A couple of days ago, I decided that Ubuntu Unity is not for me. I upgraded my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS just after the later’s official release. The hopes are high during the upgrade process until I finally got it operating on my laptop.
Despite using live versions of Ubuntu with Unity in several occassions, I did not really used it for much longer than a couple of hours. I was so used with the Gnome desktop of the old Ubuntu that with Unity provided my some unhappy moments on how to use the desktop. It was the same experience when moving from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 or MS Office 2010. The only difference was that, for the MS Office, there is truly nothing a user could do as it is part of the work place computer software package. There are actually no choices, the user (employee) needs to learn it or else.
With Unity, it is totally different, users have the choice.
Learning unity has been painful. Moreso, there are some functionalities that has been dropped in Ubuntu 12.04. A good example is Synaptic Package Manager. If you want it, install it using the command line.
After more than a month of keening, I finally decided to drop Unity for Cinnamon. My choice, Linux Mint 13, which is considered as the best desktop operating system providing a near ‘MS Windows’ type of experience and a fork of Ubuntu. I don’t really mind that though. I have been using Linux since the first release of Fedora (my first linux box).
While searching the net today, I came acros this article. It actually describe the same feeling that I have with Unity.
Like the other Linux distros, Ubuntu should have provided a choice of desktop for users, Gnome or Unity. And let the users decide which one is more appropriate for them. What ever the future of Unity will be remains to be seen.