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Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

dehype.org

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Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#51

Post by ceol »

Everyone has hit on the same issues I found with the article, but these parts bugged me.

First:

>Apple’s software is hard to customize and can be extremely clunky and annoying to use — that is, if you use your own brain instead of blindly buying the hype.

Am I reading too much into it, or is that very insulting to Mac users? I'm not sure where I'm buying into the hype by preferring the look and feel of OS X 10.7 to Windows 7. The author seems to subscribe to the "if you like something I don't like, you must be inferior" school of thought.

Second:

>A very good example of this is iTunes and the way the iPhone forces you, even today, to plug in and sync everything through one horridly clumsy application.

iTunes is in no way a great application, but the author has made it apparent he comments on things with which he has no experience: iOS devices haven't required users to sync through iTunes since iOS 5. You do it all on the device a la Android.

With those issues and the various points other commenters raise, I don't see how this article is anything more than a rant by a person who sees simplicity and usability as an encroaching evil.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#52

Post by lovskogen »

acabal wrote: post #44
asadotzler wrote: post #12

"The 'usability studies' that get quoted whenever I have talked to people from Canonical about this have participation numbers that are laughably low. Having a focus group with two or three dozen hand-picked candidates to 'evaluate' complex user experience changes like these does not seem convincing to me. It seems ludicrous." Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often…

I actually think he's right in dismissing those studies as ludicrous. You can't honestly take one or two (that I can recall) "studies" with only a dozen participants and then brand your product as "usability tested." That's just paying lip service. When you're changing a complex, deeply-ingrained interface for hundreds of thousands of people, doing two studies on a dozen people--and AFTER the fact!--and then calling…

Usability guru Jackob Nielsen disagrees with you and the author: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#53

Post by kstenerud »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18
notatoad wrote: post #4

more accurate title: "ubuntu: i don't like what you're doing anymore." ubuntu isn't doing anything wrong. they're not doing things the old way, nor are they pretending to. it's top down control with unilateral decisions, but that's what's necessary to move forward. for a product to come out well, decisions have to be made. if you listen to everybody, you get a product that sacrifices quality in favour of not pissing…

But the person making the decisions not a designer. When you load Unity for the first time you have to be taken aback, or at least I was, but how glaringly ugly it is.

"But the person making the decisions not a designer."

Who is making the design decisions (what's their name)?

How do you know this person is not a designer?

How do you know that there's only one person making the decisions?

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#54

Post by kijin »

asadotzler wrote: post #12

"The 'usability studies' that get quoted whenever I have talked to people from Canonical about this have participation numbers that are laughably low. Having a focus group with two or three dozen hand-picked candidates to 'evaluate' complex user experience changes like these does not seem convincing to me. It seems ludicrous." Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often…

> Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often does produce useful results is enough to discredit the rest of this guy's rant.

In other news, dismissing an entire article based on what is only a minor detail in the overall argument is enough to discredit the rest of your rant, right?

On some websites, people think they look smart if they point out a single flaw in a long article and pronounce that they "stopped reading right there". Happens all the time in Reddit. But I'd expect better from a top comment in an HN thread. Yes, the article has flaws. Lots of flaws, actually. But discredit the whole thing because of one point that isn't even the main point?

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#55

Post by SkyMarshal »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #34
AUmrysh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that users can understand when the interface is poorly designed because they have to interact with it constantly. Sure, there are parts of UX that most users never think about, but when something has been overlooked, like when you can't move the launcher sidebar to the bottom, or the settings are confusing to get to, there's a usability problem. I think the real thing about Ubuntu, however, is that…

It makes very little sense to pick a distro if you dislike their default interface. There are too many choices, or you can pick a distro like Arch that is WM agnostic.

It does if you value other aspects of it: Debian package management, Ubuntu PPA's, Wayland (when that arrives), popular apps like Spotify target Ubuntu and Fedora and don't 'just work' on other distro's, etc.

Default interface is just one aspect of the decision, and some of the others may outweigh it even for those who hate the interface direction.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#56

Post by wmf »

kstenerud wrote: post #53
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the person making the decisions not a designer. When you load Unity for the first time you have to be taken aback, or at least I was, but how glaringly ugly it is.

"But the person making the decisions not a designer." Who is making the design decisions (what's their name)? How do you know this person is not a designer? How do you know that there's only one person making the decisions?

