Design by democracy doesn't work.
Ubuntu has always been about targeting the mainstream as far as I can tell. They do a good job of it, and there's plenty of other options for those who think otherwise.
A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or show Shuttleworth how wrong he is and switch to another distro, most likely Debian for those who are most comfortable with Ubuntu.
I actually switched to Mint 11 after 11.04 and found it to be a really good alternative. Specifically because it didn't break everything and has access to all the Ubuntu repos and tools. I switched back to Ubuntu for 11.10, hoping some of the things which pushed me to Mint in the first place had been fixed, but I am again bitterly disappointed. Unfortunately, I value having a pretty interface, I find xfce ugly, and s…
If you like Mint, why not just use that?
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#103These 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…
But isn't there some tacit agreement, or expectation that long-time users and active members will not have to abandon years of investment in a platform -- on a whim of the provider? Of course, the designers are entitled to make their changes... but at the expense of the (supportive) user community? I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but providers would not exist were it not for the demand created by the community. It's true that displeased community members can abandon ship, but they have a right to be angry (in the understanding that they entered a provider-user arrangement upon a "gentleman's agreement" as stated above).
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#104Most people hate Unity. They are sticking with it. Canonical needs to be profitable. OK, so which distribution is everyone switching over to in place of Ubuntu?
Don't bother leaving Ubuntu, just install XFCE, gnome-panel[1], or make a leap into the world of the tiling WM with the package awesome[2].
[1]I think this is the name of the Gnome 2 package. Personally, I couldn't stand Gnome 2 and even preferred Unity; I didn't jump into the world of the tiling WM until compiz started crashing my GPU.
[2] at http://awesome.naquadah.org/ ; I don't like the name, but I love the WM.
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#105The debate over where to place a particular widget or what bits of the user interface are customizable seems off-target to me. What struck me most was the fact that we had a polite community member doing his best to describe a problem that he was very concerned about. He felt that people in the community of Ubuntu users were feeling ignored and he suggested that an easy solution would be to provide more detail on why a particular issue in Launchpad is flagged as "wontfix". While the effectiveness of this solution is debatable, Canonical focused on how the community feels selfish and entitled. Ironically, instead of Canonical clearly explaining to this community member why they wouldn't be more descriptive on issues flagged as "wontfix", the discussion degraded into just the sort of name calling and posturing that this community member was attempting to alleviate.
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#106These 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…
Indeed. I really like Unity. Especially on my 10" netbook, it has the most vertical space of all mainstream desktop environments, by far.
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
And on the other hand, I have to regularly restart Unity (the version in Ubuntu 11.10) due to non-driver and non-hardware problems.
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#108Am I the only one who loves Ubuntu and does not use Unity at all? Basically, what I want out of a distro is a convenient platform to build the system I want. That's Window Maker with a lot of xterms, an Emacs session, a Firefox session, and possibly other applications as I need them. Any distro can give me that much. The reason I pick one over the other is ease of administration. Ubuntu gives me this in the package m…
I'm an old Debian and Ubuntu user. I moved to Ubuntu for my desktop since I could install it and it would just work, with a sane enough GUI. With each new release the previous years, they've made design decisions that I don't like.
While it's nice that they try to improve the desktop, it seems like they forget that in the real world, Linux adoption happens with power users recommending (and supporting) new users with their Linux installation. Maybe Ubuntu can change that, but we're not there yet. And if Ubuntu doesn't cater to the power users _as well_, one day they'll wake up to another Linux distribution gaining popularity.
I've switched over to XFCE (Xubuntu) for now, but it seems like I might be better off going back to Debian. After all, I can join the Debian community and actually have a say if I disagree with its direction.
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#109It'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…
"But the only way to avoid this one major failure mode is for Shuttleworth to ignore, as politely as possible, the complaints of his users." The problem is Shuttlworth can't keep his mouth shut. Personal attacks only make the situation worse. He should take a page from Apple here - "keep your mouth shut" - and produce.
So the solution to "you're ignoring the community" is to ignore the community? That strikes me as an odd suggestion.
And if you can show me a single personal attack from Shuttleworth here, I'd be very interested. I don't always agree with him but in my experience he's always been extremely professional. Claiming anything else is incredibly unfair and mean-spirited.
For the lazy, every comment on the linked bug by him (with an aside that 9 comments on this bug hardly seems to be ignoring the complaint):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/9
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/19
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/20
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/25
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/26
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/27
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/29
Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity
#110These 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.…
I wholeheartedly agree that communication is the issue. And everybody is doing an awful job of it right now (Users and Canonical).
"Figuring out what the user wants" isn't necessarily the answer either. Not if your goals are as lofty as bringing Linux to the masses. Un/fortunately, the current user base is NOT necessarily the future.
But if they want to bring "us" along, there are options. Drive the design-centric stake into the ground. Put their designers front and center with blog posts and marketing and workshops. Make it real. Let those who want the same-old to make the choice to go elsewhere - cordially.
And from there, teach the function-first world from which it comes why design is important, by leading through example. Open the curtains on this dark basement of a community to let some light in and start a long and important conversation about personal hygiene, kerning fonts and rounded corners. Help a couple app developers make some real money selling a simple yet well designed app through the new software center.
In my mind, that's real communication and leadership. Bickering over features won't get anyone anywhere, and while their hand-waving "won't-fix" is NOT the way to go about it, neither is wasting too much time on people who probably won't like what Ubuntu is trying to become.
Personally, I like the new stuff, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.