Why people don't like Unity and Ubuntu?

[Aleks]

Actually, it is

[Aleks]

You implied you don't like Arch because you find it difficult. Likewise, many people don't like Unity or Ubuntu for their own reasons. The title of your topic asks for those reasons, and people are telling you the reasons.

No, I did not imply that I don't like Arch, I said if it's good for you, then OK. I don't know how difficult it is, actually I'd like to try it with dwm to see how would that go. Although, not much time lately.

[emarsk]

Nice flame fest. Let's join!

At the time I tried Ubuntu, what I didn't like was having every 6 months new broken "features" to fix. Maybe it's better now, I don't know, but honestly I don't care, because there are distros that I like more.
Also, this bug has been quite a show stopper for me: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... +bug/84900
The Amazon privacy issue has been a really bad move, it doesn't matter much if it's "fixed" now: once you betray the trust, it's difficult to get back.
Another thing I don't like is the attitude of building their own things like they are a separate community from the rest (Mir, Unity, bzr, the whole relationship with Debian). It's more like a "bad vibe" than a practical matter, but still…
So I went back to Debian and stayed there until the systemd debate. Now I'm on Funtoo (Gentoo).

I tried Unity in its infancy, but since I like to have a "focus follow mouse" policy, the menu separated from its window was a no-no.

For the record, my (non-)desktop of choice is Openbox + Tint2 (for the tray icons), no panel menu, no desktop icons. I configured it so that I interact pretty much exclusively by the keyboard: my windows are usually full screen, one or two per desktop, I have keybindings for launching my most used application, and for the rest I use the terminal or Rofi (it's like a pimped up dmenu).

Yes, I'm on the minimalist "hardcore linux till death" side , but you asked for opinions and here is mine.

[Ghaydn]

Long ago, in 2008, I've installed Ubuntu with Gnome (yet v2 then) first time and loved it. KDE was brilliant too because of it's fully-featured apps, but it worked too slowly on my old Pentium IV so I couldn't use it. Couple months later I found that Gnome's panels are fully configurable; also I found applets and screenlets that make desktop look very very fine.
In 2010 Gnome changed for a while. It got more ascetic and unuseful. Some changes were too strange for me. For example, in U 10.04 Pidgin was changed to Telepathy. I did't like Pidgin anyway but Telepathy was the same but cropped. Or Rhythmbox (and Transmission): left-click on tray icon worked as show/hide app window; since 10.04 it just showed app menu. Even now I can't understand WHY they did so. And they moved window buttons to the left - this is the second thing I cannot understand WHY.
But for some time I was still using Ubuntu-gnome. Until I got a laptop. The first day I've installed Ubuntu Studio on it. Since then XFCE was my favourite DE. It was light and configurable. It had panels and applets. So I've been used it for long time.
Now times have changed. XFCE don't look good enough on high-dpi screen. It's not compatible with touchscreen.
I've tried to use Unity several times. Last time was 2-3 days ago. I thought - it would work fine with touchscreen. But it work terrible. Gestures okay, maybe. But Main Menu in that I have to type anything - it kills the whole idea of touch control. How do I type if I don't have a keyboard? Okay, I have it, but why do I need to move my hand to the screen and back if I can simply press Win key? Android and iPhone menus are optimised for touchscreens; Unity menu is radically NOT. Cannonical has crossed a cat and dog in this case. Also in Unity I can't create my own panels and lots of launchers on them. And I can't configure anything in there.
After that I tried Cinnamon. It's pretty good but, again, not configurable. For example, I couldn't make it's interface a little larger for use with hi-dpi screen. So now I'm exploring KDE. On this computer it work fast enouth to not produce xruns so let it be. At least I can make make scrollbars larger on it.

[CrocoDuck]

Hi there, here my points on why I don't like Unity and Ubuntu anymore.

I have used Ubuntu from 2009 to 2012/2013 sort of thing (I am not very good at recalling dates). When Unity came on I disliked very strongly and I kept using Ubuntu with Gnome 3 for a while. My choice has been ArchBang Linux for the past 2/3 years: Openbox + tint2 + wbar + conky. Super Sexy. Now, I purchased a new machine. I got it with 8 Gb of ram and 250 SSD and Ubuntu 15.04 since I am in the middle of my dissertation and I have not time to install a pure Arch, which will be my goal soon, and I need Linux to support my workflow. Then, it has been the first time I put my hands on Ubuntu and Unity after a while. My impressions:

Unity:
[*] It is slow, buggy, bloated and clumsy. Seriously, it cannot animate smoothly the switching of desktops or the scrolling of a pdf in evince. Especially the last thing is extremely annoying, because it lags so much while scrolling and it is almost impossible to get where you want in the text. I had to resort to open the pdf's in chromium. And by the way, Firefox with the Ubuntu integration stuff is just plain and simple horrible: it cannot render pages properly, text lines are all rendered on the top of each other. This is unexcused for a distro that: a) should work nice out of the box, b) Is running on that hardware. My compaq Presario CQ61 was able to run Gnome 3 (the very first released version) nice and smoothly and before of that Gnome 2 with all the compiz stuff you can imagine. Inexcusable.
[*] The Mac thing of putting the program menu in the top bar. This is personal taste. I work often with multiple windows open and I hate to have to put a window under focus to operate its controls first. It is a further step that slows down workflow considerably, although it may seems not.
[*] The look. Still personal taste. I don't like the proportions of the bars.
[*] Configurability. Not as deep as I would like it to be, but I can get over it if I like the look and feel (like I do with Gnome 3).

