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A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

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Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#61

Post by maigret »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #34
old-gregg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unity exists because every other Linux GUI has > fallen victim to this process That's very debatable. According to me, Gnome 2.3 is by far the best designed UX for a desktop operating system. Like most people, I generalize based on my own limited experience, and I have seen people grow up and learn how to use a computer in Gnome who were disgusted by Windows and OSX user interfaces. Like all animals, humans can be…

Do you know about the alt+` shortcut to switch between windows of an app? It's really nice.

The problem of that shortcut? It only works well on English keyboards. Try that on a French or a German one, you have to press Shift additional or even Alt Gr.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#62

Post by bluedanieru »

That's why iOS has a springboard in only one place, same for Android. These are modern interfaces, based on serious design work. Our goal is to compete with those, so we're not that interested in matching functionality that was in Win95, especially if we think that functionality will get dropped in Windows 8 or 9 or 10.

So they want Unity to be a GUI for tablets? How far up your ass does your head have to be, to think that a GUI designed for desktop use, and a GUI designed for tablet use, can be used interchangeably? Someone ask Mark, he'll know. Or someone who worked on Metro since they seem to have the same parts of their brain broken. If Microsoft does break into the tablet space, it will be from work on Windows Phone 7, it will not be from Metro. Apple recognized this when they used their phone GUI for tablets despite having a perfectly good desktop GUI around, and Canonical is all about copying Apple like a fucking funhouse mirror, how did they not pick up on this?

If they want to target the tablet space, good for them. I think the ship has probably sailed, but more competition there isn't going to hurt. But don't fuck traditional desktop users, who currently account for 100% of your user base, in the process.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#63

Post by lukifer »

old-gregg wrote: post #27
goodside wrote: post #12

It's not reasonable to expect a design team to be able to function under the condition that whenever a user disagrees with the placement of a UI widget, they must either publicly justify their decision as being objectively correct or make the widget's position a user-configurable option. There is an enormous class of design problems that have several appealing solutions, one of which is better than the others, but no…

> Unity exists because every other Linux GUI has > fallen victim to this process That's very debatable. According to me, Gnome 2.3 is by far the best designed UX for a desktop operating system. Like most people, I generalize based on my own limited experience, and I have seen people grow up and learn how to use a computer in Gnome who were disgusted by Windows and OSX user interfaces. Like all animals, humans can be…

> a concept of an "app" makes no sense on a modern desktop, and windows is what users want to manage, not "apps"

I disagree; I think this is a subjective thing based on one's usage habits. I tend to think in terms of apps, with multiple windows attached to each. (This is partly because I keep a lot of windows open, and tabbing between 5-10 apps is more reasonable than tabbing through 30-50 windows.)

I agree with your main point, however; Ubuntu should be blazing its own trail, not mimicking the past.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#64

Post by einhverfr »

enobrev wrote: post #28

These sorts of complaints seem so absurdly dramatic. I don't understand the reasoning behind them. They somehow bring up an eerie image in my head of someone holding their spouse hostage in the basement for lightly mentioning that they wanted to take a photography class. "No, dear, you're not allowed to be anything besides what you were the day I met you. Change is not in the cards for you, unless I make those change…

The issue here is a lack of communication. For example in LedgerSMB, we get occasional users asking for MySQL support. We send them a (lengthy) canned response detailing why MySQL support is not on our priority list and in fact why we wouldn't accept patches if they were written. We politely advise people to look for other accounting programs if this doesn't seem desirable to them. Pretty soon we got fewer and fewer. People could see what our position was, why it wasn't open to debate, and so forth.

But reading a lot of this what I see is "won't fix. Sorry, against our design" with no attempt to either leave the door open for future changes or figure out what the user wants. Better approaches include a long-term feature requests queue or some other way of preserving feedback for later review during design sessions, or a canned response which details why a category of feature requests is unwelcome and inviting further discussion of what could be done instead. If it is not applicable, the user ideally should be challenged and asked to justify why they need what they say they need before the bug is marked wont-fix with no discussion.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#65

Post by alinajaf »

midwestwebdev wrote: post #52

I guess I'm confused about the whole issue. Personally I hate Unity, which is why I installed Gnome 2. Isn't that the point of Linux? Being able to customize it to your liking?

