Ubuntu Unity Becoming An Official Flavor With 22.10 Release

[tildearrow]

For all the flak Unity got (and rightly so in the beginning) it was actually pretty okay towards the end. Far more stable and less buggy than Gnome 3 that replaced it, at least for me.

Here it was the opposite... Unity sometimes would do the following at random (even just after installation on a VM):
- crash terribly
- System program problem detected
- Sorry, Ubuntu has experienced an internal error.
- Some icon is missing from the top bar (sometimes it's weather, sometimes calendar, sometimes volume and sometimes the power off button!)

[ehansin]

Aren't there X.org to Wayland comparability layers? The performance would be worse, but still usable for the vast majority of people imo.

I cannot remember how long ago I read this or what they called this, but I thought I remembered some effort to allow full desktops and window managers to run on top of Wayland + XWayland (so in this case, Unity on top of XWayland on top of Wayland.) Was sort of a way to keep some legacy stuff going that isn't going to be ported, but use the more modern "stack" to do so.

[Flaburgan]

Is it still maintained by a 13yo person?

[Takla]

For all the flak Unity got (and rightly so in the beginning) it was actually pretty okay towards the end.

I thought so too, though I was never a regular user but someone who tried it out on occasion. Somehow I always prefer Xfce but of the desktop environments which aimed for touchscreen friendliness and gesture/mouse swipe control Unity was the most coherent and had some nice ideas. I used to use a Nokia N810 with Maemo so I had something to compare it with at the time and Unity was really quite slick. I have recently tried the latest Gnome on Ubuntu Live and it is a lot better than it used to be, but why it took them so long to incorporate the good ideas already widely accepted and in use via Unity escapes me. I will be having another look at Unity. It's a shame that Ubuntu/Canonical gave up on it just as it was getting very nice to use. Did it depend too much on their own upstart init/service manager system? I forget.

[ferry]

As other people have said, Unity was ultimately no worse than the current Gnome desktop. I think the current Ubuntu desktop is one of the ugliest desktops Ubuntu has ever had.

I also regret that Canonical didn't finish Unity 8. This would have become the best and most modern Linux desktop in my opinion, and I've been monitoring the progress closely.

The current problem with Ubuntu is mainly that it is slow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMfqCzbSmQU

It's not just the Snap apps that are slow to launch. My Void Linux with XFCE feels like a McLaren compared to the current Ubuntu in terms of boot times, login, shutdown and UI responsiveness.

It might be helpful for Michael to test which Linux systems boot the fastest again, since he hasn't tested this in a long time, and to compare Ubuntu's boot times with Alpine Linux, Void Linux, MX Linux, and Clear Linux.

If he does the test on an HDD, big revelations will probably happen.

I have Kubuntu which is likely even worse in boot and login times. I resolved that by not rebooting so often.

The firefox snap was indeed terribly slow, fixed that be removing the snap and installing from the ppa.

[CochainComplex]

Is it still maintained by a 13yo person?

A 13 yo genius is still better then a 40 yo idiot - I knew someone who was able to program extremely great stuff in asm with 13. AFAIK now he is Arch maintainer.

[arQon]

For me, the only "real" feature of Unity was that it was the first DE to acknowledge that modern displays are *far* wider than they are tall, and to use the dead space at the side of the screen for large, easily distinct icons etc rather than wasting valuable vertical space on them instead.

I never adopted Unity though, because it also introduced the incredibly annoying and stupid anti-feature of changing icon behavior if you already had an instance of that program running, and hiding those "extra" instance, which made it unusable for terminals. But I stole the layout, and still have my own panels configured that way to this day.

[Etherman]

Heh, I feel that. I have a old backup laptop and boy do new distros feel sluggish in it. Is the same thing on Windows.

Yes. I tried Fedora on a laptop with spinning drive and 16GB ram and the boot time literally made it unusable. Manjaro works fine on it

[uid313]

If Unity doesn't run natively on Wayland then that's a huge problem indeed imho.

It doesn't. Unity is based upon Compiz which is tied to X.Org Server.

[PackRat]

Wow! it looks so much better than gnome. I am going to install it so I can stare at that slick desktop for ten minutes while I wait for my snaps to load.