUD - to be available elsewhere. Now that we're switching away, I hope that Canonical puts some effort to moving these innovations back upstream as extensions or options. I think Ubuntu's problem was never their NIH syndrome - plenty have that - it's that they, unlike Mint and others, were never that interested in pushing their changes upstream, and so never gained any real buy-in or community development on their modifications.

 

[canseco]

It's sad to see Canonical ending support for this project, now that they finally used QT.
At least it seems some community members want to keep it alive.
https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org
https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org

Supported = most likely the only tested platform.

Porting companies like Feral have volunteer dedicated Linux teams for testing on the most used/popular distros.
Indie teams may have that luxury just asking for help on Reddit,

But it's true that most developers only know about SteamOS or Ubuntu. And Valve only supports those too.

Anyway, no problems for me running new commercial games on my PC with Antergos using steam-native-runtime,
But my old hardware, it's not new enough for the more demanding ones,

 

[TrashyMG]

Porting companies like Feral have volunteer dedicated Linux teams for testing on the most used/popular distros.

Not surprising, Feral has done an excellent job on every game I've played from them.

 

[Christoph.Krn]

I [...] found myself wishing for Unity - or at least Unity innovations like the fullscreen globalmenu-titlebar merge and the HUD - to be available elsewhere.

In several environments, you can limit the panel width to < 100% (say, 90%), pin it to the top left screen corner, and configure windows to maximize behind the panel.

What do you like so much about the Unity HUD?

 

[kabaiakh]

My first distro was Yggdrasil.
It was 22.5 years ago today.

Sticked to Slackware after that.
Then Debian for quite a time.
Still using it for self hosting.

Turned to Parabola for my laptop.
Unhappy with XFCE 'lags'.
Blame it on years under IceWM.
Hope it will be faster on the Pyra.

Might try a Parabolized ArchBang soon.
Openbox seems light enough for me.

Never used Ubuntu.
Not a big fan of any major DE.
I'm an alien.

 

[Grench]

I'm surprised by this as well, since, frankly, I always had tons of bugs and performance issues with Cinnamon.

I had tried Cinnamon a few years ago when I first started fiddling with Mint. Yes, it was buggy and at the time I flipped to XFCE and all was well.

Cinnamon has gotten MUCH better than it was back then. No errors or bugs to report within a few months of use this time.

Of course the DE is simply a means to an end. They're all pretty good these days. A lot of the 'DE wars' feel like religious/patriotic affinity.

 

[veloknight]

In several environments, you can limit the panel width to < 100% (say, 90%), pin it to the top left screen corner, and configure windows to maximize behind the panel.

What do you like so much about the Unity HUD?

Interesting, thanks for the information. It's still not effortless, though, and I can't see how much I'd like it without the global menu. I've tried using global menus for other DEs before - they were always terrible, unfortunately, at best being a feature that was well-supported by one toolkit but more often an afterthought.

Re: the HUD: What's not to like? I can navigate through GUI menus using just a keyboard, even if I don't know the shortcut; and maybe not even exactly what I'm looking for. Even after Ubuntu gave up development on it for quite some time, I still use it whenever I'm in a bigger program like Gimp and want to use something. I've always wanted to be able to take the HUD functionality and somehow implement it as a GNOME extension.
[doublepost=1491504452,1491503773][/doublepost]

I had tried Cinnamon a few years ago when I first started fiddling with Mint. Yes, it was buggy and at the time I flipped to XFCE and all was well.

Cinnamon has gotten MUCH better than it was back then. No errors or bugs to report within a few months of use this time.

Of course the DE is simply a means to an end. They're all pretty good these days. A lot of the 'DE wars' feel like religious/patriotic affinity.

Yeah, my experiences with Cinnamon were all a while ago, maybe I should give it another try. I've always been kind of reluctant - I guess I held a grudge against Mint over the Banshee thing, and always liked Gnome Shell - but trying new DEs is fun!

I don't understand the way some people get super territorial about DEs, though at least it's better than systemd debates. I have always found the multitude of desktop environments in Linux to be an obvious source of strength, and have very fond memories of the "bad days" when all the big Linux distros were conducting all these exciting experiments in paradigm (Gnome 2 + Compiz, KDE4, e17, Gnome Shell, Unity, all around the same time). I guess my perspective is shaped by the fact that Linux was already new to me at the time, so I didn't have an ingrained workflow that was disrupted, and that now that I have fairly steady workflows and daily drivers, I also have a spare machine or two to play around with different desktops on.

 

[Exophase]

Good riddance. I hate Unity.

But I've been using Mint with MATE ever since Ubuntu switched anyway. Never really bothered with Cinnamon. The old classic desktop paradigm works fine for me.

 

[Grench]

Good riddance. I hate Unity.

I have yet to have encountered anyone who actually liked it and had half a clue what they were doing. I did encounter one guy who liked it because it meant he didn't have to learn how to use Linux... Just smile and wave.

But I've been using Mint with MATE ever since Ubuntu switched anyway. Never really bothered with Cinnamon. The old classic desktop paradigm works fine for me.

I'm not trying to promote Cinnamon. When I installed Debian Stretch RC2, my go to DE of XFCE had not been updated to match the new kernel and file organization subtleties of Stretch. So, I reinstalled and simply selected all of the DE options (using BluRay image on a USB stick). Click the DE selector button on the login screen, selected the first alphabetically (Cinnamon), and haven't bothered to move further down the list. Just laziness really. Maybe I'll give MATE a whirl tonight - or maybe revisit XFCE to see if the updates I've installed over the last month made it happy again - or maybe Gnome 3.