With the title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, I think it's clear who's making the decisions.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#57

Post by oakgrove »

kristianp wrote: post #41
hackoder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is fantastic. I tend to stay on testing (wheezy atm) because it is fairly modern yet stable. Stability is the biggest problem with Ubuntu I believe- people will generally adapt to the UI changes that canonical is making, but breaking stability is a complete no-no. Even today, on Ubuntu 11.10, Unity shows wierd bugs time and time again. Apps like VirtualBox and KeePassx will show multiple times (or just disappe…

I'm looking around for alternatives too after using 11.10. I have been happy using Ubuntu for about 3 years. Is there anything Ubuntu adds that I would miss in changing to Debian? Not including the Unity interface of course.

The main difference is Debian isn't quite as user friendly out of the box. Sudo isn't set up for you for example so you'll be in for a surprise the first time you try to use it. Also, Debian isn't quite as pretty. The fonts aren't as good and the desktop looks quite a bit dated. The upside is Debian at least for me is much faster. I don't know what Canonical did to Ubuntu 11.10 but it drug for me. Also, Debian doesn't crash at all at least for me whereas Ubuntu did suffer some random instability.

That having been said, I like the idea of Ubuntu. I like the fact that they are trying to move the Linux desktop forward and I will happily return if they can get Unity straightened out. As it stands though, I'm a content Debian user for the forseeable future.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#58

Post by SkyMarshal »

hackoder wrote: post #24
hsmyers wrote: post #5

As we get closer to the next big version (wherein most of the apocalyptic changes take place) I'll be reading HN for useful lists of alternatives. Anyone with useful suggestions can chip in now of course :)

Debian is fantastic. I tend to stay on testing (wheezy atm) because it is fairly modern yet stable. Stability is the biggest problem with Ubuntu I believe- people will generally adapt to the UI changes that canonical is making, but breaking stability is a complete no-no. Even today, on Ubuntu 11.10, Unity shows wierd bugs time and time again. Apps like VirtualBox and KeePassx will show multiple times (or just disappe…

Interesting, I've been using 11.10 on a netbook since last fall, and on a new laptop since January, incluing daily use of VirtualBox and KeePass(2, not x), two of my top 10 most frequently used apps. Zero stability issues, I've been very happy with it.

I wonder if there's some hardware issues, or something else you've got installed that's causing those problems.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#59

Post by voidr »

tikhonj wrote: post #39
voidr wrote: post #20

Canonical wants to create somethingm the OS Mark dreamed of, just like the GNOME and KDE people, what's wrong with that? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ― Henry Ford Sometimes you need to decide whats best for the user. Most users do not want choices, most users want something consistent that works and that is what Canonical is trying to deliver.

I've always been confused by the "choices" argument: it seems to be a false dichotomy. Why not have good defaults but then let determined users change whatever they want? If you don't care, you just use the system as is; if you are consistently annoyed by something, you can dive in and fix it.

That is what Canonical is pushing for, you get Unity and GTK, if you don't like it, you are probably one apt-get install away from changing it. To accomodate Ubuntu to my needs I hack the hell out of it, it takes me hours to get it right, to make OS X work the way I like it's just an hour or less, but I have more power over Ubuntu than OS X.

The problem however with choice is maintainability and duplication. Do we really need so many window managers? Why not have only one that actually works? While it's cool to have multiply desktop environments for almost every distro, it has it's toll, somebody has to maintain and test those. What would we have if we had combined the effort that was put into Libre Office, Abiword, KOffice, Open Office and the rest?

Don't get me wrong I love having control over every bit of the OS and I love being able to choose, but I feel we could sacrifice some of it it for the greater good.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#60

Post by hackoder »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #58
hackoder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is fantastic. I tend to stay on testing (wheezy atm) because it is fairly modern yet stable. Stability is the biggest problem with Ubuntu I believe- people will generally adapt to the UI changes that canonical is making, but breaking stability is a complete no-no. Even today, on Ubuntu 11.10, Unity shows wierd bugs time and time again. Apps like VirtualBox and KeePassx will show multiple times (or just disappe…

Interesting, I've been using 11.10 on a netbook since last fall, and on a new laptop since January, incluing daily use of VirtualBox and KeePass(2, not x), two of my top 10 most frequently used apps. Zero stability issues, I've been very happy with it. I wonder if there's some hardware issues, or something else you've got installed that's causing those problems.

Hmm. This was a fresh vanilla install that I tried recently on the same hardware that runs debian wheezy. I wanted to have all the benefits of ubuntu's large community (PPAs for a lot of sofware etc, plus I do generally agree with the direction that ubuntu is heading in), but the lack of stability was just killer.
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