Agreed, I think Ubuntu is still a great distro for 'just working' on most machines I've installed it on. I dislike Unity too, so I install a couple of packages, grab my xmonad config file from github and get back to work.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#66

Post by unconed »

old-gregg wrote: post #27
goodside wrote: post #12

It's not reasonable to expect a design team to be able to function under the condition that whenever a user disagrees with the placement of a UI widget, they must either publicly justify their decision as being objectively correct or make the widget's position a user-configurable option. There is an enormous class of design problems that have several appealing solutions, one of which is better than the others, but no…

> Unity exists because every other Linux GUI has > fallen victim to this process That's very debatable. According to me, Gnome 2.3 is by far the best designed UX for a desktop operating system. Like most people, I generalize based on my own limited experience, and I have seen people grow up and learn how to use a computer in Gnome who were disgusted by Windows and OSX user interfaces. Like all animals, humans can be…

As an OS X user, I would call OS X the opposite of "app centric". It's document-centric first. Apps are binding glue, but windows that represent documents come first. A window representing one document will never switch to representing another. It will always open a new one. The titlebar of a document holds an icon that represents the document, and can be dragged around. It can be right clicked to see the document's location in the file system and open any of the references locations.

And if you're talking about conditioning, perhaps you should considering not using Alt-Tab, a task switcher that has never really worked properly, because it cannot be both memorable, linear and context-adaptive.

Those shiny OS X windows that fly around without lag allow me to task switch visually, using touch gestures. It works great and uses all parts of my brain. I recognize windows by their shape, proportions and contents, not by a single icon. Swipe up, see all windows grouped by type, swipe up, focus on all windows of the same type. Swipe left/right, switch desktops.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#67

Post by lechris48 »

maigret wrote: post #61
bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about the alt+` shortcut to switch between windows of an app? It's really nice.

The problem of that shortcut? It only works well on English keyboards. Try that on a French or a German one, you have to press Shift additional or even Alt Gr.

Nope, at least in GNOME shell the shortcut is Alt + [key above Tab] so no problem there

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#68

Post by nnq »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #40
old-gregg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, BTW Unity/Gnome3 copied this kludge as well and they're proud of it. This is an equivalent of launching a new computer line which throws away SSDs in favour of punch cards. See, "apps" made sense in the prehistoric times when single-threaded desktops with limited RAM were primarily used to do one thing at a time. But things changed. The concept of an "app" have not been making sense for a long time: you can run…

You say this, as every major platform migrates towards apps. Windows 8: (huge push on becoming) app centric. Mac OS X: (becoming )app centric. Android: app centric. iOS: app centric. What OS isn't? Linux. (eh, edit, this really isn't fair. Linux is as "app-centric" as I need it, though the "linux is so secure" assumption is uh, going to become fallable as its competitors approach an app-centric, isolated model. (also…

...but every major desktop platform has easily accessible configuration settings for you to change this behavior, eg. for Windows 7 I can just:

    right click task bar > properties > taskbar buttons: never combine
...to switch back to a window centric approach, and this combined with the ability to use virtual desktops (even on Windows with a 3rd party app) with the taskbar only showing windows from that desktop, and going even further if you like, using a multi display setup where each display has a task bar showing only the windows from that display (like having "# of virtual desktops" * "# of display" actual virtual desktops) (note: I HATE this but know people that swear by it), you can easily manage even ~50 windows without becoming visually or mentally crowded, with no need for the app-centrick view that makes you click around all the time...

...the point being that unity should try and learn more from the nice and clean but yet easily costumizable interface of Windows 7

Disclaimer: I'm mainly a Windows user, touching a Mac from time to time, and using Xfce when on *nix because it just works and doesn't stand in my way...

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#70

Post by VolatileVoid »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #40
old-gregg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, BTW Unity/Gnome3 copied this kludge as well and they're proud of it. This is an equivalent of launching a new computer line which throws away SSDs in favour of punch cards. See, "apps" made sense in the prehistoric times when single-threaded desktops with limited RAM were primarily used to do one thing at a time. But things changed. The concept of an "app" have not been making sense for a long time: you can run…

You say this, as every major platform migrates towards apps. Windows 8: (huge push on becoming) app centric. Mac OS X: (becoming )app centric. Android: app centric. iOS: app centric. What OS isn't? Linux. (eh, edit, this really isn't fair. Linux is as "app-centric" as I need it, though the "linux is so secure" assumption is uh, going to become fallable as its competitors approach an app-centric, isolated model. (also…

This is the problem. This debate, right here. This is what I think the - albeit impolite - heavy-handed replies from Shuttleworth are trying to avoid.

There's no one right way, and governing by pure democracy simply won't work, because everyone has a different opinion.

And sure, you can make it configurable, but that's not the point - is it? If you're a power user, you'll find a way to manipulate the system to your will no matter what. But 99.9% of the users (well, when dealing with Linux admittedly that percentage is much smaller) will NEVER CHANGE THE DEFAULT.

So: apps vs windows? Side launcher vs bottom launcher? Doesn't matter. Just choose one, and for the love of all things holy, be consistent.

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