I am so tired of Unity: Part 2 AKA I like Kubuntu/KDE

I have been trying Kubuntu for last week or so and so far I am really liking it. I must say that I am impressed. KDE looks a lot more polished and stable than Unity or even GNOME 3 for that matter. The UI is really sleek and stylish. The effects are good looking and so are fonts and icons. The text in title bars, buttons, menus and everywhere else is thinner and a lot more smoother than it is in Ubuntu. And most importantly I really like Kate. I am used to Notepad++ and Gedit always felt so ancient in comparison. But Kate seems like a good replacement. I think I will stick around for a while.

I am so tired of Unity

I am an avid Ubuntu user. It has been my primary OS since 2008 i.e for almost six years now. But I am now getting tired of Unity, not Ubuntu, just Unity. For those not familiar with the term, Unity is the desktop environment of Ubuntu. Ubuntu switched to Unity from GNOME a while ago when GNOME 3 was about to be released. I have read that Canonical did not agree with the direction GNOME was heading in and when they were not able to sort their differences with GNOME they decided to create their own desktop environment for Ubuntu and so Unity was created. But this is what I have read on internet and considering how reliable internet is, I am not sure what really happened but the fact remains that Ubuntu switched to Unity.

Unity has its own merits but it has made it difficult for me to perform day to day operations. For example whenever I have to run an app for which I don't have a launcher icon I have to click the home button and then type the app name for it to appear in the app list and then click on it. I don't like that. I also do not like that there is not button to minimize all windows. I also do not like the fact that every program has its menu in the top panel. When I have two windows open side by side and I need to use their menu, I have to first select the window and then move my pointer miles away to top panel to get to the menu. Similarly I like the close button for a window to be in the top left or top right corner of the screen when they are maximized. This makes closing them easy. But with Unity this is no longer possible. There are a lot of other similar issues which are not a big deal them self but together they make it really difficult for me to perform everyday operations.

But this does not mean I am giving up on Ubuntu, I am not ready to go back to Windows, but I have decided to give Kubuntu a try as well and see how I feel about KDE. No matter whom I end up with, KDE or Unity, I will still be using Ubuntu.