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48 Hours Enduring Ubuntu 5.04
ceswiedler writes "Matthew Thomas lists 69 interface issues he has with the new Ubuntu release "Hoary Hedgehog", ranging from desktop and Nautilius behavior to Firefox and Evolution. They're serious interface issues, he claims, but he also says that Ubuntu 5.04 "is the first Linux-based system I have encountered that is tolerable enough for me to use for everyday work." That's a rather backhanded compliment...the suprising thing is that he's an interface designer working for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu." As Thomas mentions, "Many of these flaws probably exist in other Gnome-based systems, and some of them also exist in Microsoft Windows and/or Mac OS."
Apparently, usernames are design flaws: "The login screen uses the term "username"." As is rebooting the computer: "The login screen uses the term "reboot". (My shoes are fine as they are, thanks.)"
http://unelite.freelinuxhost.com - Rock/Scissors/Paper and RPGs shouldn't mix.
Now I understand which Mac users people are making fun of when they say bad things about Apple.
Obviously this guy is an extreme case but has he used computers for a total of 96 hours or are all people from NZ like this?
This guy is unbelievably picky. I haven't noticed ANY of this, and even now that he's pointed it out I still don't get why it's an issue.
I'm a strong proponent of making a system as easy to use as possible, but it seems to me this guy is going by the book and needs to, well, to get a life.
Every UI can be imrpoved, but it seems he's more interested in finding things that don't meet certain technical spects than considering whether or not a system is actually comfortable and usable for the users.
He was the scourge of the mozilla project until he finally left in a huff.
He's a whiner and a complainer who thinks that the concept of compromise is an exercise for the weak. Put simply, he doesn't live in the real world.
I could write 69 reasons that any software sucks, that doesn't mean I'm someone who deserves a story on slashdot.
I hope Canonical isn't paying him much, seeing how the vast majority (all?) of the stuff he's bitching about is either GNOME or other specific apps and has nothing to do with Ubuntu.
And even if it were Ubuntu, I'm more worried about hardware detection than about 'shut down' being mispelled as shutdown'.
The guy is a genius. Sometimes I feel like compiling a list like this myself, but I rarely install a system from scratch, so it is difficult to point them back to a single source.
:-).
But Linux needs more people like. Interface bugs are bugs, because the confuse the user, and (thus) the software does not work for them. Calling the user "stupid" wont help either, because you are still stuck with the same user
The most obvious UI bug I remember is the GNOME pop up box when you exit a program without saving. They keep changing it, but it still makes me hesitate every time. It is just extremely nonintuitive. (Yes, and MacOS also took many revisions before they got it right. Microsoft this didn't get it...) Openoffice is a lot better, as is KDE.
Now if the developer would take these issues serious and fix them, Desktop Linux would be a lot closer already.
Judging from the complaints I'm seeing so far in the postings to this story, the issues that have been brought up over and over again with respect to usability in F/OSS software are still alive and well here.
Which is, of course, not a surprise to anyone literate.
The thing with this list, and I'll agree that TFA is pretty picky, is that they are all little things that, much like the Uncanny Valley, are the key to making the step from half-baked to user-friendly. Bear in mind, please, that I am writing this from a 96-hour old installation of Hoary, myself, and I'm quite pleased with it. However, the issues he has mentioned overlap rather thoroughly with issues that I've had.
I'd like to see more open source software make it in the real world -- I've tried to get my girlfriend to use this laptop, but, well, I've lost that battle from the first time she had to ask me how to make movies play (and we're not talking about someone clueless here, either!). So, something with a bit more polish is going on here this weekend, and I'm back to using the laptop for only web surfing and movie watching.
Anyway...
Seriously, guys. Yes, he's a nitpicker. But he's also right. Polish is everything, and polish means picking at every little thing.
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if people weren't so goddamned stupid.
"By default, when opening a folder window, the parent window closes automatically. This surprises the sort of people who will never be confident enough to investigate Nautilus's preferences, and who expect things on their own computer to stay where they left them. It is unfixably inconsistent -- it does not happen for the Computer window, or for the Desktop, or for opening documents rather than folders. And it dramatically reduces the usefulness of the file manager for managing files, as it is extremely difficult to get source and destination folders open simultaneously." this is annoying as hell. very easy to fix, but having that as the default behavior is just stupid.
because for someone so keen on user interface, I can't seem to figure out where on that page I'm supposed to click to get to the home page of his own website...
Incorrect menu item capitalization is found throughout the top-level menus: "Four-in-a-row", "XSane Image scanning program", "Recording level monitor", "Volume monitor", "Run as different user", and "Shared folders".