Ubuntu:
[*] Ubuntu software center. It is slow (talking about browsing), messy and buggy. While installing the Matlab compatibility package it was unable to open a shell for the configuration manager of the program. As such, it went in an infinite loop into which apt needed my input, but no means where provided for that. I had to manually kill aptd and fix the package manager soon later. Not a huge problem but killing aptd can be very harmful and break the package managing. Really, that would be a nightmare for a beginner. I was about to purge software center but it wants to purge the unity desktop meta package as well, meaning that I cannot have updates if they are associated with it. This kinda sucks, it feels like they want to force you into use that tool. No way, I am using apt right from the terminal.
[*] Over-configured, loosely optimized. Not bad for beginners (I still recommend Ubuntu to beginners) but not so good for intermediate/advanced user that want a personal system. It is a compromise and I am fine with that. I don't like this when it comes to official derivatives, like Ubuntu Studio. It is only half ready to use. They packed it with programs and the lowlatency kernel to try to make it out of the box. Ok cool, but what about all the other audio configuration you can do to optimize the thing? They aren't there. I am active on Ubuntu Studio forums and I saw recently a very hard vent about it. People are expecting Ubuntu and derivatives to be easy and out of the box, but nowhere it is stated that sometimes it is not like that. Feels like they picked up an ambiguous choice.
[*] Documentation. Last updated 2010. 'Nuff said. The obsolete documentation creates lots of ambiguity for users, see this for example.
[*] Community. I am still part of the Ubuntu Studio community and I am part of this problem. Although there are some cool people, we are on average not very technical competent and we can hardly solve problems and help people in need. This is a collateral of the user friendliness, that formed a "not hardcore" user base. Cool competent people are also not that inclined in assisting novices. It makes sense as a novice is supposed to browse forums and documentation and try to solve his likely very known and common problem using these resources. However, we saw that sometimes documentation is outdated and also most of the forums posts are, which isn't very optimal. It is not like with Arch that, having an amazing documentation, pro user are right when blaming newbies of laziness...

So, don't get me wrong. I don't hate Ubuntu and Unity or the community, to which I am still happy to be a part although I contribute very little. They have a place in the universe. However, I feel like there are inexcusable things. Like, a pen drive with Antergos (Gnome 3) runs smoothly and nicely with all the eye candies while Unity is laggy. That means something. For all the rest, they are just points of view, not things that are right or wrong about it. I understand that by proper configuration you can make Ubuntu + Unity good for you. Anyway, I rather go with Arch and make it as I want it from the ground base up instead to strip a huge thing, which is harder, especially when you need to do it with apt, that doesn't make easy as pacman to remove packages with all their conf files and dependencies not shared by other packages. You will left some grim behind. The only apt based distro I like now is Debian, to be honest, cause you can make it from the ground up if needed.

About DE's, openbox is hardly beaten in terms of configurability (and overall ease of). Anyway, it is 2015 and I would like to have something that doesn't look like a ghost from the 90's (although I still like the feel). I will give to Gnome 3 another go. I will also try Pantheon and Enlightenment and see how it goes...

EDIT: chosen a bad documentation example...

[MattKingUSA]

Ubuntu is a great distro and unity is pretty awesome and unique. I used it for a good 2 years after Mandriva 2010.2 was released. But in 2013 I started using KDE on ubuntu. And then went to Mageia in 2014. But my wife still uses Ubuntu with KDE. And I also have Rasbian with KDE. I think KDE is just awesomeness. However, I use some other dm not sure if it's mate or not but it's got the use as hotspot option built into the wireless manager so I use that to provide wifi in our house. However, I did see a really cool theme for iceWM that was released in 2014 http://box-look.org/content/show.php/Ni ... ent=164750 It looks just like kde. So that's kind of sweet. I may use that on rasbian. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I didn't find any unity themes for icewm.

[MGdesigner]

I prefer Mate(or Gnome2)+Compiz.

The most important for me is Mate can extend a window to fit more than 1 vritual screens. It's very useful for mixing when you have 20~70 tracks .

