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I haven't tried Mir yet.

Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application.

The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing.

Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.

For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked better.)

In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore.

I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I do enjoy using it more than almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3 a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity is certainly my favourite.)

Unity was buggy in the beginning, but it has been usable ever since 12.04 LTS. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I use for work and when I'm in OS X, I miss Unity.

The screen is uncluttered, the shortcuts are great, the dashboard is great, the various special effects are finally not nauseating, the only thing bothering me is that I can't move that launcher on the right side, but lack of customization is a problem with Gnome in general.

Mir isn't really rolled out enough to settle the score on that one.

Totally agreed on Unity though - it is a breath of fresh air compared to most alternatives on linux.

Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir.

But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.

It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices

I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? To be honest, I'm kinda tired of hearing this, because it seems to come from people who never really used Unity. I have extensively used KDE (v 2), Gnome (v 2), xfce4, Unity and now i3. I tried Unity simply because I was puzzled by the conflicting arguments. Power users complaining so much, while newbies were raving. I thought I would test drive it for a month just to see, I ended up using it for a year. Unity isn't perfect (no graphic environment is), but it does have its highlights. Most of the essential functions are documented in the cheatsheet that appears when someone keeps the WinKey pressed.

In my opinion, most power users who complain never took the 2 minutes required to understand how that desktop works and presumed that all they had to do was to plug in their mouse and click away. If they'd taken the time, there would be less complaints, since Unity is rather keyboard centric. Newbies on the other hand thought "let's learn Linux", read the manual, and came out ecstatic.

I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about?

Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer?

That seems like a pretty big usability impediment to me. I have a Unity and non-Unity laptop. The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side. It's true that I can search for the things - but that requires me to know the name of the many oddly named Linux apps out there. And yes, I've spent more than minutes, in fact I've spent days using and attempting to customize the thing.

The screen mechanics are ghastly also imho but I could learn them if, like, the GUI let me actually run my installed application.

Sure it works as a kiosk or those who just start a shell and leave. But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.

It's true that I can search for the things

That is the primary method of using it, it's not the alternative.

The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side

For one you don't need to know the name of the program, you just need to know a few keywords about what it does. e.g. type in "brow..." in the dash and see it proposing Firefox and other browsers you may have installed. In case you still have no idea what your program does, nor what its name is, you can still navigate to find your programs the old fashion way, using the dash and filters. I would assume that after using a program once or twice a user can either drag its icon to the side or simply remember its name. And if they do neither of those, the dash keeps a history of most frequently accessed programs. While using Unity I had 3 icons on the launcher and I _never_ even used them, and I run many apps at once.

Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer?

This is the first I've heard of Unity conflicting with a program and that might be a bug in one or the other.

But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.

Since many are pontificating against it, I think people deserve to be exposed to counter arguments. A lot of people have taken upon themselves to decide that Unity is this and that, without even using it properly. They spread fud as truth, instead of disclaiming it as their own opinion. And frankly when you see the arguments, it is obvious that they haven't used the thing for more than a few minutes. It just strikes me as odd that people would keep doing this when there is ample evidence that the GUI is positively received by most people who give it a chance. If you don't believe me, ask System76 or Zareason, after all their business is directly tied to having people satisfied after they buy a linux box.

I view your sentiment as a little shortsighted. On a typical desktop you end up with over a hundred of applications installed and you end up using only 10 apps daily. A typical Windows Start menu gets extremely cluttered and extremely hard to search for the app you want. That's why keyboard-enabled search works much better.

OS X does the same thing. It has a launcher on which you pin the most used apps and for everything else you need to search it with Spotlight, or go to the Applications directory in Finder. I haven't seen many people complain about the usability of OS X in this regard. IMHO, the Start menu is a broken abstraction.

As for the UI and that bullshit on being optimized for tables ... I actually like that Unity is so space efficient. For example, why in the world would I need a window top bar, if the window is maximized? Vertical space on 16:9 screens is precious, Unity optimizes for it and I find that to be awesome ... like, one of the reasons many people like Chrome's UI over Firefox is exactly because of this, yet Unity brings this design decision for all apps.

Yes, almost same opinion. I've got feeling about unity people are really trying to step forward linux desktop UI. Not just copy and paste then edit something.

- remove cascade style start menu. - quick search interface for application, files. - well organized keyboard shortcuts and inline shortcut help - make free vertical space as possible as - it's simple. users only need to understand windows key, left launcher.

Yes, It was buggy and slow at the first time. Maybe Canonical had pushed so much earlier. But it's now working well and really usable.

KDE 4 has all the benefits of Unity as well as the ability to be customized. For users that like a 'start' menu, you can have it, but you're right that keyboard launchers are just better most of the time. KDE has two built-in, and every other DE works with Synapse, which is much faster than Unity for keyboard-based launching.

The UI is optimized for tablets and phones, but not because of space efficiency. In fact, Unity is less space efficient, because it demands that the launcher be so huge (to afford touch-based interaction). In every DE I've ever used, I actually hide the top/bottom panel, but that's not possible in Unity (the top panel affords no customization whatsoever, AFAICT). So, in practice, Unity is consistently less space-efficient with my vertical space than every other DE, in addition to being less customizable.

Just an anecdote of course, but on my not very beefy laptop Unity is the only environment I've tried that runs slower than Windows. Using it it seemed great and I'd like to use it, but unusably slow for me.
> I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about?

Having a single menu for all apps at the top of my 1920x1080 screen was a usability issue to me.

I was on that same wave length for a long time. But I gave it a year then rounded up the usual suspects (xfce, gnome, kde) and was surprised to see how much I missed unity.
Since folks don't seem to know what I was referring to, I wrote up my experiences with Unity. The tl;dr is in the paragraph second to last ('But Why?'), for folks that don't want the nitty-gritty. http://killring.org/2014/02/17/unity-shortcomings/
I rather liked Unity but bug #739184 means I can't use it. Hopefully, someone sorts that out by the LTS 14.04 release.
What's so great about Unity? I think the latest version of Gnome is much better.
For small screens, it preserves a lot of real estate. When most notebooks are limited to 1366x768 screens, it's an excellent choice.
Thanks for providing some insight. I guess that's not a concern for me, since my laptop is 1920x1200.
To emphasize, it preserves a lot of vertical real estate.
Yes, really.
Fair enough, but most people are using Ubuntu on a desktop or laptop with moderately large screen (or is 1366x768 on a laptop considered small?)

Can you actually run Ubuntu on a phone yet?