/. posters have commented so far, it looks like this guy is simply trolling.
I think this guy is a little over the top. With the exception of XSane, the capitalization is correct. At least it is in my writing styleguide.
He should also check a dictionary.
That alert has a button which misspells "Shut Down" as "Shutdown".
Shutdown is correct.
It's also unfortunate that he's not differentiating between a package standard (that would appear in most distributions) and a specific choice made by the Ubuntu team. For example, he's picking on the Gnome footprint logo by the Applications menu.
From other
--- Dan
as previously stated by many, Ubuntu is still a child. A very well liked child, but still a child. Second release, Warty Warthog being the first of course, Id say they are doing a fairly well and good job. Good enough for http://distrowatch.com to top them on the list of per hits on that site. Clearly good enough to stray some Deb Maintainers to the project.
That be said, its true......
There are a number of issues in the mend that need to be corrected before you take an end-user and put them infront of it. Still, I think its a very respectable start.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Perhaps in the future.
But the thing is, he says at the end: """ My boss, by the way, is Mark Shuttleworth. I'm working for his company, Canonical, as an interface designer. """
After almost 60 issues on general interface design and usability issues, he says he works for the promoter of this project. In a way, he's telling that these issues will not be overlooked in the future and future Ubuntu releases will try to solve this problem. And this brings me some confidence in the Ubuntu projects (although I may try Kubuntu, as I am biased toward KDE).
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
26. The dialog for choosing a session similarly includes "Last" without telling me which that was, and "Default System Session" without telling me which that is. It also offers "GNOME" and "Failsafe Gnome"; failsafe behavior, apparently, is achieved partly by not SHOUTING.
Given that he's spent much of the previous 25 nitpickings whinging about capitalization, I can't help but wonder if GNOME was written as 'Gnome', would he complain that it was incorrectly capitalized, being an acronym and all?
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Defect reports are by and large nitpicks. Many of these are even bigger than nitpicks. But that's what UI polish is all about. You get your car detailed, you don't expect them to leave a few streaks and smudges here and there, do you?
And he wasn't exactly using multiple exclamation points or making comments on how this rendered the whole thing unusable or shoddy. He simply listed defects and sometimes the reason this constituted a defect.
It's pathetic, the way some people create this personal attachment to software like this. It's not like he whitegloved your damn homes. If the GNOME developers share the reaction of the slashdot crowd, then frankly I too think he should shut up -- because he's otherwise wasting time and effort on a project that doesn't deserve any.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
This guy seems to have a strange fetish.
I knew Ubuntu was sexy but damn!
My install got into a endless loop at the "Add users" part of the install. It kept coming back to the "Full Name," username, password dialogs no matter how I entered the info.
/home a vfat (fat32) file system because I wanted it to be a common area to share files with Windows. Permissions and ownership don't exist on fat. I unmounted /home and remounted the fat partition on a different mount point under a different name and all was well....after I spent another significant amount of time figuring put visudo and sudousers.
After rebooting, it complained that I didn't set up a non privileged user and prompted me to enter a root password.
When I tried running the adduser from the admin menus it did the same. Running adduser from the command line I saw it was giving an error when trying to chown and chgrp the user's new home directory.
I had made
Yes, I will report the bug once I get a round tuit....I just went to report it and see it has already been reported as Bug 5374 for debian-installer, which is good, because I was convinced these kinds of problems only happen to me.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I guess you need to be Matthew Thomas to appear on Slashdot's main page whining about stuff like:
10.
36. Items can't be renamed by clicking on their names and typing!
Seriously, life must be a total nightmare for this guy. Apparently he spends his first 48 hours with any OS enduring it. My favorite quote: "I have encountered that is tolerable enough for me to use for everyday work. That is a great achievement". No sh*t!
I like this comment:
Gaim displays my own AIM account in my buddy list. This is not very useful, as I don't send instant messages to myself.
Well then hotshot, try not adding your OWN name to your buddy list. GAIM just imports your aim buddy list, it doesn't add anything by itself.
Chat windows have a "Send" button, which will slow some people down by misleading them into thinking that they need to click the button every time they type something, instead of pressing Enter.
Uh..Ok. And I guess gaim shouldn't have buttons text formatting because you can use html tags. And web browsers shouldn't have a back button because you can use backspace
The login screen uses the term "reboot". (My shoes are fine as they are, thanks.)
Oh, your a clever one.
