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(Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

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Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#51

Post by windsurfer »

spiffworks wrote: post #40
freakwit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, Unity broke all my keyboard shortcuts. I gave it a fair shake (used it during the beta, tried not to mark it down for bugginess) and am back to classic. For my settings, multitasking with the keyboard is very easy - just press super and the relevant workspace number - just press super and the relevant character to launch a particular application

Heh. Close to six months in Gnome and I never realised that those shortcuts existed. Apparently, I have severely underestimated the Gnome desktop for a long time.

Most people have...

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#53

Post by rjbond3rd »

drdaeman wrote: post #30
mkelly wrote: post #4

One of the great things about Linux in general is that this is non-news plenty of users who don't use the default window manager anyway. Prefer something else? Just switch. You're not married to the window manager like you are on OS X and Windows. I'm very happy for that. (Edit: I should clarify that I'm writing this in anticipations that the general sentiment will be that Unity is terrible. If you don't think it's t…

One bad thing about GNU/Linux is with the current direction of things, at some point in time we won't have this easy anymore. IMHO the complexity gets a bit too high, and cost of maintaining forks gets too big, so even free licensing does not really matter anymore. One has to be very motivated, to keep up with his fork.

What's the complexity you're referring to? I don't see it.

Having lots of choice for window managers is decades old and completely normal. It's modular and it continues to get easier. I don't see any burden but perhaps I misunderstand.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#55

Post by drdaeman »

rjbond3rd wrote: post #53
drdaeman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One bad thing about GNU/Linux is with the current direction of things, at some point in time we won't have this easy anymore. IMHO the complexity gets a bit too high, and cost of maintaining forks gets too big, so even free licensing does not really matter anymore. One has to be very motivated, to keep up with his fork.

What's the complexity you're referring to? I don't see it. Having lots of choice for window managers is decades old and completely normal. It's modular and it continues to get easier. I don't see any burden but perhaps I misunderstand.

I were thinking of complexity of patching the software and keeping up with upstream (i.e. maintaining a fork).

I just have a feeling (highly subjective, sorry) that some major GNU/Linux distros (especially Ubuntu) are turning from a distribution of loose coupled exchangeable components to monolithic tightly-integrated products.

Well, Debian seems perfectly fine in this regard, so even as Ubuntu user (for now) I don't care much about the situation. Sorry - I were wrong writing like this was about the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#57

Post by jamesgeck0 »

igouy wrote: post #49
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The menubar is at the top of the screen because it's easier to click them. Fitt's Law[1] says that the larger something is, the easier it is to target. When something is against the edge of the screen, you can't move the mouse past it, so it has infinite width or height (or both; corners are nifty). By placing the menu at the top of the screen, you go from a clickable area with a height of about 20px to a clickable a…

Even on my smaller than average 1280x1080 monitor, the top of the screen can be a long way from the current mouse position - notice that Fitts Law factors in that Distance. (And as you've brought up Fitts Law, think about what that says about the very much smaller target provided by those Unity overlay scroll thumbs compared to a window size scrollbar.)

The scroll thumbs actually have about the same area as the scrollbar. Maybe larger, because the little tab pops up under wherever the mouse is, so you don't need to seek for it vertically like with a normal scrollbar. In theory.

In practice, they're too fiddly, sometimes appearing on the inside, sometimes on the outside, and requiring you to move your mouse in and out of the window frame. If they get that sorted, they'll be on par with (if not better than) normal scrollbars, imho.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#58

Post by AlisdairO »

lloeki wrote: post #50
AlisdairO wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first started using macs, I hated the group-by-application idea too, but I've come to prefer it. Combined with application-specific expose, I find it scales so much better for when I have over 10 windows open on a non-huge screen - which I do most of the time. When I go back to a WM with a list of lots of windows open, I find myself hunting and pecking amongst all these tiny, almost indistinguishable icons, an…

I Cmd+M the ones I want to keep around but don't plan to use right now. They go in a smaller mode below a divide line on Exposé. Also I tell the Dock to "minimize into the application icon". Document window + Application icon + Exposé can really scale up, to the point I rarely ever use Spaces (when I was an avid user of virtual desktops under Linux).

That seems like a god way of working - I might try modifying my UI-driving in line with that :-)
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