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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."
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'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.
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.
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.
Gnome 2 goes away in the next release of Ubuntu. Then it's a choice between Unity and Gnome 3, which both appear to be following similar 'you will do things the way we want you to because we know best' philosophies, or KDE which is OK but just feels blah whenever I try a new release.
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.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
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.
Gnome 2 goes away in the next release of Ubuntu. Then it's a choice between Unity and Gnome 3, which both appear to be following similar 'you will do things the way we want you to because we know best' philosophies, or KDE which is OK but just feels blah whenever I try a new release.
or XFCE (Xubuntu) or LXDE (Lubuntu) or . IMHO, XFCE is now very similar to GNOME2; close enough that if I were a GNOME2 user who'd rather switch than whine, that would be my first choice. Personally, I prefer LXDE.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
I agree. I was using Unity (or whatever its precursor was called) in 10.10 because it was part of the Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix (note that the netbook edition is now only intended for ARM netbooks), and 11.04's Unity is a huge leap in stability, usability and just general look-and-feel. Are there still some more to be done? Absolutely, but for someone to claim that Unity is "throwing away years of UI experience" is hyperbole at best and disingenuous at worst. I think that we are going to learn a lot from the Unity/Gnome-Shell "experiments" and when the dust settles, we may have something that is a lot better than Gnome 2 ever was.
>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
11.04 isn't an LTS release.
God I hope not because Gnome 3 is not ready for prime time as well. It's nice but in terms of polish it's back 10 years to where you have to configure it by hand. That's an epic fail.
and both unity and Gnome 3 forgot that people have laptops so their management of backlight and sleep functions all got flushed out the toilet. I'm back to Laptop annoyances from 5 years ago.
Unity and Gnome 3 are early alpha releases and NOT ready for use by users as a stable release.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The problem is that Gnome3 is essentially the same as Unity, its basically just a slightly better implementation of all the same concepts, with all the same problems. You still have zero support for applets, no option for a taskbar, no launchers in your panel, no additional panels, etc. And of course both of them require OpenGL support, which I find quite frankly completely baffling given that my OpenGL drivers basically broke on every single dist-upgrade for the last few years.
Sometimes it seems to me that these bunch are actually sabotaging "Desktop Linux".
I don't really like Windows 7, but I dislike GNOME more.
Agreed... and I always give new things a good chance.
When they moved the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the left side of the windows, I gave it a try, and found that going to one side instead of the other really didn't have any actual impact on my life so I was happy to use that, and I still do. It's really not a life-changing thing for me, I got used to it in about 2 minutes and I don't really care.
But Unity? I tried it. I really did. And it sucked like a tornado. Taking up useless space on the left side of my screen with icons in seemingly random order? I much prefer my tiny and thin bars at the top and bottom of the screen that show me useful, realtime information that I want, and give me very quick access to everything I need.
I don't hate things because they're different or because I'm ignorant of them. I hate them after I really give them a chance and learn about them and they still just do not work for me. I use Ubuntu as my OS on my daily workstation at my job, so I need things to be quick, efficient, and work the way I work. Unity doesn't do that for me at all, even after I tried.
If Ubuntu drops Gnome completely and makes it a pain in the ass (and/or unsupported) to install... I'll be moving to Kubuntu or Xubuntu. I've used both before, and unless they've completely changed into something else, either would work just fine for me. Maybe Unity is very good for some people... I'm just not one of them.
The biggest problem is that Canonical has said that the option to switch back to GNOME will be completely removed in 11.10, leaving Unity as the one and only option.
The strategy, attempting to force something that doesn't work well on the user base in order to speed up fixing/finishing it... the "involuntary beta"... is downright MSFT-like
Gnome 3 is just as goofy as Unity. Canonical basically saw that Gnome 3 was going to be a stupid UI, and in a move of utter "brilliance" decided instead to go their own direction and create an EQUALLY stupid UI.
XFCE is a better option. Unfortunately the exo package used in the version of XFCE available in 11.04 causes issues with Chrome opening files. The XFCE compositor is also fairly basic in comparison to Compiz.
All in all, it's an aggravating time to be a Linux user. I feel like 10 years worth of solid, stable UI design was just tossed out the window because some idiot UI designers wanted to feel special.
I'm still sporting Ubuntu Classic myself. Once that option is gone I'm going to be pulling my hair out whilst I try and get a decent replacement desktop setup. I'm thinking that with enough tweaking, XFCE is the most likely candidate.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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
The problem is that the UI designers are changing focus from desktops and laptops to touch screen devices and such when the majority of users are still using a mouse and keyboard setup to navigate.
No matter how outdated the mouse/keyboard setup might be, it's still the most prevalent means of computer UI navigation available, and many of us are still very comfortable with that setup.
The difference between this situation and your car analogy is that the mouse/keyboard setup still works very well for the majority of computers. A better analogy would be if they would remove the physical steering wheel, shift stick and everything for your car and replace those with a giant touch screen interface.
I'm having a hard time getting accustomed to OS X interface. I can control the speed of my mouse, but not the acceleration. I can't resize windows except for the bottom right corner, (which sucks when I'm trying to line things up on the right side of the screen and resize from there). The windows don't "snap" together, making it hard to maximize space, and then most of them don't seem to remember their size or positions (or get confused because I had multiple windows opened the last time I used it).
There's more, but what I found out after using it for about a month is this: Mac users pay a premium for their Macs, and to keep them upgraded - so having to install a bunch of paid software to just tweak the UI doesn't seem crazy to them like it does to me; all the answers I found when trying to tweak things ended up being third party $oftware.
We're taking a step backwards every time these companies take away options in order to simplify.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
As others have said: the changes you state are all well and good for small handheld devices. Those devices don't omit the keyboard and mouse because their input method is superior - they do so because it's impractical to have them on a mobile device. DESKTOP operating systems don't have those type of space restrictions. Without those specific needs for compromise, the keyboard/mouse setup remains a quicker, more efficient way to enter data. Trust me, I don't mind checking Facebook and doing quick tasks on my Android phone. Works great sitting on the couch. There comes a point though when I'm doing a lot when I just say "Fuck this" and go down the hall to my desktop so I can get a keyboard in front of me. I can type in 30 seconds what it'd take 5 minutes or more to enter on that touch interface.
This is not a one size fits all thing, and the distributions are insane if they think of it that way.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually, there's an Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS and 6.06.2 LTS, and 10.04.1 LTS and 10.04.2 LTS as well. Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS comes out on July 28th.
The LTS releases are supported for 3 years/5 years on the desktop/server, so the CD images are rerolled with updates every 6 months.