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A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

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Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#81

Post by DanBC »

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…

> So a company comes along and says: Listenting to you guys isn't working, so we're going to try something else.

Sure, that's a valid way to work. He should have started off by saying that, rather than building a large, vocal, community and then ignoring them.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#82

Post by tankenmate »

hollerith wrote: post #48
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…

>at least Microsoft recognized (correctly) back then that a concept of an "app" makes no sense on a modern desktop, and windows is what users want to manage, not "apps" >windows from different desktops in OSX are mistakenly combined in the same useless giant Alt+tab list Completely agree. In particular, I used Gnome (2.14 through 2.18) for a few years, then OS X (Leopard through Snow Leopard) for a few years, and the…

I have been using Linux since 1993 and GNOME since the end of 1998. Over that time I have had less than a handful of GNOME crashes that weren't caused by X driver / hardware problems. Restarting the GUI on Linux is normally much easier that on other machines, it rarely requires full reboot; the only exception again is of course really bad graphics drivers / hardware.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#83

Post by Wilya »

dasboot wrote: post #41

I use Ubuntu as my exclusive desktop OS. Ubuntu / Linux has far bigger problems than Unity. (Jump to point 5 for conclusion). 1. There are huge regressions. With the upgrade to 11.10 my laptop's battery life has been cut from 5-6 hours to 2-2.5 hours. This is on an Asus UL machine that on Windows gets 10 hours. This may be a kernel issue, but Canonical could add a lot of value by at least warning, or better, fixing/m…

Regarding #1, it's not necessarily a kernel problem. One bloated program running in the background could be using a bit too much CPU and disk. "Modern" desktop environments love those programs, for some reason.

It could be a lack of support for a specific advanced power-saving feature at kernel level, but that wouldn't be my first guess..

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#84

Post by Causification »

enobrev wrote: post #44
dasboot wrote: post #41

I use Ubuntu as my exclusive desktop OS. Ubuntu / Linux has far bigger problems than Unity. (Jump to point 5 for conclusion). 1. There are huge regressions. With the upgrade to 11.10 my laptop's battery life has been cut from 5-6 hours to 2-2.5 hours. This is on an Asus UL machine that on Windows gets 10 hours. This may be a kernel issue, but Canonical could add a lot of value by at least warning, or better, fixing/m…

#3 is one of my biggest gripes, in general. The Gimp is one of the worst products I've ever taken the time to try to learn. I'm not just tweaking photos, I'm trying to do some work as a professional, working on files given to me by other professionals. Forget about trying to open a PSD with more than a couple layers on it. Don't even bother. And the interface... I don't mind spending a week or two learning an interfa…

How long did you spend staring at your screen in slackjawed disbelief after selecting the zoom tool and finding that instead of zooming out, right-clicking does nothing?

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#85

Post by DanBC »

einhverfr wrote: post #64
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.…

Better communication would probably have solved many problems for them.

A canned FAQ with, as you say, details of why they're doing stuff would have helped. More importantly, links to instructions for removing Unity and installing other environments would have been good.

But that would have opened another problem: Installing Gnome 2.x is only going to be viable short term. Dependencies will start to break more and more stuff until users are forced to upgrade.

Really, Gnome should have forked and had a stable 2.x release with gentle bug fixing, and a renamed 3 release with fun new features.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#86

Post by yason »

Mark already said it: if you don't like it, then don't use it. It's his money on the line, you go fork your own Unity. This is an instance of "you can't please everyone so don't even try."

While it would definitely be nice to please everyone, even merely trying to do so will seriously derail you from your own vision and design. That direction can either be yours or nobody's.

People also overestimate the effect of this kind of soloing. At worst, they will just create something nobody will use.

And if the majority of users will cease to use Unity, there will be 3rd-party packages for Gnome3 or Gnome2 or whatever it is that people want. As a critical review, if Ubuntu ever get to that point it might indeed be a good idea for Ubuntu to accept defeat and return to the mainstream. However, it is no earlier than that when we will see if they truly are stupid. And if they are, then there's a fair chance of forking and there will not only be Kubuntu and Lubuntu and ${WHATEVER}buntu but also Gubuntu.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#87

Post by jiggy2011 »

einhverfr wrote: post #79
bluedanieru wrote: post #62

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 thin…

Exactly right. I am going to state the obvious here. UI's should be designed around their input methods. If the input on a tablet and a desktop are different (mouse vs fingers) then use a different UI. Plain and simple. Gnome 2.3 was a very, very good UI aimed at desktops. 3.0 is another kinda sorta tablet UI that only kinda sorta works on desktops (I am playing around with Gnome 3.0, XFCE, and a few others). The fun…

Totally Agree, there is a reason Microsoft are seperating Metro and the main Windows UI and that apple have seperate types of devices (Mac / iPhone + iPad).

If you want Linux for tablets/phones just get android.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#88

Post by jiggy2011 »

gbog wrote: post #54

No one seem to see that the real problem here is not Ubuntu, Unity or Gnome X.y. The real issue at stake is putting the designers on top of the decision hierarchy. It have worked well with Apple, it was in its DNA, but it is not at all in Linux DNA (neither in Google's or Amazon's or Microsoft's). I do not mean to say design and UX and usability is not important, but still, it is a matter of priorities. If a designer…

For something designed by 'designers' it is seriously ugly.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#89

Post by padobson »

This reminds me of a fight in a church about how high on the wall the cross should be hanging.

Bitter arguments among side-stream groups (church-goers, linux-users) are a much bigger reason why these groups do not attract mainstream audiences then what it is they're fighting about.

Unity, Gnome, and KDE are all headed towards a more Mac-like UI because Apple is the most lauded software design company in the world.

Like church-goers, Linux users should be supporting and celebrating innovation in design that are meant to increase use in the software. If such innovation was more broadly celebrated for its own sake, then it is much more likely that one of the major players would be willing to risk new design decisions - to really experiment with the UI. Instead, the same changes are all adopted by the major players because trying something too different will get your ridiculed, and that leads to losing early adopters, and that leads to a diminishing user base.

If you want to see Linux become more mainstream so that a generation of computer users can have a little more software freedom, then join the discussion by celebrating experimentation instead of condemning it.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#90

Post by slowpoke »

Causification wrote: post #75

I am an irregular Linux user and am not deeply involved in the Ubuntu community, but over the past several months I have seen the general attitude of "random geeks" change dramatically with regards to Ubuntu. A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful c…

> A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful contempt.

True. I used to suggest Ubuntu myself (actually, I was one of the people who started with Ubuntu, now I'm on Arch).

I've switched to either suggesting to install one of the forks of Ubuntu (mostly Kubuntu or Xubuntu), Linux Mint or even Crunchbang.

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