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Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider
Barence writes "Canonical's decision to impose the new Unity interface on Ubuntu 11.04 users appears to have split the Linux distro's users, according to PC Pro. Features such as a moving Launcher bar and invisible scrollbars have angered many users, with one claiming that 'Ubuntu is doing a great job throwing away years of UI experience.' The rush to meet the six-monthly release schedule also appears to have harmed the release, with many users reporting graphical glitches with the new user interface."
I hate unity.. but just logout and go back into ubuntu classic.
This is an entirely configurable option. Users who like it will keep it, users who don't will switch it. Anyone complaining is just doing it to hear his own voice.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Let's all remember how much we hated XP when it came out, and then how much we wanted Windows 7 to be XP when it came out.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I've been running Unity on my netbook for six months and it's not bad there as it's a bit more space-efficient on the screen and all I do is web browsing and type the odd document in Office; hence the half dozen launcher icons are all I need.
But I only lasted about 30 minutes with it on my laptop until I switched back to Gnome, because having 30 launcher icons scrolling up and down the screen and having to move the mouse to random parts of the screen to make them appear and scroll through the list to find the windows that are actually open is just awful.
IMHO the big problem is the idea of a 'one size fits all' GUI for everything when people have very different requirements on different systems. Unity is an improvement on small screen devices where you don't need to open six out of thirty different applications at a time, but not good when you do.
For me, it's working fine and I'm sticking with it. Gnome fanboys will not appreciate it, but Unity feels a bit slicker than Gnome.
Isn't anyone that describes a UI as "slicker" a fanboy by definition?
And the user experience is so close it's almost undistinguishable.
I don't think that most of the people complaining about unity are comparing to Gnome3 -- they are comparing to KDE4 and Gnome2.
Ubuntu need to decide whether they are "the Linux for the rest of us" or "the bleeding edge".
When they started out, making Linux more polished-looking, consistent, user friendly, easy to install and the Linux you'd recommend to Aunty Agatha, that was bleeding edge (even if it wasn't exclusive to Ubuntu, they did a lot to advance that field, and to promote Linux in general) so there was no choice.
Now that most Linux distros are, at worst, no harder to install than Windows, and make a good College try at auto-detecting your hardware and helping you locate drivers they might want to think twice against "forcing" major changes on mainstream users (even if there is a way to revert, making them the default will give some people a WTF moment and fragment support and documentation). They also tend to introduce other major changes to subsystems with their regular releases.
If I were Ubuntu I'd have the last LTS version "headlining" the website as the recommended download, with the latest 6-monthly release as an option, and divert a bit more effort to backporting new versions of applications (not just bug/security fixes) to LTS so that non-techie users had an easy way to install the latest & greatest applications without a major OS overhaul. Of course, that's very unsexy work, especially if you're not being paid.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
But the original selling point of Ubuntu was that it was the distro that "just worked". You didn't have to spend days tracking down hardware problems, or hours figuring out how to change all defaults to something that worked. That meant the defaults were set to those that would be most familiar and comfortable to most computer users.
It is nice to have a distro like that to recommend to Linux Newbies, but Ubuntu is moving in a direction where it no longer is that distro.
I upgraded to 11.04 and I like Unity. It's a lot quicker and, while a little buggy, I'm already moving faster than with Gnome. That said, if you don't like Unity or Gnome 3, then either stay with 10.10 or 10.04 (LTS) or go to Linux Mint or Debian or pick a distro but quit bitching or pay for Windows / Mac. Either way, get off my lawn!
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
This is why I've told everyone not to immediately update to Ubuntu's latest version. In fact, your best bet is to just stick with the LTS releases. Ubuntu has certainly proven not to be an option for production level servers and is starting to make me question its viability as a work station.
>Mark Shuttleworth where he apparently said that perhaps power users should switch to a different distro.
Mark, Mark, Mark:
If power users switch to another distro, who is going to answer 1st-day newbs' questions on ubuntuforums.org? 2nd-day newbs?
And who's going to do all that free Ubuntu development and package management work for you on launchpad?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You need a predictable, stable system BUT you decided to upgrade to the initial version release? This isn't shame on Ubuntu, this is SHAME ON YOU.