The system runs on a 3.46Ghz quad core Xeon with 48GB of RAM and a pair of 500GB SSDs in RAID 0. The 'weight' of the DE is a flea on an elephant.

 

[veloknight]

I have yet to have encountered anyone who actually liked it and had half a clue what they were doing.

veloknight. Pleased to meet you.

If we're going to decry the nastiness of the DE squabbles, we shouldn't call each other names for something that amounts to aesthetic preference.

 

[PowerGod]

thanks to this thread I found out that my old loved distribution "Mandrake/Mandriva" is still alive !! Even if as a fork called Mageia...

That was really a great linux-noob distro !! And the first one that was almost totally able to substitute Windows by default without too much fiddlings... Mandriva 2007 came by default with KDE+Compiz, so awesomeness ready without configuration.
(It was also one of the first with auto-mount of CDs and USB devices... the greatness at the time !!)

I never used Unity, but I don't like very much how both KDE and Gnome are became recently... at least there are still ways to personalize them

 

[Grench]

Unity tried to shield me from everything that an OS is supposed to do and saddled it with a bunch of frilly junk I found to simply be in the way of actually using the hardware.

 

[second exodous]

Unity tried to shield me from everything that an OS is supposed to do and saddled it with a bunch of frilly junk I found to simply be in the way of actually using the hardware.

I just open a terminal, unity doesn't prevent you from doing that.

 

[levi]

Ubuntu Just Works (TM)

Funny, I forget what actually stopped me using Ubuntu at home (7.03 I think it was) but it was something that was unstable, possibly network manager. At work I stopped using it on 64-bit machines because its policy for multiarch libs made life harder for me than just having a /lib64 folder.

Xandros would be my first linux (previous to that I spent a little time in the openBSD installer, but never got it installed anywhere) but I only booted that a few times before splatting it with Ubuntu, back in the gnome 2 days. Then I jumped ship to Debian 6 (squeeze), and then when I needed to do a sysuprade, instead I backed up my home folder and installed Arch on it, for its rolling releases. I don't play many games but I bought a few of the early humble bundles, and never had a problem running any of those games (other than them being too slow on this old hardware). Mednafen handles almost all of my emulation needs too.

 

[Willhelm]

*lol*

so gnome 3 would be an improvement over unity

 

[Inimuk]

I never got the logic of distro hopping just because you don't like a DE. It can be changed with a couple lines in Terminal, no?

 

[canseco]

It's easier if you use a GUI package manager, like Pamac, Synaptic, etc.

Installing plasma-meta was enough to install an entire new DE alongside the default one.

But every distro has some unique features or optimizations towards some work or hobby, like Recalbox for emulators, KXStudio for musicians or KDE Neon for a good out of the box experience with that DE.

 

[veloknight]

I never got the logic of distro hopping just because you don't like a DE. It can be changed with a couple lines in Terminal, no?

Sometimes, but it really depends on distro. I've noticed that when installing through package managers (either terminal or gui), sometimes themes and default settings can get messed up. Ubuntu and Gnome-Shell do not play nice with each other, for example.

Chakra Linux was interesting - when I tried it, they were a KDE-only distro that was very aggressive about putting GTK-based stuff in a special repository that then gets segregated from the rest of any given installation. It was an interesting way to try a pure-distro experience.

 

[second exodous]

Funny, I forget what actually stopped me using Ubuntu at home (7.03 I think it was) but it was something that was unstable, possibly network manager. At work I stopped using it on 64-bit machines because its policy for multiarch libs made life harder for me than just having a /lib64 folder.

Xandros would be my first linux (previous to that I spent a little time in the openBSD installer, but never got it installed anywhere) but I only booted that a few times before splatting it with Ubuntu, back in the gnome 2 days. Then I jumped ship to Debian 6 (squeeze), and then when I needed to do a sysuprade, instead I backed up my home folder and installed Arch on it, for its rolling releases. I don't play many games but I bought a few of the early humble bundles, and never had a problem running any of those games (other than them being too slow on this old hardware). Mednafen handles almost all of my emulation needs too.

I really don't think any Linux has just 'worked' for me other than Gentoo, built from stage 1. Then again no OS has just 'worked' for me, OSX or Windows. If you had to say no effort on my part, just click next until it is installed, I think Ubuntu is probably the best bet. The problem with OSX and Windows is it seems there are a lot of hoops to jump thought to get it installed with keys and such. I tried to re-install Windows 10 for a friend and couldn't do it, It doesn't have a partitioner and it can't install from a blank SSD, WTF?!? Ubuntu has the larger user base out of all the Linux distros and Canonical works hard at taking feedback and getting their OS to 'just work', or at least the closest there is to it.

Getting back on topic, I don't remember why they developed Unity, I just remember Gnome at the time was a mess, much more so than when KDE wipes the slate clean and starts over. Maybe that is why they made Unity, personally I think they should have just forked Gnome like Linux Mint did with Cinnamon. Unity gets a bad rap, I hated it when it first came out but I'm using it right now and I can't find anything wrong with it. Well, besides the color, I don't know why they like orange and brown so much.