<story><title>Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdsgl</author><text>I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>max-m</author><text>When Ubuntu first switched to Unity I hated it.
But over time it got better and I got used to its concepts and I&amp;#x27;m daily driving it to this day.
Now I even fear the day Compiz and therefore Unity stop working - it has become my DE of choice.
I love its space efficiency: the global menu bar and the local window menus (I have it configured to show the window menu when I hover the title bar) and the &amp;quot;task bar&amp;quot; on the left: I use my displays in landscape mode, so width is abundant but height is at a premium.
The grid layout shortcuts just work, something that Gnome 3 couldn&amp;#x27;t really do when I last tried it a couple of years ago.
I don&amp;#x27;t often use the HUD to activate menu entries, but it can be very nice for programs like GIMP when you remember the name of an entry but can&amp;#x27;t find it in all those submenus.
I wish Canonical would still maintain it, over the years it seems to have regressed a bit. Nowadays some (I think mostly SDL2) applications tend to slow down the whole UI and window transitions &amp;quot;take forever&amp;quot;. But apart from that it has served me well. So thank you and everyone who was involved with Unity!</text></comment>
<story><title>Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdsgl</author><text>I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>esoterae</author><text>Well, if nothing else hopefully someone else notices this witness statement exposing the above-linked revisionist history for what it is--a fabrication.&lt;p&gt;On the topic of Unity:  I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2..  I don&amp;#x27;t have much anything constructive to say about it.  I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked..  it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2.  It wasn&amp;#x27;t too long after that I landed on xfce.  I still wonder what gnome2 could&amp;#x27;ve been.&lt;p&gt;All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise&amp;#x2F;lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config.  I still feel as though we were sold out.  I don&amp;#x27;t think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover.  It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.</text></comment>