Desktop Linux: Has Ubuntu's Unity Surpassed the Mac?

At OSCON in 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, challenged the crowd, "The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?"

The challenge was a defining moment for desktop Linux, coming near the start of an era in which KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu would all attempt to rethink the desktop.

Four years later, speaking again at OSCON, Shuttleworth implied victory. "We've leapt ahead of some of the competition," he said, claiming that Ubuntu's Unity desktop was now the second easiest to use after Windows, and showing specific elements in which he felt Unity surpassed Mac OS X.

The announcement of victory was quieter than the challenge -- unsurprisingly, perhaps, considering that it came in four years, not the promised two. However, design considerations, their receptions within Ubuntu, and Ubuntu's interactions with other projects concerned with desktop Linux all forced delays that he could not have foreseen in setting the challenge.

Nor, originally, had Shuttleworth specified that the challenge was to develop an interface as equally suitable for a workstation as a mobile device, although a few months later, he was thinking in those terms.

Most of all, the challenge was addressed to free software in general -- or was widely interpreted that way. In the context of the times, the challenge appeared another of Shuttleworth's efforts to reform how projects cooperated.

However, the community proved largely unwilling to place itself under his direction, and in practice Shuttleworth and Ubuntu committed themselves to improving usability in isolation.

Still, even under these revised terms, the question remains: Is Shuttleworth's claim of victory plausible?

To find an answer, I compared the version of Unity in the current release of Ubuntu 12.04, with OS X 10.6.8 -- not the latest version, which came out shortly after Shuttleworth spoke, nor even the next to current version, but one that remains widely in use and therefore seems a fair basis of comparison.

The answer, I quickly found, was far less straightforward than I expected. For one thing, the major differences are confined to two main sets of feature -- the launcher or dash and the menu replacements. For another, how you answer is likely to depend strongly upon your assumptions about what a desktop should do.

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