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Tom's Hardware Dissects Ubuntu 11.4's Interface and Performance
An anonymous reader links to an exhaustive look at the latest Ubuntu, running at Tom's Hardware. "The new Unity interface is broken down into its individual elements and explained ad nauseam. Overall the article is objectively balanced, the author does a good job of pointing out specific design flaws and shortcomings instead of complaining about how Unity doesn't work for him specifically. The walkthrough of the uTouch gesture language is exciting (wish I had multi-touch), though a full listing of keyboard and mouse shortcuts come in handy, too. Towards the end of the article there are benchmarks between Lucid, Natty with Unity, and Natty with the Classic interface. The performance of the Unity interface isn't bad at all, but that kernel power issue does rear its ugly head."
from the summary: "The new Unity interface is broken"
I still think they released it way too soon. I would never point a new user at 11.04 due to its stability, regardless of its usability. I really expected to see some of the problems fixed by this point too, but the patches seem to be just starting to trickle in. I'm hoping they don't yank out the 'Classic' Gnome interface on 11.10 as planned.
it is not a "review of a review," it is a direct link to a review, and a brief description of the link by the submitter. this is actually how slashdot works.
the news is the fifteen+ pages of information, tips, and comparative benchmarks on the new interface.
since there was less than two minutes between the story getting posted and you feverishly working for a snarky-first-post to jack up your karma, i'll forgive you for not noticing.
enjoy the mercy. next time, rtfa.
It would have been better released as a netbook or tablet only DM option.
The game.
He was complaining about the name, if you were to read the conclusions page you would notice that he didn't exactly roast Ubuntu over hot coals.
15 frigging page review you read the first half a page and determine its not balanced. Don't karma whore for the " I RTFA" karma if you didn't read the fucking article.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Other than this paragraph, the rest of the review seemed pretty fair. I found myself agreeing with the good and the bad.
Yes a car anology, on slashdot, I am that original!
Imagine a car, they replace the brake with a handle on the dashboard. The gas pedal is a set of buttons, one for each 10km/h speed range on the dashboard. To drive you always need your foot on a pedal on the floor. Sound silly? Trains are like that. It works perfectly well. So would you want this arrangement in your car?
The steering wheel you say? The need for the steering wheel in your car would make the train controls unusable?
EX-FUCKING-ACTLY.
That is the entire problem with both Unity and Gnome 3. ALL the controls in your car are not just there because of how they would be best implemented but because they have to work together with the other controls. And that can create some interesting designs. Take the UPS trucks. Where is your stick shift? Why is it not in the same place in cars like that? Because it would get in the way of the driver crossing the center to get out on the other side of the car. Most busses got an entiry set of control on the left hand side of the driver because they can because the door is not there. But this means the driver has to get out through the counter area for the passengers. British double deckers did not have the driver interact with the passengers, and he was in his own cabin, excitting through his own door, making it impossible to put controls like the handbrake in there. Function dictates design.
Changing the interface we are all familiar with can be done, if there is a need but you got to be careful you don't upset all the other needs.
What are my needs in a desktop? To manipulate windows, to arrange them to according to my need to look BETWEEN them. I am a developer, a common need there is to have one window to read data from, another to put data into and a third to test the effect. Normally you do this by having a sufficiently large screen and arranging at least two of them side by side and maybe the third with a shade effect or overlap. Alt-tab in fullscreen mode is often not functional especially if there are other windows active. These windows can typically be quickly accessed from a bar at the bottom or top where all windows have a link side by side.
So, what does Unity and Gnome3 and Windows 7 do? HIDE things behind multiple clicks.
Unity and Gnome3 especially seem aimed at smaller screens operating in full screen for applications. That is great for an author who writes uninterrupted in the same writer. It works when you are watching movies and only have a file browser open in full screen and then launch a single player from that. It is possibly great for the casual user.
But for me? I have a very large screen area, switching the pointer to the top every single time I want to do something, that is NOT efficient. If I have multiple windows over of the same app, I have that for a reason, I do NOT want them treated as one. I do NOT want to click more then is absolutely necessary to get things done.
Unity and Gnome3 feel like they were optimized for a very specific use case, tablets and other small screen setups, that just ain't the norm for PC's especially PC's that are running Linux. And they changed EVERYTHING. Nothing works anymore as it did before. All the apps in your task bar? Gone, especially in unity. Customization? Gone. Stability? Gone!
It is like they took your old reliable volvo car interface and replaced it with a new one that you hate with the build quality of a trabant painted in an exciting mix of puss and shit.
Unity and Gnome3 should have been kept as an option for a long time until the kinks had been ironed out, a very clear and fun to watch tutorial had been out to show EVERY single current use case redone in the new style and until it absolutely worked smoothly, stable AND without taking loads of functions away.
Instead Gnome and Ubuntu tried to emulate MS by pulling a Vista. They redesigned things people didn't want redesigned, and removed functionality and replaced it with instability.
Do not WANT.
I tried it,
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"The new Unity interface is broken..."
