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A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

linux-magazine.com

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Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#111

Post by fader »

cmiles74 wrote: post #105

The 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…

" the discussion degraded into just the sort of name calling and posturing that this community member was attempting to alleviate"

It might be enlightening to read the comments on the bug dispassionately and see where the name calling and posturing is coming from and where it is not.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#112

Post by jiggy2011 »

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?

I am happy with gnome 2 as well for the most part. Is it still under active development?

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#113

Post by gnaffle »

angusgr wrote: post #37
technomancy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we can all agree we hate Unity, but the constant complaining about it is disproportionate to the ease with which it's replaced.

I think this ease is somewhat offset by the extent to which Ubuntu are pushing it. When I updated to 11.04 I tried Unity for about 3 hours, got annoyed by certain things hurting my work style (the all-workspaces Alt-Tab mentioned above being one), and logged out and back in via "Classic Ubuntu". I felt no antipathy towards Ubuntu at this point, and I was impressed they were trying new things. They just weren't for me…

Agreed. Regardless of whether it's fair to be whining or not, Canonical loses if they alienate their core user group. Just look at how gradually Apple is refining the OSX desktop. If OSX had gone from the classic desktop to IOS/Springboard from one version to another, I'm pretty sure they would have had some serious backlash from their users.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#114

Post by fader »

angusgr wrote: post #37
technomancy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we can all agree we hate Unity, but the constant complaining about it is disproportionate to the ease with which it's replaced.

I think this ease is somewhat offset by the extent to which Ubuntu are pushing it. When I updated to 11.04 I tried Unity for about 3 hours, got annoyed by certain things hurting my work style (the all-workspaces Alt-Tab mentioned above being one), and logged out and back in via "Classic Ubuntu". I felt no antipathy towards Ubuntu at this point, and I was impressed they were trying new things. They just weren't for me…

"That's hubris on the part of Canonical."

I genuinely find this attitude confusing.

I gave a presentation to a user group at a senior center last night on Ubuntu, during which one person made a similar argument. (The only real difference was that he used the word "arrogant" rather than "hubris".)

I don't know your background so I can't speak to it, but this person I spoke with had contributed no code, artwork, translations, etc. to the project. He received a product entirely gratis, which he got value from. But then the product moved forward and changed. He still had what he had been given freely, of course. But he demanded that the people doing this work for free either never make changes to their work, or if they do to continue to maintain the old system as well. This work should also be given to him without charge or without him having to put forth any effort.

And for those of us actually spending our lives building the thing for him to do otherwise was arrogant.

I'm literally speechless when confronted with these sorts of arguments.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#115

Post by fader »

ilaksh wrote: post #91

Most 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?

"Most people hate Unity."

Can you show me the data that you've gathered on this? I'd love to see the user survey.

(Is it maybe possible that just because you don't like something, others still could?)

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#116

Post by maigret »

lechris48 wrote: post #67
maigret wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the correction - nice to know!

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#118

Post by oinksoft »

digikata wrote: post #23
oinksoft wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should just be using Debian if they want a stable system with good package management with a large repository. Archlinux is very good, but its repository is tiny compared to Debian and I trust Debian package maintainers more than pretty much any other distribution. I'm happy to install the few packages I need up-to-date, like Firefox, manually.

I love Debian, but I wish I could find a distro that was Debian + pragmatic hardware driver packages. That was the original value proposition that Ubuntu provided.

The thing about that is, once you've solved that problem, you don't really have to solve it again. In fact, I had hardware issues with my new laptop with Ubuntu, which seemed to be making false assumptions (it's just a new Thinkpad!), that I didn't have on Debian. And it took me very little time to set up ndiswrapper on Debian and find the wireless driver for my wifi card. However, I can see the need for better hardware detection on a more exotic portable device. On a desktop, none of this is an issue at all -- I happily ran a Zenwalk development environment for quite some time a few years ago when I was working at one startup.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#119

Post by hollerith »

tankenmate wrote: post #82
hollerith wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Good to know, thanks.

Re: A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

#120

Post by Sharlin »

naner wrote: post #11

As a long-time Linux desktop user (but Ubuntu outsider) I have been watching this unfold for quite a while. I think that Mark Suttleworth is smitten by Apple and desperately wants to create a mostly free-software OSX-ish Linux distro. He copied the anchored menu bar, moved the window controls to the left, copied exposé, copied some elements of the OSX panel, tried to improve typography, etc. Some of these were actual…

Yes, exactly what I was thinking. You may only play the design card if your design is actually world-class. Canonical is trying to be Apple without having Apple's resources.
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