5 Out of 11 Crashed Unity In Canonical's Study

dkd903 writes "Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical's Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that Ubuntu 11.04 will have." Though the Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu is a moving target, the bad news from this test is that about half of the testers managed to crash it.

Comments

Them new DE's, man

[caius112]

I personally find all Unity, GNOME 3, and KDE 4.6 to be unuseable. What the hell went wrong? Why reinvent the motherfucking wheel as clumsily as possible over and over again?

Re:Them new DE's, man

[caius112]

OK, you're right, KDE is by far the most useable of the three once you've disabled all the "semantic desktop" and "desktop activities" bullshit. But out of the box, it's just as jarring as the rest for me.

Of course, the mere fact that you can disable shitty features is a rarity these days. What happened to the Linux philosophy of personalization?

Re:Them new DE's, man

[Tanuki64]

Least common denominator. The more idiots use a system the more it has to be dumbed down.

Re:Them new DE's, man

[westyvw]

Choice is what I like, Unity is driving me crazy because it seems so locked down (or devoid of anything interesting all together). I agree with the ability to personalise philosophy.

KDE still rocks for me. Activities is a great concept and actually works well. If you dont want it, dont use it no big deal. Like classic menus? Use them. Like a desktop or several "workspaces"? Its your choice (or the distro managers for the default appearance).

Re:Them new DE's, man

[muuh-gnu]

So who is now Gnome3's and Unity's target group? Idiots overwhelmed with Windows and OS X? I dont remember that the race for Desktop domination was meant to be a race to the bottom.

Gnome3 & Unity are so unusable for everyday work (from a business point of view), that they do not even seem to be desktop oriented any more at all. They both seem to bet on a (appleized) smartphone & tablet dominated future and want to get there as soon as possible.

The demise of Gnome2 will absolutely KILL desktop linux used in businesses, at least in mine. Deprecating the familiar Gnome2 workflow for no other reason than some visual art designer masturbation reeks of irresponsibility towards existing customers and _will_ have consequences. Leaving Windows and trying Linux on the desktop on a larger scale was a bet not every business was willing to make. Punishing those who did by arbitrarily destroyng familiar desktops environments will no nothing but prove linux skeptics right and linux enthusiasts wrong and seal its fate on business desktops on years to come.

Re:Them new DE's, man

[Gordonjcp]

I don't particularly care about customising stuff. I want to get on with actually using my computer. It took me several days of digging around to get Unity into a state where it was just about usable. The first sticking point was the nauseating drop shadow around the focused window - instant eyestrain! Here's a hint, guys - big blurry things make your eyes think they're not focused properly and they go crazy trying to pull it into focus. The utterly retarded idea of sticking the window buttons on the wrong side, that had to go - why break a convention set with just about every WIMP environment since the dawn of time (or at least bitmapped graphics hardware)?

Okay, so what else was broken? Well, there's no weather applet in Unity. "ZOMG JUST LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW LOL" Yes, great, but I spend a lot of time working in windowless blast-proof machinery rooms and I like to see what I'm missing.

Lastly - and the most important thing - is the stupid sidebar thing. So there's a strip of little indistinguishable squares. If you mouse over them, the title of the app pops up. Are they apps that are open, or apps that can be opened? No way of telling. Double click one. An application launches. Double click it again. Some windows shrink and whirl around the screen, but it doesn't open another instance off the application. Right click? "Add to Favourites..." Okay, so another square appears. Double-click that - shrink, whirl. How the hell do you open more than one instance of the same app? *Middle-click* one of the squares. Oh, okay, so on my laptop, that's pressing both left and righ click at the same time? No, because middle-click chording is disabled by default.

Oh, and if you put a window too close to the strip with the squares, it gets scared and hides. Then you've got to move all your windows to get it back. Yeah, that's a really discoverable interface, guys...

Re:Not that surprising, actually

[walshy007]

window managers are harder to program than kernel hacking

Bullshit, with kernel programming if you bollocks something up the entire machine can hang and there is very little comparatively in the way of things you can do to debug the thing. Worse yet, given a bad hardware design some hardware makes it possible to brick things.

Makes window manager programming look like childsplay.

Re:Sample size

[NotBorg]

You don't need a large sample size to prove a bit of software is buggy. You need a large sample size to prove that it is not that buggy. If all eleven people found no problems and loved it, then you could say that the sample size is too small to be relativly sure aobut the quality of the software.

so...

[hitmark]

looks like i will be using XFCE for the foreseeable future. Tho if this dumbing down spreads, i may be forced to go LXDE or even FVWM...

Unity: one equals zero.

[David Gerard]

I have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The new Unity interface is stupidly shit. Half the stuff literally does not work on my netbook. If you woke up one day and thought:

"Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down phone running an obsolete version of Android through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience"

- this gets you quite a lot of the way there.

If you want it to feel a bit more like a computer, log out, select "Ubuntu Classic" and log back in and then you'll only have the Mac ripoff menu arrangements to contend with.

I actually liked the old UNR interface. I wonder where it all went horribly wrong.

Re:Because what is the alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is ahead of the rest. Why do you think Ubuntu is so fucking popular

Ubuntu pushes the edge. Not everyone can stand that.

Ubuntu isn't popular because it's "ahead of the rest", it's popular because any mouth-breathing retard can install it in 5 clicks. If popularity is measured by how bleeding edge the software available is, there's plenty of distros that beat Ubuntu hands down.

And as for "pushing the edge", I lol'd a little. Doing a shitty job != pushing the edge.