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

Surprising

[hawguy]

That's pretty surprising, I only manged to use it for 10 minutes before I ditched it and moved to Kubuntu.

That's not the worst about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Crashing is not the worst thing about it, but the fact that it is a worse interface than Gnome 2. It's not terrible like Gnome 3, but feels like a step backwards nonetheless.

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

[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:Them new DE's, man

[smash]

Yes, agreed.

I'm waiting for the dust to be blown off windowmaker, and more people to realise that they can write cross platform stuff for GNUstep/OS X.

Windowmaker plus a decent file manager / dock would give Linux a powerful, usable desktop. Unfortunately the past few years I've seen of linux desktop "development" is madly rushing to re-implement whatever useless crap Microsoft has tacked onto the latest version of Windows, or trying to look like Aqua.

The Free NIX desktop used to be BETTER because of innovation that was happening in the free software world. Lately it's just playing catchup, and poorly.

Re:Them new DE's, man

[Billly Gates]

True with that.

I switched back to Windows. Before I get modded as a troll I have to say I still like Linux on the server and I am serious and not troll baiting. I love all the scripts, apis, and programs that Linux has.

I saw the writing on the wall with Fedora 15 after I left Ubuntu due to the lack of stability and quality software. I left Windows because of beta quality products that were terrible. Linux is less stable in my experience on the desktop with the exception of Gnome 2.8. I saw the writting on the wall again with hardware based html 5 of all the new browsers ... with the exception of a lack of Linux support.

My 3 year old laptop running Fedora 13 can not even handle some sites under Linux. Chrome is getting much better but most hardware rendering is still only available on Windows.

Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are terrible. Sun donated millions of dollars of R&D into Gnome and Opendesktop and it is stupid to throw it all away. Why? Menu's work. You may want to reduce the amount of mouse clicks to find things. For some reason Gnome decided to increase the mouse clicks for the same task?? Lets now look at the hassle to simply switch a workspace. Why is that hidden? Infact in Unity why do I have to keep clicking around to see all apps?? Ugh

Compiz with newer widgets with more functionality is where Gnome should have went.

I have virtualbox handy for Windows 7 and will look forward to using it to run Postgresql and some Lamp. For me I now use Windows and I feel like garbage for turning back 10 years of my life but I do not care what people think of as stable 10 years ago or cool. I want something that works. Seriously Firefox4, IE 9, and Chrome scream and you can run all the Unix apps with Virtualbox or a win32 version.

Lets hope gnome 3.2 fixes this and I may just come back but there is no shame of switching to MacOSX or Windows. Today's gui's remind me of poor Netscape's demise of 4.

Ignore crappy blog - link to results

[Xgamer4]

Just ignore the crappy blog link. It's not really helpful at all. Here's a link to the actual results:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html

Hard to Figured Out

[dcollins]

FTA: "None of the participants could figured out what Ubuntu One."

Indeed.

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.

I like Ubuntu 11.04

[Mass Overkiller]

I have to admit that when I installed Ubuntu 11.04 beta with Unity, I felt the need to repartition my hard drive to make more room for linux and less room for windows. I like the desktop, I like the bar thingie on the left (whatever it's called). I like typing "System" and having it give me an application to click rather than wade through 3 submenus. There have been a few bugs like not being able to select that bar thingie on the left sometimes, and I still don't know what that Ubuntu icon is for or why it turns blue. Also, I'd like not to have to type my password in when I boot into linux - I thought that was why I selected "auto login" as an option. I truly enjoy this latest version and I'm thinking of keeping it. Just fix the bugs. I'll adjust myself to the layout quickly enough.

It's just bad UI

[cripkd]

The fact that it crashes is not the end of the world. Ubuntu 11.04 is still in beta.
What I don't understand is why Unity has made so many bad UI decisions.

1. the icons are on the left, to conserve vertical space. Ok, but I'm NOT on a netbook. Why not give me the option to move it at the top or at the bottom ?
2. The icons are on the left. Whenever you use content on a screen (in mostt western countries) you start scanning the screen with your eyes from the left to the right. Why do I have to see some brightly colored icons everytime I move to the next line? This never happens if the bar is at the bottom. The eyes focus on the content not on some list of eye-candy icons. Again, why no move it to the RIGHT at least?
3. The window title/window controls fiasco. I don't see why should I perform a specific action to either see the whole title of the window,l the window control buttons or the usual application "File" menu. The desktop is not yet an iPhone. The desktop is still another paradigm. The application menu should be visible at all times! We're not all just using firefox all day long (see Eclipse for exmple.)
4. Blurred windows menus. Why do I have to first focus the window and then hover or something to get it's menu?

PS. Speaking of usability, why does slashdot redirect to it's main page after logging in ??? I still hope unity will change a lot in the next 1-2 years,, otherwise it's just crap they put out to spite gnome.

Re:It's just bad UI

[Khazunga]

I installed 11.04 this week, and I totally disagree. I absolutely love top-level navigation taking over horizontal space instead of vertical space, as well as other vertical-space saving features, such as moving the menu onto the title bar. Naturally, I appreciate this more because my laptop has a 12" display. Were I on a 24" desktop LCD and I could spare space for the menus. However, if you are so inclined, this is just a gtk option. It's easy to move menus to their standard location, Unity does not bind you to that decision.

As for readability with icons on the left, just maximize your windows or move them to the left of the screen. It will push the icons away.

Sometimes, I think people criticize ANY change. I'm not involved with Unity and have not accompanied its development. The final result was a total surprise to me this week. I like it. There are corners to be polished, for sure, but it's an excellent first version.

Re:Not that surprising, actually

[greg1104]

Ubuntu rushes everything out before it's ready; it's impossible for a 6 month release cycle to do anything else. This whole Unity experiment is no surprise to anyone who was using in Ubuntu in 2008, when the at the time barely working PulseAudio was integrated into the "Long-Term Release" 8.04. And by LTS, they mean "supported until the developers are whipped to start working on their next 6 month deadline the week after shipping".

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:Not that surprising, actually

[symbolset]

It's a throwback. They were looking for Windows Vista levels of reliability, and accidently found them.

Re:Not that surprising, actually

[Lobachevsky]

Um, people do kernel programming in virtual machines. And there's plenty of debugging tools around VMs. I know, I write kernel modules.

Also, kernels can mask interrupts and ensure a function is run "single threaded" (no context-switching out), which dramatically reduces the complexity. Not every function is set up like that, many are thread-safe, but drivers are usually written to be uninterrupted and access private memory, so they don't worry about interaction with other cpus/cores/kthreads.

Both are hard, kernel programming is hard, and the massive multi-threading in window managers is hard.