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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.
I installed it the day it was out. The menubar is somewhat different, so what?
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. And the user experience is so close it's almost undistinguishable.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
If you want to keep the Ubuntu distro with a good UI all you need to do is install KDE
Despite still not being up to its best 3.5.9 shape, KDE 4 is much better than that unity abomination Ubuntu is trying to impose.
I'm not "angry" or anything, but there are some things that are annoying about the interface. My main problem is the title bar. I love the idea of trying to make the client area as large as possible -- and I love that Firefox takes up nearly the entire screen. However, to make that work, they have really goofy title bar logic. The menu and title bar are basically sharing the same area. If you mouse over the title bar, it turns into the menu. However, if the window isn't maximized, then the menu is still at the top of the screen (like Mac OS). If you have two windows open, one maximized under a non-maximized window, then the title bar looks like it belongs to the maximized window, but it really belongs to the window with the focus.
My other complaint is that the icon bar is stuck on the left. I'd prefer it on the right, or on the bottom. It's also annoying because it doesn't always stay out -- sometimes it hides, sometimes it takes multiple clicks to get something launched, sometimes it pretends to poke out, but then goes away... It's not as simple as "when I put my mouse over there, stay open until I move my mouse away". There seems to be other logic going on that I can't figure out.
Lastly, my Wi-Fi broke upon upgrading (BCM4322). I had to do some command line modprobe stuff to get it back running. Not a Unity issue, but still annoying, and hurts usability.
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.
You can install a package called "unity2d" to get Unity with your graphics hardware.
Agreed. They are trying too hard to accommodate the tablet crowd. And while it's nice to be able to type what you want instead of dealing with cascading menus, it's a bummer to have to guess whether I need to type "configuration", "settings" or "appearance" to get what I want.
Unity 3D was a bust for me. Although I had Compiz working fine on Ubuntu 9 and Gnome, compositing was broken horribly on my notebook (partial screen drawing, artifacts left "stuck" after mouse over, and other fun). The notebook is a Dell with an Intel graphics adapter so, while somewhat underpowered, has had open source drivers for a while. Canonical needs to do a better job in looking at the hardware, and enabling/disabling features appropriately. Unity 2D works okay but, to me, ends up being not much more than a different app bar and really stupid scroll bars.
I admit its not the latest hardware, but I regularly use older hardware. The VGA card is on the motherboard, and is probably rubbish too. It draws a solid colour areas over the tops of windows you are trying to use, and hides the bar which would enable you to logout!
Once you manage to get back to "classic, without effects" its OK. But for bad user experience, I'd still give it 10/10.
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Go nuts.
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Have the Ubuntu 11.04 on a couple of machines, but immediately switched to classic desktop on both. This thing is ridiculous, retarded and useless to me. I am not an Apple user, I don't own any iProducts and don't want to in no small part because I absolutely despise their way of doing interfaces. I hate the 'ribbon' garbage as well, BTW.
Anyway, from point of view of a developer, this GUI is a POS. No way I am going to use something that takes a chunk of my screen like that, gets rid of the battery power/network status icons (and whatever else I want to see on the launch bar). I honestly do not have patience to figure out where the application window goes once I attempt to minimize it. Is the window closed then and the application is killed? Is it somewhere on the background, and if so, how do I get it back? Where is the minimized window icon? That crazy search window that pops up only when I want to see the normal menu with the usual items in them - the entire idea of a menu tree is gone?
Anyway, you may want to use your computer as some sort of a weird appliance... I need a predictable, stable system, things should be where I am used to them, not hidden and removed in ways that defy any logic. The minimize/close/maximize window icons will be on the right side of my windows and there will be a normal tree like menu with items where I will find them every time I look there and there will be an icon for every window on the bottom of the screen, period.
You can't handle the truth.
I tried it, but have found it lacking. In 'classic' Ubuntu, I remove the bottom panel, and use Docky. I use Gnome-do for quick-run functionality. I have several indicators (temperature, network i/o, weather, dropbox, etc) some of which work or have replacements, and other which don't. The fonts on the Unity Panel seem blurry or low-rez. The Apple-style menu at the top is exceptionally annoying when using multiple monitors, or for those of us that don't like the buttons on the left side of the window. In general, I find the interface a step down from Gnome-do/Docky, although I do like the new scroll bars so far.
... not quite Gnome, but nice enough.
I also find that Natty is slower, and has introduced a lot of problems in Compiz, and my wireless performance is much reduced. I was reading about an interview with Mark Shuttleworth where he apparently said that perhaps power users should switch to a different distro. I respect him for saying that, but it's unfortunate, as I like the Ubuntu release cycle. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to do just that, or perhaps switch GDMs. Both LXDE and XFCE are looking quite nice
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.
Compiz crashes 2-3 times a day for me. Evolution crashes as soon as I start it (hangs fetching messages) and I have to do 'evolution --force-shutdown' on the command line because for some reason xkill is gone. Had to switch to Thunderbird, because Evolution was unusable.
