Unity – I hope it’ll be forked.

Just recently Mark Shuttlewort announced the death of Unity coming with Ubuntu 18.04.

Me myself – I don’t like the idea at all. I am one of the few people who love working with Unity or on Unity. I love it since it was shipped with Ubuntu 12.04. For me it was just the time when windows has bored me to death. So Ubuntu with Unity was just the right train for me to jump on.

I took me just very few days to realize that my workflow on Unity was just way more efficient than on windows. The best example is the app bar. It’s on the side. Instead of going down to the bottom of my screen, I just have to go down half of the screen.

The same is for browsing websites. Even we are living in a responsive design world and you can make site looking just perfect from a 52″ display to a 320px wide cell phone, the content a page flows vertically. In 99% of all cases I really appreciate having those extra 150px of content I am interested in. Sure – one can setup to have this bar hidden automatically, but bringing it back requires you to go down all that way with your mouse and sometimes it just looked to me like it’s a big glitch instead of a feature.

Having the titlebar and menu and the clock and date running in one single bar at the top is just perfect. It gave me some more pixel of content I want to see instead of some static unnecessary stuff like the menu.

For sure I was playing around with GNOME Shell a couple of times, but the fact that I could not drag and drop or snap a window from full screen mode to somewhere else without looking at where I have had my mouse cursor, has killed my personal GNOME experience.

Sadly this is what I am concerned about most. I got so used to it, that I literally do not look at the bar when I want to drag a full screen window somewhere else. My hand just goes up, clicks and drags it.

I figure that GNOME did not change it yet. There is still a title (menu) bar and the clock. When I want to drag a window, I have to get it at the title bar and the title bar is below the clock.

Reading that folks at GNOME are working on this exact behavior makes me just a little comfortable. Unity has made so many things for me convenient and I got so much used to it that I just fear the switch to 18.04.

The fact that I hit the super key and start typing for something I am looking for, either an app or a document or a video, without the need to look at it. Hit the key, type what you need and while you look at the screen the results are there. And the results are good.

Just hitting the super key to be able to search for a document I was working on recently, removes the need to find that Nautilus Icon so that you can search there for the document you wanted to edit.

Switching the whole thing over to GNOME would require one to install addons. I’m not a fan of installing addons when things are possible natively too. I rather tend to have the native solution when ever possible.

Unity has so much potential and Canonical has fixed alot with Unity 7 and I would really love to see Unity 8 happening with Ubuntu 18. But this bubble is bursted. Sadly.

I really hope that Unity will be forked and people continue the great effort Canonical has put into it.

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