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Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

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Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#21

Post by karterk »

arocks wrote: post #16

There are two reasons why an average person learns computers and uses a particular OS: * Even if it is not very intuitive, it is universally used (Windows) * Even if it is not universally used, it is intuitive (Mac OS) Linux is currently, IMHO, in the middle. This brings up a lot of issues from an average Joe's perspective: some hardware configurations do not work perfectly (especially laptops), time spent in learnin…

> Even if it is not universally used, it is intuitive (Mac OS)

I often hear people saying that the Mac is intuitive. Is there actually proper proof for this?

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#22

Post by andreadallera »

I've tried Unity and I didn't like it. But that was to be expected, since I've been using xmonad for more than a year now.

Power users like myself will always find a way to get their favourite system up and running. I agree with Canonical and their policy of "fuck you, we're doing that no matter what you tell us", since their current user base is almost 100% power users and you can't really grow out of that niche if you don't take bold decisions. We will probably leave ubuntu because of it (I'm already on Arch Linux on most of my machines) but if they manage to attract a good slice of the market it will be a great thing for Linux as a whole.

They probably shouldn't try to sell themselves as a "cheap mac", but that's another story.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#23

Post by jiggy2011 »

sp332 wrote: post #6
bigfoot wrote: post #2

"As for Unity; its incomplete, buggy and complicated." -- four lines later: "The non geek will love Unity. Its simple to use [...]". The author fails to be consistent even in a single paragraph. Even the post's title contradicts its content.

Note the present tense in the first quote and the future tense in the second. Unity will be a very user-friendly system once they fix more of the bugs.

The problem is, by the time they have fixed the bugs and made it nice they will spot something else shiny and start again.

So you'll get 2 or 3 nice stable releases before being baptized by fire again.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#24

Post by jiggy2011 »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #13

There is no indication whatsoever that Ubuntu will be able to reach "average joe", and building a product for audience you can't reach is pretty pointless. The only audience really using Ubuntu is one consisting of coders and geeks. There's a famous russian chinese saying: When a rhino stares at the moon - he is wasting his spleen flowers.

I agree, if they had taken advantage of the fact that their competitors are spending lots of resources on simpler OSs for tablets etc and concentrated on providing the best Power User experience out there and spent the time they spent on Unity building really useful software I think there would be more of a business model for them.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#25

Post by jiggy2011 »

daliusd wrote: post #10

I consider myself power user. I am developer, I have experience with Windows, Mac OS X, BSD OSes and Linuxes. I have actually tried various desktop environments and WMs (including several tiling managers, I have used awesome WM for half a year). Overall I really love experimenting with software to the very deep level. I have tried Unity and I really like it. It is simple and it does what I need. It respects my screen…

Well for one example: I use 2 large monitors to work with and run allot of applications at the same time.

With gnome 2 I can put a seperate taskbar on each monitor and switch quickly between tasks with the keyboard or mouse. I also have another panel with buttons to launch my most common apps. Small amount of mouse movement and 1 click.

With unity I have to drag the mouse right to the far left or my furthest left monitor , possibly scroll through the icons , select the app I want, click it and then I have to select the window I want. Lots of mouse movement and 2-3 clicks.

Another problem I get is when launching a GUI app from a shell script , I load the app but then cannot dock it because it doesn't understand the relationship between the shell script and the app. This means I need seperate icons on my desktop to launch some apps.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#26

Post by cs702 »

Despite the occasional glitches, I've come to like Unity a lot.

Unity is invisible when I'm working. It shows up only when I invoke it with the key. It uses screen real estate very efficiently. It lets me open my most often used apps with only two keystrokes (I've mapped to to my most used apps). It makes everything else quickly reachable with a few keystrokes via and . It lets me quickly divide screen real estate among windows with and the numeric keypad. The next version (12.04) looks set to add many features specific to multi-display setups.

It's great for people who want their desktop environment to get out of their way and prefer to use keyboard instead of mouse.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#27

Post by jiggy2011 »

kmfrk wrote: post #19
gbog wrote: post #11

> The non geek will [...] love the gloss that Unity brings to Ubuntu. I don't know. It seems common sense that "non geeks" (hear, common people) like glossy things. After all, the Miss Universe thing has some success and is pure gloss. But I think it can also be an observation bias, or the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. For instance, we check what people like to watch on TV, but what the people a…

I also think that he is mistaking "gloss" with "UX that won't make you want to pull your hair out". Creating a good experience has more to do with creating some good interface metaphors that look good and work well than to just emulate known platforms like Windows and Mac.

Entirely agree, I think pherhaps when people describe apple products for example as "glossy" or "shiny" a large part of that is because they like the overall experience of the hardware + software but don't know enough Computer / UI jargon to describe exactly why they like it so they pick up on something concrete that they like such as colours and materials.

It's like if you ask somebody why they find a woman attractive they are more likely to talk about her breasts , smile or legs rather than mentioning things like distance between the eyes, nose shape or cheekbone structure.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#28

Post by jiggy2011 »

karterk wrote: post #21
arocks wrote: post #16

There are two reasons why an average person learns computers and uses a particular OS: * Even if it is not very intuitive, it is universally used (Windows) * Even if it is not universally used, it is intuitive (Mac OS) Linux is currently, IMHO, in the middle. This brings up a lot of issues from an average Joe's perspective: some hardware configurations do not work perfectly (especially laptops), time spent in learnin…

> Even if it is not universally used, it is intuitive (Mac OS) I often hear people saying that the Mac is intuitive. Is there actually proper proof for this?

I'm not sure about intuitive (when I use OS X I still have to lookup on google how to do things) but it is more discoverable in my limited experience. There are just less buttons and menus than there are in Windows, Linux desktop sort of has this advantage too although often many of the things that would have been done with the extra buttons are done with the Terminal.

Also OS X is generally allot more consistent in it's interface than Linux is.

Re: Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

#30

Post by guard-of-terra »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #24
guard-of-terra wrote: post #13

There is no indication whatsoever that Ubuntu will be able to reach "average joe", and building a product for audience you can't reach is pretty pointless. The only audience really using Ubuntu is one consisting of coders and geeks. There's a famous russian chinese saying: When a rhino stares at the moon - he is wasting his spleen flowers.

I agree, if they had taken advantage of the fact that their competitors are spending lots of resources on simpler OSs for tablets etc and concentrated on providing the best Power User experience out there and spent the time they spent on Unity building really useful software I think there would be more of a business model for them.

I can't contemplate how on earth they might reach tablets either.

(Not ones hand-made for 125$, obviously, that one ran Windows anyway).

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