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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

#41

Post by jiggy2011 »

daliusd wrote: post #33
jiggy2011 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

OK. I see how it can be problem with two monitors but aren't shortcuts like (Start+1) helping in this case? While I still see problem with eyes movement. Lastly I'm against idea using multiple monitors so I don't feel competent enough to comment. Problem with GUI apps from shell script is bug in my opinion but I was not affected by it yet.

I imagine allot of power users do use 2 monitors , especially now that they are so cheap. And I don't just mean developers either, I've seen plenty of estate agents , accountants , lawyers etc using 2 monitors with perhaps a large spreadsheet open on 1 and their email correspondence or web browser open on another.

To be honest I don't know what the Start + 1 shortcut does, so perhaps it would help or perhaps not. If you have to use keyboard shortcuts though I don't really see how this is simpler than the taskbar where I have a clear list of everything I'm doing on the most spacious axis of my monitor.

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

#42

Post by jiggy2011 »

yummies wrote: post #29

So to sum this article up: 'unity is awesome and will finally let non geeks use linux, but any current linux users should move on to other distros.' despite how illogical that sounds, that may very well be cannonical's game plan.

This is a pretty horrible plan, all the power users who helped report & fix bugs + answer questions on forums/wikis for ubuntu will move onto something else so canonical will be on their own for providing testing and support which will either slow down their release cycles allot (no bad thing). Or they will keep pushing buggy untested software straight into the hands of peoples grandmas.

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

#43

Post by ssp »

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…

So I think one need to avoid clichés and presuppositions about "non geeks".

Indeed. And the concept of dividing the world into geeks and non-geeks is flawed to begin with, because non-geek covers so many different kinds of people, like kids, chemistry professors, Belgians, housewives, the mentally retarded, taxi drivers, muslims, the poor, the rich, and on and on. The "average user" doesn't exist (and isn't called Joe).

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

#44

Post by jiggy2011 »

asto wrote: post #36

Alienating current users (geeks) for prospective users (non-geeks) is always a bad move regardless of what the product is.

Very true, Apple does a fair job (mostly) in avoiding this and even Microsoft aren't terrible at it. There's just as many hardcore developers who love their macbooks as there are english lit students.

The idea that you have to somehow have an apartheid for users is silly.

If I trade an economical Toyota for a Ferrari the mission statement of the car may be very different but the basic interface (wheel + 3 pedals) is the same. Apart from knowing that the gas is going to be way more responsive on the ferrari you don't really need to re-learn driving just to switch.

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

#45

Post by rsheridan6 »

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.

They did (sort of) reach a mass audience through Dell's Ubuntu laptop program in 2007. It didn't quite work out then because Ubuntu wasn't ready (I owned one, it was not ready for prime time). It still isn't, but it's closer. If it was ready, then avoiding the Windows tax would be a good enough reason for retailers to push Ubuntu.

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

#46

Post by jiggy2011 »

rufugee wrote: post #38
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…

Regarding an OS being intuitive...my wife is typically the ultimate test. She's not a power user...she just wants to surf the web, process photos, and email. She also has very low tolerance for UX deficiencies. I've had Windows 7, Ubuntu with Gnome 2, and OSX Snow Leopard and Lion in front of her. She was ok with Windows 7...it was tolerable, but we hit our first virus soon in and I ordered it off the machine. She li…

I'm not so sure about "eating memory" with programs still running. I'm no OS expert but I'm pretty sure that assuming that app isn't doing anything then it's pages will be swapped out to disk (in essence , quitting the application from a memory perspective) if there are more pressing requirements for the memory.

What is the technical difference between a program that is running or not running? As far as I can tell it depends on whether it has an entry in the scheduler , performance then should only vary based on how many O(n) (or worse) routines there are in the scheduler where n is the number of processes including ones that are sleeping?

I think that measuring swap usage is a more important metric than RAM usage.

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

#47

Post by rbanffy »

Anderkent wrote: post #39
danking00 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thirded, Geeks are coding away at some application feature, managing servers, updating designs, watching some TV show, browsing the web, discussing project goals over skype with team members and other mundane things – all this on a slow day. I disagree. I have three windows open. Google Chrome (with, unfortunately for my productivity, Hacker News open), Emacs, and a Gnome Terminal (I X forward my Emacs session from m…

Alt-tab works, but alt-shift-tab does not - or at least did not work for me when I upgraded. Not wanting to waste time looking for a workaround, I just reverted to my backup and forgot about Unity.

What Alt-Shift-Tab did?

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

#48

Post by technomancy »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #28
karterk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think most of the time when people say "intuitive" they mean "discoverable". I'm not even sure "intuitive" is a property software can possess.

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

#49

Post by kitsune_ »

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…

I agree, I don't understand the hatred for Unity. I've used Linux since Slackware 3.0 or so...

My girl friend, who is an Apple user, was pretty impressed by the user interface after I installed 11.10 on my Thinkpad.

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

#50

Post by jedbrown »

danking00 wrote: post #31
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…

Thirded, Geeks are coding away at some application feature, managing servers, updating designs, watching some TV show, browsing the web, discussing project goals over skype with team members and other mundane things – all this on a slow day. I disagree. I have three windows open. Google Chrome (with, unfortunately for my productivity, Hacker News open), Emacs, and a Gnome Terminal (I X forward my Emacs session from m…

I typically have Chromium, a urxvt running tmux with 5-15 "windows" (a couple of which go to remote machines), two workspaces of Emacs, and half a dozen open pdfs of journal articles that I may be looking back at. When debugging parallel jobs, I may have a few more tmux instances. I find that Xmonad offers the most efficient window management in this scenario. I currently run it with Gnome3 in legacy mode because all I want from Gnome is the toolbar and session management.
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