I also uninstalled the appmenu because there were situations involving VirtualBox and Java/Swing apps where it would just go blank and stay that way, so I would have no menu at all. Plus, when you combine the app menu with Gnome's propensity to steal focus and raise windows to the foreground regardless of what you happen to be doing at the time, it's almost unusable.
After 4 days of tinkering and disabling things I'm to the point where I can actually do something (barring the compiz crashes, which require a reboot). Overall this is the glitchiest, most unstable Linux instance I've ever dealt with. I'll probably go back to KDE this upcoming weekend.
Bingo, though it's "unity-2d". I use RDP with my ubuntu computer so no hardware acceleration, and it works just fine. Only real difference is that reordering windows in the taskbar requires you to click and hold the icon for a bit before dragging, whereas in normal Unity you drag the icon out of the bar and drag it back in at the drop point.
... then maybe it's time to switch to Fedora?
or Arch.
Ah yes, Arch, the distro that tries to convince its users that it's a BSD (hint: aur is NOT the same as ports), and contributes nothing upstream. Are you guys still throwing everything in /usr/bin?
I would say Arch is trying to be a blend of BSD/Gentoo without all that compiling everything nonsense. Very easy to build/maintain a minimal system, no release cycles, and piece of cake to unofficially distribute your own software packages to the rest of the Arch community. Arch is probably one of the most promising ideas for a distro we have seen in a long time.
>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
Yesterday I finally replaced ancient XP with Ubuntu on one of my machines.
The first impressions were "it's retarded." The install required to connect to the net to download required packages (over ethernet, while I only had wifi) despite running off 600MB install disk. I finally managed to install from 'live' and was not impressed - the Unity interface was so dumbed down that it was beyond useless - multitouch touchpad support broken, power managment disabling all the options I needed, gedit unable to load files containing unprintable characters and so on. At first I thought "That's it, Ubuntu has jumped the shark. I need to look for a different distro.
Then I thought "let's see, maybe KDE is still usable." Of course none in the default, but simple apt-get install kde-plasma-desktop loaded it just fine. Log out, session: KDE, log in, done.
And then I decided I'm quite happy with Ubuntu. The OS under the hood is actually pretty good, and once you replace the desktop manager, it's quite a nice OS to use.
So, install KDE and stop complaining.
sudo apt-get install kde-plasma-desktop
It's that easy,
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Yes, you can disable it at the login screen, but many people never see the login screen due to auto-login and OpenGL driver issues might screw up Unity so badly that you can't even get to the login screen or just outright crash your machine.
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
Unity is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I 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 three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way."
Picture: Unity is made of arse.
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm not sure who decided that we needed Cell Phone UI's on our desktops, but I'd like to slap the person(s).
I believe the recipient of your slappage would be Christian Giordano:
http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scrollbars-in-unity/
At least, this quote would seem to be culprit:
"Other platforms optimized for touch input like Android and iOS are already using a light-weight solution visible only while dragging the content."
So that's your question answered I think.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
You can only disable it for another 6 months, and even for these 6 months you can only disable it if you have new hardware.
At work I have 18 Dell p3 machines all running Ubuntu 10.04.
I would prefer 10.10 as it is vastly better, but not being LTS forces you into this upgrade cycle.
11.04 will not even boot into the graphics system on those computers to let you disable unity.
So if I want security updates, I must switch to another distro. (Or upgrade, but that is controlled by the finance department, not IT)
Also with the fact that unity won't load in vmware what so ever, I haven't even had a chance to SEE unity in operation, let alone have any complaints over GUI changes.
Of course with 'not bootable' being the out of the box defaults, if you truely know how to change that out of the box setting to be more like I want (specifically, to boot into a GUI), then I am all ears.
It's similar to the windows vista/7 issues with Aero, but with absolutely no fall back in place when your hardware doesn't support it.
Just as I wouldn't try to run Win7 on a Dell p3, now Ubuntu put itself in that same category of software. But that's ok, there are plenty of other Linux distros that will support older hardware.
Ah yes, Arch, the distro that tries to convince its users that it's a BSD
It has elements of BSD, but so?
hint: aur is NOT the same as ports
No. It won't automatically rebuild packages as part of an upgrade. Will it?
and contributes nothing upstream
Yes... their goal is to use stock packages. There is little to contribute upstream. If as an Arch hacker, you want a package improved, you contribute fixes upstream and wait for them to come back downstream. That doesn't usually take long.
I would say Arch is trying to be a blend of BSD/Gentoo without all that compiling everything nonsense.
Yes and no. Once you have to go to the AUR, it is not as convenient as ports. But I don't like source distros, since my laptop is too slow.
Very easy to build/maintain a minimal system,
Yes and no. It is easy, and realiable, but doe to the rolling releases, any custom software can easily break at any time. On the other hand it is usually more up to date than anything else. I like it on my laptop. I would hate to have it on my desktop.
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