Ubuntu Unity in 2021. Is it actually usable?

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I used the Ubuntu Unity desktop for a few days. Here are my thoughts about the Unity desktop in 2021.

The Good

I love the Unity desktop. I used it back in 2014 and 2016 when I would try out Ubuntu from time to time. I never really dove into the power user features of it, but I liked the desktop. Around a few days ago, I decided to try it out again using Ubuntu 20.04. Immediately, I had some concerns and some good thoughts. For example, the Unity search is really powerful. You can search files, programs, and even do calculations in the search menu. Another good thing about Unity is the panel. I love the menus being in the taskbar like on a Mac. It was also super cool to be able to search through those menus using the Alt key. Unity is a pretty cool desktop environment.

The Bad

Immediately after installing the desktop, I noticed a few bad things. For example, GNOME applications did not look very good. The borders would be rounded in weird ways, and sometimes there would be duplicates of buttons or buttons that didn’t work at all. The dock area is also a problem, as on GNOME it would autohide if an application was interfering, but show itself when nothing was in the way, the Unity dock would not do that. It will only show if you hover over the dock. This made me not like the desktop as much. Also, Compiz is pretty outdated now. Trying to tile the windows was not a great experience, especially with the buggy animations. Another bad thing is the lack of keybinds. Sure, you can add ones for programs, but there are no keybinds for basic tiling like putting one program to the left and one to the right. I did not like Unity for those aspects.

Conclusion

If you wanted a basic desktop that could get things done fast, I would not recommend Unity. Unity simply is too old for modern applications. If all you do is sit in a web browser all day, Unity will be fine. However, if you want a powerful desktop, I would recommend GNOME or KDE instead.