Are Unity and Cinnamon good for Linux?

**philinux** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by whatthefunk

Are these the major innovations that you guys are raving about? Are a keyboard shortcut list and a recently used applications/documents view major OS breakthroughs?

It's not an OS it's a Desktop Environment. And usability/configurability is getting much better and will further improve before 12.04 is released.

And I wasn't raving just presenting the latest info.

**whatthefunk** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by philinux

It's not an OS it's a Desktop Environment. And usability/configurability is getting much better and will further improve before 12.04 is released.

And I wasn't raving just presenting the latest info.

Yes, you are right...it is a DE not an OS. My bad!

But, I honestly dont see the innovation that people keep talking about. Most things Unity does other DEs have been doing for years. My old XP install had a recently used documents menu...and this is a new thing to Unity? I just dont get it. The "innovations" in Unity to me are regressions...less customization, more annoyance. This is why I dislike it so much. Unity is like discovering your belly button again and again and again.....

**philinux** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by whatthefunk

Yes, you are right...it is a DE not an OS. My bad!

But, I honestly dont see the innovation that people keep talking about. Most things Unity does other DEs have been doing for years. My old XP install had a recently used documents menu...and this is a new thing to Unity? I just dont get it. The "innovations" in Unity to me are regressions...less customization, more annoyance. This is why I dislike it so much. Unity is like discovering your belly button again and again and again.....

I know you dont like it but now it's got multi monitor support and is much more easily customized it is moving in the right direction.

Also compiz ccsm is likely to be dropped so the myunity app is probably going to be the cuustomizer to use. Lets see what happens with that one.

**whatthefunk** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by philinux

I know you dont like it but now it's got multi monitor support and is much more easily customized it is moving in the right direction.

Also compiz ccsm is likely to be dropped so the myunity app is probably going to be the cuustomizer to use. Lets see what happens with that one.

It is getting better, Ill admit that, but multi monitor support is yesterdays news. Customization has been an option for years. How is this an advance? I guess you could make an argument that Unity is catching up to other DEs, but I woulsnt call this the innovation that others are calling it.

**philinux** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by whatthefunk

It is getting better, Ill admit that, but multi monitor support is yesterdays news. Customization has been an option for years. How is this an advance? I guess you could make an argument that Unity is catching up to other DEs, but I wouldn't call this the innovation that others are calling it.

My guess is that the devs reckon that the unity lenses are the major advance. I'm one who disliked unity and used the classic desktop. But now I'm using unity all the time. Testing on 12.04 is showing up the diff between 11.10.

**whatthefunk** · February 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by philinux

My guess is that the devs reckon that the unity lenses are the major advance. I'm one who disliked unity and used the classic desktop. But now I'm using unity all the time. Testing on 12.04 is showing up the diff between 11.10.

I am looking forward to the 12.04 release just to try out the new improvements. I doubt they will be able to counter the awesomeness emitted from my Kubuntu install though

**lykwydchykyn** · February 6th, 2012

Originally Posted by Simian Man

Not really. KDE4 was an evolution, not a revolution. It refined the concepts that were part of the project from the very beginning. People didn't like it until around 4.2 not because it was too different, but just because it was buggy as hell. Now that the rewrite has matured, there is hardly anybody who prefers KDE3 because KDE4 does all of the same things only better.

It's a totally different situation to what's happened in Gnome Land.

That may be how you remember it, but I can remember a time not so long ago where the blogosphere and rabid commenters of the world turned Aaron Seigo into the poster child for "developers don't care and don't listen to what users want". Probably started around the time when they took away desktop icons (before letting folder views be full screen).