In Ubuntu, telling the computer to shut down takes me about 35 seconds: choose "Log Out", wait about 25 seconds for the logout process, then click "Shut Down" and confirm it in an alert.
Now this is just a flat out lie. Ubuntu has a shutdown option when you hit "log-out". You don't have to go back out to gdm at all.
"15. Dialogs themselves are not modal: they let you continue to use the parent window. This allows such nonsensical situations as a "Save as JPEG" dialog for a Gimp image that no longer exists, and a Print dialog for a Web page that is no longer open or even still in Firefox's cache."
Fair enough, but sometimes dialog boxes should be modeless (a find/replace dialog box in a text editor for instance). Remember Larry Tessler (from Apple and PARC) used to wear a t-shirt saying "DON'T MODE ME IN" - in general, modal interfaces (including dialog boxes) suck. They have their place but noone who knows anything about user interfaces should make such a blanket statement.
"16. The mouse pointer does not hide itself when it is stationary and I start using the keyboard. As a result, it frequently gets in the way of what I am typing or reading."
Hiding the mouse pointer completely is usually a pretty stupid idea. It's quicker for the user to move the pointer out of the way than it is to find a hidden pointer when they need to use the mouse again...
1. Some of his complaints are well-explained. Others assume the reader has a background in interface design. For example, what is wrong with using "username" and "Reboot"? Feel free to add your own.
1. Every window that has menus puts them in a separate menu bar inside the window. [...] Ubuntu is not entirely ignorant of Fitt's Law
What he neglects in his analysis is that (1) that's where most users expect menu bars to be, and familiarity usually trumps Fitt's law, and (2) Fitt's law is a red herring anyway. Designing a UI based on Fitt's law is like picking a car based on the size of its spoiler or picking a girlfriend based on the size of her boobs--someone may have enough of a fetish with it to do it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
While a few of the comments suggest minor useful improvements (e.g., multiple new windows should be cascaded, not stacked), much of rest of the analysis is filled with many more similarly irrelevant comments. And many (most?) of those comments apply to proprietary desktops as well.
The question isn't how many nits one can pick with Ubuntu, the question is whether it is good enough for regular users, and I think it is. In fact, one can even argue that it is easier to use and more consistent than the proprietary alternatives.
Yes, he's a nitpicker. But he's also right.
No, he's not. Well, not all the time. Some (but far from the majority) of his examples are just wrong, intended to dumb things down to suit newbies and newbies only (and sometimes the overzealos Apple fan, but why would one use Linux anyway?). In fact, you change users when switching to root. The user is an important concept in unix, and although it seems quaint, people should learn about it.
Actually, if he bothered to learn things, the "deep design flaw in Unix-derived systems" he speaks of in #27 would go away. You have to know how to fix stuff if you want to fix it no matter what OS you run. Personally, I wouldn't dare to delete a file used by the login process, no matter how intuitive it looks.
Some of his points are just meaningless, like complaining that xscreensaver shows a clock for no apparent reason. He also laughs off security warnings. This is reason enough to shoot the guy.
But yes, Nautilus is garbage. It was even worse.
In fact, you change users when switching to root.
No, it's like Apple's permission dialog or using "Run As..." in Windows XP. You don't change users, you just give the computer the authorization it needs to perform a specific task. Changing users imply that you logged out (or are using fast-user-switching.)
If Ubuntu's "Change User" dialog *actually changed users*, he'd see his desktop icons and backdrop change to the ones set by "root," he'd see all his settings for applications change to the ones set by "root," etc.
He's not complaining that the login screen in "xscreensaver" shows a clock, but that it's entirely different from the normal login screen in the system. Why should two screens that perform the exact same task look and behave differently? That's confusing to users, and it needs to be fixed.
(Even if you're coming from a pure "Unix hacker" point of view, you'd still say that it qualifies as duplication of effort and still say it needs to be fixed... why have two pieces of code that do the same task instead of having one piece of code that's called from bother locations?)
Now I agree that some of his complaints are off-base. For instance, menu capitalization is pretty arbitrary-- as long as it's consistant. Saying all menus must be in titlecase (although that's the standard in MacOS X and Windows) is wrong, but saying all menus must be in the *same* case is correct. But most of what he's saying are problems that actually need to be fixed, period, end of story.
Comment of the year
Of course that paragraph should be:
(Even if you're coming from a pure "Unix hacker" point of view, you'd still say that it qualifies as duplication of effort and still say it needs to be fixed... why have two pieces of code that do the same task instead of having one piece of code that's called from both locations?)
