How is a nearly 10-year-old desktop experience more complete than what we have today?

Do you remember Unity? Because I do, there are reasons for this DE and that old Ubuntu to be still ahead of today's desktops and a truly desktop that doesn't feel incomplete when you're coming from another systems.

There are also nice details that make a difference between cheap desktop experience and a polished one with attention to details like the following:

Wallpapers in lock screen & Guest Session

As you can see the wallpaper changes according to the wallpaper that users had (and even we had a Guest Session, some 2000s memories with shared PCs). Remember that this is a feature from

Don't you like to clutter your workflow with a dock? No worries

Whether you disable the Dock you can still see where your app is, you got an animation that let you know the position of the current minimizing app on the Dock.

Do you like instances? It has you covered

Fortunately KDE let's you manage instances without too much pain, however is not as smooth as this, all you have is a fade-in and out. In GNOME you must right click the icon app, or use a hotkey, or click the focus indicator (

Drag n' drop to that trash can!

This is a defacto gesture that you can expect in any machine with at least one pointing device, how is this not present in the latest GNOME? Not even in the latest Ubuntu.

There are more things to highlight about the defacto experience 10 years ago:

• The fact that Ubuntu Software Center had paid software. Flathub guys are doing their best to make paid software a thing, but sadly they had to re-invent the wheel and very late.
• Screensavers are no longer necessary but they're cool. We lost it and probably it won't be in a long time because of how Wayland works.
• Fractional scalling, this wasn't only for Ubuntu but we had it in almost any distro with X. Just we got fractional scalling few months ago on Wayland and don't get me wrong; I use Wayland, but it's sad to lose features without any replacement and get them back after a long time.
• Windows that resize themselves to fit the content, this is something very common in macOS and even with an animation for it, you can see examples of that by simply using System Preferences.app, Unity had it (without the animation). I don't really know if it's still posible with GTK4.
• Blur, this can be done in KDE but it's not the default, it's cool but not as cool as setup your PC and see your wallpaper being in your Dock without doing anything else.
• Icons in dialogs, I don't know if you have paid attention to recent software specially those ones made on GTK4/libadwaita, dialogs with icons aren't a thing anymore. In the era of GTK2/3 it was very common and the defacto, but now it's less common to see.
• Just as the previous item, mnemonics are getting impopular both by users and development toolkits and I don't know why. I use them and they are really useful.

How it was your experience with desktop distros a decade ago?