[Aleks]

I've been reading all of your reasons and arguments, and, save for the personal preference, I really don't know what the hell are you guys talking about when you speak about heavy on resources, being bloated and what not. While I admit, xfce is of course a lot lighter DE, when configured right, at least in my experience, unity is lot better than gnome 3. I tried Debian and got back to Ubuntu for that reason. And that was on my old PC. On my slightly newer laptop, which is not that special either, it's smooth as possible and I'm quite enjoying it.

[CrocoDuck]

...when configured right, at least in my experience, unity is lot better than gnome 3...

For some reason it always been the opposite in my experience, regardless the hardware I tried running it on, regular install or live image. We should probably remember that personal experience is not evidence after all. Maybe we should try some kind of more quantitative benchmark... not sure it matters so much though.

I am trying to configure my Ubuntu 15.04 + Unity to be responsive because the lags annoy me too much. All the tweaks I did were like OS centric (swappinnes, mount parameters etc). Do you have some tips to make Unity more responsive? I will have to work with it a while and, although it is not so bad, it is really not running well and smooth. I don't know the reason, but gnome 3 running on Antergos from a pen drive is far more responsive... Maybe because Arch? Maybe because pen drive? No sure: my system settings should not yield to noticeable differences...

Maybe you will ask: why you don't install Gnome3... I don't like to have more than one DE... I want the less amount of dependencies possible... cause I am kinda compulsive...

EDIT: Sorry, wrong quote.

[Aleks]

I am trying to configure my Ubuntu 15.04 + Unity to be responsive because the lags annoy me too much. All the tweaks I did were like OS centric (swappinnes, mount parameters etc). Do you have some tips to make Unity more responsive? I will have to work with it a while and, although it is not so bad, it is really not running well and smooth. I don't know the reason, but gnome 3 running on Antergos from a pen drive is far more responsive... Maybe because Arch? Maybe because pen drive? No sure: my system settings should not yield to noticeable differences...
.

Oh, I don't do much, I just follow these instructions: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/system_configuration

Then I do basic disabling of those "privacy stuff" things in the System Settings. I also install the low latency kernel. For some reason it works best for me, in a crucial way. Then I install KXStudio repos and build my system (meaning, set of apps that I work with) to my preference from there.

I had 15.04 on my desktop, and while it was OK, I have to say it was buggy. I guess there is a truth in that that you should stick to the LTS releases if you need it for more serious work.

But, I have to say one more thing. Basically I am a guitarist, and I don't do many many multiple tracks, synths, effects etc. But as a guitarist, I have to say that my experience in regard of lags is great. To my ear, that's real time I'm hearing, and great sound/noice ratio.

[khz]

Ubuntu is great for some people! Unity - i have never try.
I use gentoo (example http://gentoostudio.org/) with LXDE and 2 monitors. But i am a minimalist (GUI), 100% 4 audio!

[CrocoDuck]

Oh, I don't do much, I just follow these instructions: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/system_configuration

Oh dang, you are another victim of my bad English. I was not meaning audio optimization, I am doing other work on that laptop at moment. I was talking about the responsiveness of Unity itself. Like, the animations are not fluid for some whatever reason, especially when I switch desktops. Since I have to use lots of programs on multiple desktops this annoys me and adds seconds to complete tasks... that become minutes of lost time a day... did I mention I am kinda compulsive ?

I will totally check the privacy thing and the low-latency kernel though, thanks!

Well, when referring to audio workflow I don't think Ubuntu is worst of anything else really. I mean, every distro needs to be configured for that, I had to do it on ArchBang as well... Probably only AVLinux, Audiphile Linux and few others are pro-audio out of the box for real. I only wish there was a banner on the Ubuntu Studio website saying "Guys, it might be that you have to take further optimization for audio to be best here", just to avoid people to approach it as a complete out of the box experience, although it might be like that for most of people given today's hardware. As a note, I will try sooner or later NixOS. I am fascinated by the declarative approach and they got already some cool pro audio stuff ready.

[CrocoDuck]

Ubuntu is great for some people! Unity - i have never try.
I use gentoo (example http://gentoostudio.org/) with LXDE and 2 monitors. But i am a minimalist (GUI), 100% 4 audio!

Wow! I didn't know there were other resources together with Gentoo ProAudioOverlay. Good to know, I will dig into.

[sysrqer]

Gentoo ProAudioOverlay.

That's more or less dead, there is a new initiative to get most of the relevant stuff from there in to the main gentoo portage tree, as well new stuff like kxstudio apps and artyfx etc.

[khz]

Gentoo ProAudioOverlay.

That's more or less dead, there is a new initiative to get most of the relevant stuff from there in to the main gentoo portage tree, as well new stuff like kxstudio apps and artyfx etc.

which new initiative?
Hmm first look i found http://gpo.zugaina.org/Overlays/netcrav ... nd/cadence @Overlay: netcrave
Wow helm was in gentoo overlay \o/
but nothing found about artyfx.
which new initiative?