Review: The Unity desktop and Lomiri on Ubuntu Unity 24.04
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Lomiri works, but it is very minimal in its approach. Perhaps more importantly, at least when run on my laptop, Lomiri didn't work gracefully. It's functional, I can open applications, switch between them, and adjust settings. However, Lomiri doesn't really do anything to help the experience. I need to resize each new window, the mouse jumps around a bit, and there aren't any search or convenience features which stand out. In short, Lomiri still feels like it is primarily targeting mobile devices and is working on laptops and workstations as an add-on ability. It runs, but it's not yet a polished experience on desktop machines the way it is on mobile.
In contrast, Unity 7, while it has remained relatively undeveloped for the past eight years, is still a pretty solid desktop experience. The conveniences and shortcuts that made it appealing ten years ago still hold up today. There are a few areas, like the Dash, where I feel icons could be displayed more efficiently, but on the whole the desktop performs well. It's nice to see Unity 7 gain some fresh life and I'd like to see it updated to the point where it could be ported easily to other distributions. Unfortunately, I think Unity's development team remains small and it's unlikely to get a lot of new work, new features, or Wayland support in the near future.
In short, I really like Unity 7, though I think its small support team will struggle to keep it up to date with new developments (new versions of GTK, Wayland, and improving the Dash). Lomiri seems to be in the opposite situation. It's running on a modern display server, it has been ported and packaged to Debian (and its children), but it's still a ways to go from being an ideal desktop environment for workstations. Lomiri performs well on mobile devices, but it doesn't yet scale up well to a laptop experience.