Most of us like to have a computer which looks professional, can do most of the things we like to do, offer something new to learn and do, and finally don't crash around too often. We will like to have the system a bit light on the pocket. Windows 3 and then Win 95 offered the professional touch, but fell short of the expectations for the razor's edge. Mac was hard for a struggling student or a start-up professional.
Then came Linux. It had everything one wanted for a good adventure. The system was robust and often productive. The GUIs were a sort of amateurish. Back then the system crashed often, though we saw that less than the blue screen of death. Yet we loved it. Linux occupied a separate partition on the hard drive, coexisting with Windows. And when things got better we kicked Win 98 / XP / Vista out and let Linux occupy the entire hard disk. The fight now was with the Mac, which we knew was always better, but could never afford to have.
All the popular distros,especially openSUSE, Fedora and the newcomer Ubuntu, based on Debian gave us a whole new desktop experience. We really did start having the Mac experience - or better than that. The desktop became glossy, faster, responsive and really professional in appearance. Users could never remember when the systems crashed last. I don't have an instance of my computers crashing in the last 3 years. We are starting to be there - the ultimate desktop experience.
Things started breaking when the whole lot of new devices called 'tablets' started appearing on the horizon. These are pricey things that could pretty do not much more than opening your Facebook chat or stream your favorite Youtube video. You could also read a e-book for 20 minutes, until your eyes grow too tried. If you are in the the beach or the park the 'pad' did not seem to offer a good reading experience, unless you have opted for audio books as your choice of 'reading' experience. You can listen to the music you have purchased over the music store, but with a sinking feeling that you don't need to lug a 'slate' to do that.
The web has transformed long back from a read-only web to read-write web. I see some guys at airports trying to do the read-write act with their 'slabs'. By and large I belive the 'book' that came along recently are the worst technology spoilers. They are platforms of digital media consumtion, which tries to act as if they could be points of content creation. I have seen a couple of guys lugging a small key board and a 'slate' and try to deal with their e-mails. This gets a bit complicated when you on a air plane. A small net-book could have done that with a higher level of elegance.
The producers of linux distros however got caught in the 'pad' madness and came to belive 'touch' is going conquer the world and beyond. Gnome makers moved on to touch oriented Gnome 3 Shell and Ubuntu makers dissatified with the Gnome efforts forked into Unity. Both belive touch is the thing to go. Even the makers of Windows became sedated to believe that will be future of computing and they are furiously preparing of the release of Win 8 - by end 2012.
Being a LinuxMint user I was spared from the agony of an early adopter of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 or Gnome 3 Shell in Fedora 15. By now also the major distros including Ubuntu clone LinixMint has decided to be Gnome 3 Shell friendly, leaving Ubuntu alone with Unity. I installed Uubuntu 11.10 on a virtual box to see how it actually is. I also installed Gnome 3 Shell on Ubuntu 11.10 to see it compares with Unity.
Both are rough around edges. Both look amateurist - a throwback into the good old days of Linux. Both crashes often. Unity is supposed to be a bit slow, but in my 3 GB RAM Virtual Box, it seems to run fine. Unity tries to ape Mac as much as it can, starting from the default desktop background. Overall I find Unity better than the plain minimalist Gnome Shell.
In Unity I found it was not possible to pin applications to the 'left-only'dash - that feature do not seem to work. I am not sure I could have icon on the desktop if I want that. You have a standard four desktops in Unity. It is hard to find how more desktops could be added. In Gnome Shell you can have infinite desktops. There are no minimize / maximize icon on the application window in Gnome 3, but apprently you can have a scaled view and maximize by clicking on the window bar.
Unity has a unified application menu bar on the desktop top edge. Even if the application runs from a smaller scaled window, the menu will span the whole desktop on the top edge. The friendly dock sit only in one position - left. Both assumes that computers users are pretty dull-witted, therefore provided only one approach to do anything. The Gnome Shell dock is seen only inside the dash. So you will have click minimum twice to luanch a application.
Both look a bit of ameturish attempts to mimic Mac and will have a long way to go before they start doing better. In comparison the Win 8 Start looks a whole lot better. It is unfortunate that Linux users will have to be transported back to good old days where Linux interfaces looked half finished and crashed around a lot.
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