I’ve been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10’s GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16’s GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.
They’re more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.
They look and work more alike than you’d think.
I find it puzzling. But in a way it makes sense.
The differences between the two environments are small. A click here, a small feature there. But there’s a lot of GNOME in both Unity and GNOME Shell.
I know there have been problems with the GNOME Project and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu has an active design team that wants things to look a certain way, which isn’t necessarily the way that GNOME designers and developers want them to look.
And Ubuntu is a big project with a huge user base, and the Ubuntu/Canonical team wants more control over the desktop they deliver to their users.
I get it. Yet Unity looks more like a tweak on GNOME Shell (or GNOME Shell a tweak on Unity) than you might think.
I guess that means if you hate one of these desktop environments, you’re bound to hate the other, too. I see no way around that.
But if you like Unity, chances are you’ll like GNOME Shell. And vice versa.
I’ll crawl back under my rock now. Readers, go about your business. Nothing to see here.
I like Gnome Shell but I can’t stand Unity. Unity is ugly, sluggish, and less efficient than Gnome Shell.
Unity is way better than Gnome Shell, since at least it offers a launcher and a taskbar directly on the desktop. Gnome Shell is simply unusable, the worst desktop I have ever seen.
I was prepared for Unity to be radically different from GNOME Shell. It’s just not that different, and I really don’t think you can pit one against the other.
In my mind, Canonical is developing Unity so they can have complete control over look and feel and not have to continually submit patches to GNOME that end up getting rejected. Developers were spending time on patches that upstream clearly didn’t want. But Ubuntu wants them, and instead of taking the upstream release and then applying all of their patches and maintaining them separately, they figured, why not just become the upstream for the “shell” portion of the DE, keeping GNOME 3 as the base but doing exactly what they want in the UI?
My early assessment is that GNOME Shell is better in most ways, Unity in some. The question is, who do you think will have the better desktop environment going forward for your particular way of working?
That question is very much open at this point.
But saying “GNOME Shell sucks, Unity is great,” or “Unity sucks, GNOME Shell is great,” just isn’t possible at this stage of development for both projects. They really are two peas out of the same UI pod at this point.