Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret • Hacker News Board

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#21

Post by icelancer » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:01 PM UTC

benologist wrote: post #6

Rewrite of http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 written and submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com) employees that spam HN. Their other employees/accounts include: - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 (their social media manager) - http://news.ycombinator…

Yeah, wow. Just checked his submission history. Gotta love these blogspambots.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#22

Post by donniezazen » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:03 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #16

donniezazen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration…

Thanks, one of the biggest problems with Gnome 3 is that there is not even one distribution that actively promotes Gnome 3, get rid of kinks, themes it, and make it look like modern DE/OS. Fedora is a lot of work, Arch Linux believes in KISS. On the other hand Ubuntu does everything for you.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#23

Post by wtetzner » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:05 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #16

donniezazen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration…

It seems weird to me that power users need so much GUI support. I find Gnome 3 very convenient. If I need to launch a program, I press the super key, start typing the name, and press enter. It's like using IDO mode in Emacs.

As far as I'm concerned, most of the stuff they removed was just noise.

There are a couple things I dislike about Gnome 3 though. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to set the Date/Time format. Also, it's annoying that you have to install the Gnome Tweak Tool to set things like focus follows mouse, instead of it just being part of the Gnome settings.

But these are pretty minor things.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#24

Post by BruceIV » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:07 PM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #10

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#25

Post by viraptor » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:08 PM UTC

I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta testers will be good for the project.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#26

Post by jfoutz » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:09 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #16

donniezazen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration…

Oh, right the guy who said: "Unity 3D behaves spectacularly on all tested hardware, including old and new graphics cards. The performance is quite good, the responsiveness is great, and you even get reduced power consumption."

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#27

Post by BruceIV » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:10 PM UTC

I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a pain).

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#28

Post by freehunter » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:11 PM UTC

imchillyb wrote: post #9

IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche. This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the por…

Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly the same as they've always been.

This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true.

How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#29

Post by viraptor » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:13 PM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #10

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

Xubuntu has some tiny bugs like anything else, but I can't say I've seen anything annoying so far.

Re: Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

#30

Post by mbell » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 7:13 PM UTC

imchillyb wrote: post #9

IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche. This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the por…

> This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want.

Who do you think the Ubuntu user base is? I'm willing to bet the vast majority are not developers locked into the gnome 2 style desktop environment as you appear to be claiming.

> His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind.

How dare he make choices he believes will benefit the company he has personally dumped massive piles of cash into. Really, what an asshole.

> That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.

The gnome dev process was a train wreck, KDE is a bloated mess, and xfce is devoted to being minimalist. His only choices were forking gnome 2 or building their own DE. I really can't blame him for not wanting to take over a massive existing code base. Particularly one that is locked into a desktop metaphor that doesn't have a long term future for the masses.

> All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.

What makes you think people like you (developers, presumably) are the target market for Ubuntu? They aren't, they never were, ubuntu has always had the goal of being a distro for non linux geeks. Its pretty clear looking at the mass market that the standard desktop metaphor is on its way out for general purpose computing needs.