Hub could use small improvements here and there

First off, I know we shouldn't bundle topics but there's a quite a lot that bug me about current Hub so I'm going to go bit against that rule here. Anyway here goes:

1. We should be allowed to upgrade existing point releases directly in-place. Like, if I have 2018.2.4f1 installed and 2018.2.5f1 gets out, there's no option to "upgrade" that specific installation. This would be logical to have as majority of the users will now have to uninstall previous version, then install the new one in place and then set it manually as preferred engine version. This means there are lots of extra steps involved in the current approach for no good reason (you can still allow multiple point release installations into same computer, just expose the upgrading on the right click menu etc).

2. There's no way to install older point releases through hub. I recently had to install older versions to track where some bug got introduced and found out that this wasn't possible via Unity Hub. Taking the issue #1 into account, you could just have package manager like solution for managing 2017.x, 2018.x etc engine versions where you could freely pick the engine version to install for that installation instance (folder). This would double as upgrade option as you could then swap the engine version in-place.

3. I saw this mentioned on the forums already, but there really should be a notification icon somewhere that there are new releases available, this would be really handy especially if you are in beta.

4. There's no "refresh" option for the engine list, we often get new releases on RSS feed but Unity Hub doesn't get refreshed automatically for few hours unless you restart it.

5. Hub's engine updates often lag bit behind the downloadable versions even when you keep restarting it, this isn't exactly a huge issue, nor is #4, these are just small annoyances when you first see new version being out but are unable to download it through Hub.

6. New project option should let us pick the package manager packages included in the new project.

7. There should be an option for setting the default package list for new package manager packages. Now I always remove same 3 packages from every new project after creation. (I know there's a default list in \Editor\Data\Resources\PackageManager\Editor\manifest.json but it's pointless to edit it as you lose the modified list after each point release installation). This modified list could be just stored somewhere in users appdata instead of editor folder.

 

How about this?

Why can't we launch the different versions we have installed from the Hub?

 

To reflect this on what we have now 6 months after making this thread: Unity has mostly fixed point #5 (now after getting new version on RSS feed, you usually see it available on Hub but you still have to restart the Hub for this as mentioned on point #4).

And I think at least some of these are on some roadmap now (like ability to pick package manager packets from Hub).

That being said, I still feel that all the remaining suggestions should still be considered for future Hub versions for better user experience (all these things are still very much needed).

 

You can? If you didn't install a version through the Hub, you have to add it first, other than that you can open any installed version of Unity via the Hub.

 

Oh, I misread that post myself, thought it was about not being able to install (and launch) different Unity versions with Hub alone.

But yeah, you can use Hub's (+) Locate a Version too to add your previous Unity installation paths to the Hub listing manually.

I dunno if Unity does this automatically for all new manual installs but I've noticed that at least if you install the custom engine version under same parent folder where Hub is configured to install Unity versions itself, Hub will automatically pick the manually installed ones too on next startup (so no need to manually tell Hub where you put them).

 

Belated reply for sake of ongoing Hub improvement discussions

This is what JetBrains does by default with their Toolbox app (Hub equivalent) ... its really quite nice. They keep the older versions in a cache and let you swap between them quickly. It needs some finer control though, they just have an "all or nothing" switch.

Agreed, basic feature. (So long as it filters based on "minor versions" (semver.org) you have installed... e.g. Don't tell me 2017.4.x has an update if I don't have any installed.)

Yeah, I just end up checking the websites for new versions. Hub should just imitate the JetBrains Toolbox here. (Auto-refresh on focus w/ activity icon + optional buried manual refresh)

If you mean a full replication of the Unity Package Manager UI? My guess is that won't happen soon, since that component is written against the Unity Runtime but the Unity Hub is an Electron app.

This makes a lot of sense. Allow setting a default at the Unity Hub level. And to ease the pain of #6 being unlikely, maybe on let you optionally change to a different manifest.json via file picker when creating a New Project.