Now that the Unity hate has cooled down, how do you feel about the WM?

[Copper Bezel]

Not that it matters, but with a hidden panel with the menu applet on and cramped or removed decs, you could remove one more line. It wouldn't be very useful for most users, so I don't think it's about wasting space, exactly, but you could technically use slightly less.

Unity is about as cramped - erm, space thrifty - as I would want a WM to be, personally. = )

[rai4shu2]

It's nice that the flame wars have died down, but that just demands that we look at the real problem here:

What drives the design?

With Gnome Shell, I feel like the design was driven by a need to eliminate distractions. Unfortunately, I don't really believe this need exists outside the mind of Gnome developers, and thus the resistance to Gnome Shell in the community.

With Unity, I think the design was driven by a desire to emulate the touch-style paradigm of application-centric thinking. I don't think touch input devices have proven themselves, outside of their convenience in extremely mobile devices. For the desktop, it really doesn't make any sense to use this design until we perfect an input technology like eye-tracking.

[Copper Bezel]

It's not that simple for either of them, though. I don't think there's a unified, single goal for either project, and I don't actually think there should be. I mean, dogged pursuit of any one absolute rule that's somehow supposed to apply in all cases would probably lead to a lot of oversights. And a Linux desktop just doesn't have the freedom to maneuver that Windows or Mac does; there's not enough of a top-down structure in the design process to have that kind of unified vision, and Gnome or Ubuntu can't force app developers to follow their standards, either.

Shell and Unity are both window managers made by a committee of people saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?"

I think that you're right that Shell seems designed around visual simplicity - I mean, that's at least one of the major goals they're keeping in mind. I don't see a touch paradigm in Unity, though. The launcher and dash have large buttons for sloppy clicking, and the keyboard is more emphasized as a way of getting around and doing things than in just about any desktop that isn't Ratpoison, so those are generalizations we could make about the interaction mode. Obviously, Unity also emphasizes searching whenever possible, too. With the searchiness, large buttons, and keyboard focus, it's sort of like Chrome's UI concept, but without the simplicity (without meaning either of those generalizations as an evaluative comment.)

[VooDooSyxx]

I for one, am loving Unity. I've used xmonad the past 2+ years and what sold me on Unity is the keyboard navigation. It really is excellent. The dash and HUD are pretty sweet as well. I see the dash and HUD as basically a super-powered dmenu, which works out great for me since I said goodbye to those stupid application menus a long time ago.

More than the Unity hate, what I don't really get is the keyboard hate. I see a lot of comments here and on other sites with things like "(insert function here) is now 4 mouse clicks away instead of 2. This is unacceptable!" I just want to scream into my monitor USE THE KEYBOARD. There are two interfaces. One has 100+ buttons and the other has generally 3. It's pretty obvious which is the more powerful interface.

[sfyoung]

Thanks. sudo apt-get install gnome-panel did the trick.

[monkeybrain2012]

I like it, just wish that it is less buggy. There are a whole bunch of things broken in 12.04 and many are fixed in 12.10, I am waiting for an update.Instead of adding more stuffs and keep changing it IMO they should spend the time to make it solid and bug free.

[MisterGaribaldi]

@OP: Oh, I don't think anything has really cooled down regarding Unity. No, I don't think it's cooled down at all.

In the course of the next several months to a year, when I'm finally in a position to do so, I will going to a System76 laptop, and probably one of the first things I will do is put KDE on it so as to completely avoid anything having to do with Gnome and Unity.

[addegsson]

Unity is my favourite DE.

[Sableyes]

I dont think the Unity hate has gone away either. Its just more accepted and less people yell about it now. But its still hated ^^

As for me, always have thought it was the bees knees Love it!

[LillyDragon]

@OP: Oh, I don't think anything has really cooled down regarding Unity. No, I don't think it's cooled down at all.

In the course of the next several months to a year, when I'm finally in a position to do so, I will going to a System76 laptop, and probably one of the first things I will do is put KDE on it so as to completely avoid anything having to do with Gnome and Unity.

I'm sure there's still a vocal minority, from the looks of it. =P Unity is far from a traditional desktop environment, so the split in the userbase was bound to happen, IMO. Stats for KDE and XFCE usage went up drastically with Unity's introduction, so it's safe to say we're apart of that statistic. XD That's the great thing about Linux, having choices, so that's a huge plus for other Window Managers. I think now that everyone's made their choices of which WM to stick with, there isn't as much noise about Unity as there was before.

At this point it only annoys me that I have to install a different Window manager out-of-the-box, instead of just tweaking it to my preferences like with previous Ubuntu releases, so it adds another step to the installation process to me. I'm loving XFCE and can't wait to figure out what's snagging up on MATE (The user-settings-daemon is unresponsive, for whatever reason.) so I could try that out too.