I'm probably the last person who still uses Unity and it's for this exact reason. I set the launch bar to auto hide and use the compiz Expose clone hot corners to switch windows.
It all just gets out of the way.
I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.
FYI, KDE/Plasma supports all of those features you mentioned:
1. You can set the launcher/taskbar/panel to auto-hide.
2. You can set up the screen corners (or a keyboard shortcut) to show an Exposé-style view of all running applications/windows.
3. You can have a global menu bar.
You can get pretty close to emulating Unity's interface with Plasma, especially if you use Latte-dock. But there are still certain things that can't be done; the biggest to me is having the menu bar (File, Edit, etc.) in the title bar of all the windows (a global menu at the top works though). You can get a button that then gives you those options, which is close but an extra click.
> I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.
Are you referring to the Window List extension? Why not use Dash to Dock instead, or even Dash to Panel (not sure if it’s current state, I don’t use it) which will also replace the main top status panel.
I’m a GNOME user on a single display (X because NVIDIA and 3D industry apps) and it works well for me. I do like the other DE’s though, I’m pretty agnostic in that sense.
No I'm talking about how the "File Edit " etc menu is drawn in one and only one place like in MacOS so that every application doesn't waste screen space drawing their own menu.
Oh, right. It’s been such a long time since I’ve used unity I completely forgot that was a thing, my bad.
Most of the time when I think about Unity these days I think about the sidebar launcher and the maximized window mode integration, not the rest of the features it provided; I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu.
After installing Ubuntu 18.04 I tried staying with Gnome. I installed extensions to get closer to the behavior I wanted. I realised i basically had a cheap, slow knock-off of standard Unity functionality. I installed Unity and never looked back.
I'm no longer waiting for the window manager when switching virtual desktops. Load on the system is now once again due to me using it, instead of the window manager.
It all just gets out of the way.
I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.