A love story coming to an end
It’s very sad to say this, since I’ve been an Ubuntu user and supporter for five years, but the truth is that in recent times Ubuntu has gotten worse with each design iteration.
Ubuntu’s new interface, so-called Unity, has been surrounded by controversy from the very beginning. With a brand new interface being developed for GNOME —the desktop environment upon which is built Ubuntu—, the Ubuntu team decided to use a custom interface —the aforementioned Unity— rather than sticking with GNOME’s new one. At that moment I personally wasn’t sure that was going to be a wise move. However, a few months later GNOME still looked a bit messy, unpolished and not particularly beautiful, whereas Unity offered a simpler, more streamlined and refined interface. So it didn’t seem such a bad decision after all.
But then the Ubuntu team started messing around with their initial design. They not only added a number of supposed improvements that were actually to the detriment of the user experience in my opinion —such as a global menu that remains hidden until you hover the mouse over the top of the screen—, but also moved Unity towards a more futuristic and allegedly impressive look, turning a reasonably sober desktop into some sort of videogame. Ubuntu’s most confusing and ridiculously cluttered interface ever had landed. Meanwhile, GNOME’s new interface showed an incredible amount of progress since its initial state and got much, much better. Nowadays it sports a clean and beautiful interface that is a wonder to use and makes managing windows and workspaces a real pleasure.
So I don’t know if I’ll stick with Ubuntu and just install GNOME Shell to replace Unity or —more probably— move to another distribution that ships with GNOME Shell by default, like Fedora, for which I’ve developed a certain sympathy lately. What I do know is that I won’t be using Unity after my next clean installation of a Linux distribution.
I hope you prove me wrong with your next iteration, Ubuntu. Because if not, I’ll probably end up saying that it was nice while it lasted.
