Unite Shell: Making GNOME Shell More Like Ubuntu's Unity

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unite Shell: Making GNOME Shell More Like Ubuntu's Unity

If you are/were a fan of Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment, Unite-Shell is one of the most promising efforts to date for making the current GNOME 3 stack more like Unity...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Unite-Shell

[ElectricPrism]

Just spent an hour debugging a Gnome Shell a client is having. Turns out to be a problem with the Volume Mixer extension that freezes up the shell resulting in 100k lines of errors per day due to Gnome 3.30 f_____g up extensions.

GTK4 is coming and changing in a way that breaks Plotinus HUD menu without exposing API elements necessary for it to continue to exist.

The Apple Walled Garden attitude is really concerning when plugins are told "nope, you don't have the right to exist", and devs are willing to break backwards compatibility destroying a user's workflow because it doesn't align with their "more perfect vision".

It's obnoxious that extensions are necessary to fix Gnome, and after a few years of using it exclusively, after nautilus takes 60 seconds to start and lots of quirks I am finally configuring a fallback option made of out Openbox, Polybar, Panther Launcher, dmenu, rofi and other modules.

I think we have made a big mistake in Linux creating Umbrellas and gardens where apps are either KDE or Gnome. I am beginning to think severable components working together to be a desktop is the only way to protect a workflow from outside reinventing the rat wheel.

It's obnoxious that Global Menu is implemented in KDE and then removed only to be re-implemented again. I understand that GTK needs to grow, but from the attitudes common among developers including narcicism, perfectionism and idealism -- practicality, and a product that benefits users is literally blown out into space.

Drunk on their success and in awe at their amazing creation that people love they fail to understand what made it good and destroy the reasons why people love it.

I just wish Gnome could ramp up for Gnome 4.0 instead of ruining Gnome 3.x. It took many years between 3.0 and 3.x to make Gnome stop being a steaming pile of shit and function properly, and I expect the GTK 4.0 ramp up will cause a lot of problems.

Gnome Devs are literally rethinking lettering users use their own Themes other than Adwaita, and thinking of drastically changing the extension engine in a way that offers no alternatives to necessary extensions like Dash to Dock, Top Icon (System Tray), Volume Mixer, etc...

I don't want to be the sky is falling guy, but there are a lot of concerning developments happening right now that stem from a bad attitude, and a blind passion to pursue a defective vision of perfection.

[ElectricPrism]

Just spent an hour debugging a Gnome Shell a client is having. Turns out to be a problem with the Volume Mixer extension that freezes up the shell resulting in 100k lines of errors per day due to Gnome 3.30 f_____g up extensions.

GTK4 is coming and changing in a way that breaks Plotinus HUD menu without exposing API elements necessary for it to continue to exist.

The Apple Walled Garden attitude is really concerning when plugins are told "nope, you don't have the right to exist", and devs are willing to break backwards compatibility destroying a user's workflow because it doesn't align with their "more perfect vision".

It's obnoxious that extensions are necessary to fix Gnome, and after a few years of using it exclusively, after nautilus takes 60 seconds to start and lots of quirks I am finally configuring a fallback option made of out Openbox, Polybar, Panther Launcher, dmenu, rofi and other modules.

I think we have made a big mistake in Linux creating Umbrellas and gardens where apps are either KDE or Gnome. I am beginning to think severable components working together to be a desktop is the only way to protect a workflow from outside reinventing the rat wheel.

It's obnoxious that Global Menu is implemented in KDE and then removed only to be re-implemented again. I understand that GTK needs to grow, but from the attitudes common among developers including narcicism, perfectionism and idealism -- practicality, and a product that benefits users is literally blown out into space.

Drunk on their success and in awe at their amazing creation that people love they fail to understand what made it good and destroy the reasons why people love it.

I just wish Gnome could ramp up for Gnome 4.0 instead of ruining Gnome 3.x. It took many years between 3.0 and 3.x to make Gnome stop being a steaming pile of shit and function properly, and I expect the GTK 4.0 ramp up will cause a lot of problems.

Gnome Devs are literally rethinking lettering users use their own Themes other than Adwaita, and thinking of drastically changing the extension engine in a way that offers no alternatives to necessary extensions like Dash to Dock, Top Icon (System Tray), Volume Mixer, etc...

I don't want to be the sky is falling guy, but there are a lot of concerning developments happening right now that stem from a bad attitude, and a blind passion to pursue a defective vision of perfection.

[DanglingPointer]

Yeah Unity in 16.04 for me is the standard.

Basically since 16.04 is supported via LTS, you can use Unity in 18.04 and it is supported for as long as 16.04 is supported!

[mike456]

Gnome on Ubuntu with Unite extension is even better than Unity was.

[vegabook]

The only thing I miss about Unity is the menus in the title bar. It saves some vertical space which is often useful when coding on smaller notebook, especially 16x9.

[jo-erlend]

I much prefer Unity over Gnome Shell, but that's not about appearance. I love how Gnome Shell looks. It's the lack of features that bothers me, or to put it differently; it's the superior features that makes Unity my favorite shell over any other, on any OS. A great many of them look nice, but just isn't as efficient and comfortable.

[varikonniemi]

The functionality seems to be there but the visuals of the launcher are sub-par. Looks like unity 2d fallback in that regard. But i have no doubt this can be fixed in an upcoming version, the default 18.04 launcher already has the code.

[Etherman]

Wow! This is exactly what we need. Another DE!

(BTW i'm a gnome-flashback user)

[L_A_G]

I'm one of the people who weren't particularly impressed with the transition to Gnome so I'm probably one of the people who this is for and will probably try it out once I get home.

If there's one thing where I think Gnome really falls behind Unity, it's in virtual desktop implementation but I doubt this will do anything to remedy that. Then again it may just be me being fond of how MacOS used to implement it, which in turn was a copy of a third party application that I used before Apple implemented "Spaces" in 10.5, seeing how Unity's implementation was almost identical.