Unity Desktop: Still good in 2022?
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00:00 Intro
00:59 Sponsor: Store your files securely and privately with Internxt
02:07 Dock and global menu: does it still work?
07:45 The Dash and the HUD: a bit outdated
11:34 Window management and performance
14:04 Does Unity still hold up in 2022?
16:13 Sponsor: Get a laptop or desktop running Linux with Tuxedo
17:32 If you won the lottery...
#Unity #Linux #DesktopEnvironment
So, first, Unity is a shell, not really a desktop environment: it doesn't provide its own set of apps.
The Dock, or launcher, as they call it, holds the Dash button, with the Ubuntu logo, as well as app shortcuts and opened applications, and everything else you might have plugged in, like hard drives. There's also the trash can at the bottom.
Right clicking an app brings a jump list with a few contextual options depending on the application.
The dock displays all opened windows on all workspaces, and clicking the app's icon will take you to that workspace with a nice little animation.
Long pressing the super key brings numbers for each app shortcut. Pressing that number will launch the app, and you also get a nice recap of all keyboard shortcuts, of which there are many.
To round up the base behavior of the dock, you can tune a few things, like autohiding it, or displaying the workspace switcher as well as a show desktop icon, and you can change the icon size.
Now, let's talk about the top panel. It holds the current focused app's name, the global menu bar, and the system indicators. That global menu isn't always displayed by default, it's hidden, and you have to hover over it to reveal it.
Another nice thing that Unity does with its top bar is using it as the titlebar: when you maximize a window, its titlebar disappears, and is merged with the top bar, which means you're saving precious vertical space.
The Dash opens when you click the Unity button, with the ubuntu logo, or when you hit the Super key. It's kind of the precursor to the GNOME app grid, but with a bit more power to it. It has global search, to let you find anything you want: apps, files, videos, music, pictures, or folders.
**You also don't get Amazon search results anymore, which is unfortunate, I liked these. Ok, no, I'm lying, that was horrible and privacy invasive**
The lenses at the bottom don't feel super practical anymore. For example, you can't move apps around or create folders, which makes it a bit less useful than the GNOME apps grid. For documents, and pictures, it's ok, as it's an easy way to find the recent documents you interacted with.
Pressing ALT summons the HUD. It allows you to find an action, or menu item related to the current open window, and just type to find it.
You also get window tiling. Just drag an app to a screen edge, and it's tiled there, or drag it to the top, and it's maximized. You can drag the whole top bar down to unmaximize, which is handy.
Then you have the workspace switcher. Clicking it zooms out on a grid of all your virtual desktops, there are 4 by default, and you can move apps directly from one to another by just dragging them.
If you have multiple windows opened at the same time, clicking on the dock's icon brings an overview of all of them, which is extremely nice.
On the performance side of things, Unity used up 1.5GB of RAM out of 16, which is on par with modern GNOME or KDE when you have that amount of available RAM, maybe a little bit higher.