Stupid Slashdot not having an edit button... that's a usability problem.
Comment of the year
"Stupid Slashdot not having an edit button... that's a usability problem."
I know you were probably joking, but Slashdot does this to prevent you from completely changing a post after people have replied to it or moderated it. Just imagine what kinds of tricks the trolls would get up to...
"... A foot icon? What's that about, anyway? Ubuntu's logo isn't a foot."
It's the Gnome foot. He logged in using gnome. Does this mean if he had been using Kubuntu, he would have said, "What's with the K?"
He is obviously outside of his territory and discredits most of what he presents from his lack of common knowledge.
This is what Linux is all about, choosing what you want to use, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever. I think he missed this key point.
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
OK, he is admittedly a nitpicking ass, but he did get a few good ones in there. One of them has bothered me ever since I first discovered it. It isn't an Ubuntu thing. It's aparently a Unix web browser interface thing. Here's his quote:
"Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one."
Exactly! So why did *whoever* come up with such an irritating default behavior. Does the OS X interface do this too? We use Mozilla on our Solaris systems at work, and it has that same annoying problem. He's exactly right that the huge majority of the time, you want the whole address selected so you can type in a new URL, so that should be the single click action.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I understand Slashdot's rationale behind it. (Joel from JoelOnSoftware.com actually uses the same philosophy on his web forums, as well, for the same reason.) The problem I have is that almost *every* other forum I use allows me to edit my posts after I make them. So my habit is to type the post, submit it, read it in context and proofread for typos, then go back and edit the post to fix things. So I guess the problem is that my workflow doesn't account for Slashdot's way of doing things.
It also would be nice if Slashdot supported bbcode, since that's another mistake I frequently see around here.
Comment of the year
Nonsense. The mouse cursor reappears when you move the mouse, which is how you find the mouse even if it is not invisible (do you really think people look all over the screen for the image of the arrow, rather than jiggle the mouse and look for the moving thing?).
His modal dialog comment is stupid, though. Getting rid of modal dialogs has been one of the big deals in improving the user interface experience. A real fix would be to avoid the inconsistent states, rather than the simple fix of going back to modal boxes. In his Gimp example, closing the image should maybe pop up a question "you were trying to save this to a file, are you sure you want to close it" and if they still close it, get rid of the dialog as well.
Actually, he missed out on one UI bug in Evolution that makes me laugh. I wish I had a screenshot, but on fairly regular occasion, Evolution gives me an error message with a label saying, "Error: Success." Gets me every time :)
No comment.
The key point is not about choice between gnome/kde etc. It's about the strange feeling for a new user to click a foot to start programs, he or she doesn't care about the logotype of the DE, as long as it lets him/her do what he/she wants to do.
Quantum hacker.
Bandwidth exceeded.
Use this instead.
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
Stop hitting on the guy now. Slashdot (read Ubuntu/Linux Lovers) have already had their revenge by getting Mathhews site /.ed
;) Picked on Ubuntu Did Ya?
Poor fella
Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness
It's out of bandwidth. We really need a term for this sort of thing. Maybe something like "excess consumption of hyperlinks from popular news internet sites" or something.
My point? Did anyone grab a copy before it died? Thanks much.
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
I see a lot of posts here for the idea of changing the system to be as user friendly as possible - I also see posts countering this.
It's really a large thing to debate because making things _EASY_ and simple to use for new users (both of computers and linux rather than Windows) may not necessarily make things easier to use for experienced users.
Also, I'm not just talking about users firmilliar, I mean advanced users.
Some things which help you do something quickly - may not be used by the "simple" user - infact the button to click to such advanced functions may be classed as "clutter" by the basic user or the GUI nazi reviewing the OS's usability - none the less it could be helpful for the advanced user.
(hence ultimately this slashdot story is certainly not going to be a one sided discussion like most Microsoft threads)
Also while I'm on my soap box - I will say that one thing I'd like to see (and I don't know the "ui" or technical term for it) is the "attaching" of sub windows to Windows - like the save as dialog box or the Adobe Acrobat "accept license" box which pops "under" the application.
I don't like the fact that in Windows at least sometimes the file save as can not only not be "on top" but also it can actually be out of the bounds of the application - it would be logical to keep it within the Window's "area"
(example if Paint Shop pro is open and taking 300x300 pixels in the top left of my 1600x1200 Windows session,.. the saveas box for PSPro should ONLY BE within those 300x300 pixels)
Maybe there's reasons why this shouldn't happen but I think this is a small but great little idea - so that users always know which "little box" is assigned to which application.