Well they're off to a good start. Honestly why anyone would want to use such an interface on anything larger than a netbook is beyond me.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The UI has everything hidden behind searches or submenus or whatever to free up screen real estate on smaller screens. On my dual-26" monitor setup, I don't want buried and simple. I want the 10-15 main apps/scripts I use on the front page and the start menu to show me all the admin/config options in a standard menu the way I've had it everywhere else.
Maybe I'm getting old and fuddy-duddy but I found this interface a clunky and unusable attempt to look like a mix of Windows 7, iOS, Android and Mac OSX. The search box in Windows 7's start menu still shows me all the control panel/admin task items just like the start menu. The Unity search box could not find my network config, my updater app or a bunch of other apps I'd been happily using before switching.
I'll be honest and say I read no documentation or tutorials on how to use Unity but I can't remember the last time I had to read a book on how to use a flippin' menu system.
Any developer of an operating system, regardless of proprietary or open licence, would do well to pay attention to what power users do to tweak the OS immediately after installing, and what tools developers create to make it easy to tweak. Consider the nice little app Ubuntu Tweak - it's a worry when a third party add-on gives superior fast access to common things you need to fix, it demonstrates how broken-by-design the original OS is.
Interesting, Linux Mint, Pinguy and other Ubuntu derived have not embraced Unity, and as always their versions of 11.04 fix quite a list of broken things.
Microsoft paid a lot of attention with Windows 7, after Vista. A lot of the defaults, such as services, were similar to what power users would do to tweak some speed out of Vista.
Canoncial are you listening?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I recently decided to put Ubuntu 11.04 on a spare machine, just to see what all the fuss was about. I hated it, for the same reasons that others have given above. It seemed to be different for the sake of being different. The clincher was when I tried to open a second text terminal. It wouldn't let me, presumably because I already had that application open, and why on earth would I need two of them?
So then, just for kicks, I decided to install the latest Debian. When the desktop came up it felt like coming home. In fact, I was a little shocked to see how much it looked like the Ubuntu I was used to. There was a Debian logo in the upper left corner instead of an Ubuntu one, but that seemed to be the only difference. The same applications, the same themes, the same everything. I never realised how little Ubuntu added to its Debian base.
So I've made up my mind. The next big reinstall is going to be Debian instead of Ubuntu. Best of luck to Ubuntu with its Unity, its Wayland, its Ubuntu Software Center and its Ubuntu One, but as far as I'm concerned it's time for something else.
and the news is that somebody just discovered unity?
For me, the news about 11.04 is that KDE just works. Call me a happy camper.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Desktop users don't care about +/- a few percent in file copy speed. What they should have tested was: does the desktop grind to a slow, unusable halt when copying files? I know 10.10 did, and also Windows to some extent, but not as bad. This would be a huge win if it worked better on the new Ubuntu.
wtf is this, ubuntu?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-11.04-natty-narwhal,2943-13.html
2 hours lost?!!?
how can anyone write code that causes such a huge battery life reduction?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Serious question about the global menu bar: Did they find a way to make it work with focus-follows-mouse? That's one thing I really miss on my Mac. I hate click-to-focus, and I've tried the various add-ons to enable focus-follows-mouse. But on a Mac, the global menu bar makes it completely impractical. To get to the menu bar you have to move the mouse outside the window. If you pause over another window on your way to the menu, the other window gets focus and the menu changes. Has Canonical found a way around this, or did they just omit focus-follows-mouse as an option?
The other thing I didn't see in the article was any mention of multi-monitor support. Does Unity have it? If so, how does it play with the global menu and the launcher? Are they only on the primary display, or are they replicated on each one?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
After seeing the latest "innovations" both Unity and Gnome 3 brought to the table, I made a switch to Arch Linux with OpenBox, permanently.
IMHO both Unity and Gnome 3 are doing a great disservice to Linux
"Optimized for tablets..." What tablets? Where are the Linux tablets? All I see is out there are iPads and Androids, with Microsoft joining the fray with Windows 8 soon.
What will probably end up happening is what we've already seen with Linux on desktops: Ubuntu and possibly some other tablet-optimized distro will try to sign up a hardware vendor (say, Dell, since they seem to be somewhat friendly to the idea)....and fail, due to the market realities (aka. other OS vendors with deep pockets and deeper market penetration will eat their lunch)
Then they will try to position themselves as an alternative OS on somebody else's tablet (be it Android or Win8), with minuscule uptake (hobbyists and enthusiasts) - mostly because they will have too many rough edges being not fully optimized to run on proprietary hardware.
In the meantime the majority of Linux laptop/desktop users will struggle with the tablet-optimized UI ....or switch to something more usable, maybe even go back to Windows.
I largely agree with this.
What really gets me is that my family and friends who have tried Unity like it, and tell me they prefer it to the prior versions of the Gnome interface and to Windows. That they mostly use OS X may have something to do with it. But, I have been bemused to keep reading complaints from people who boast of their deep experience with Linux that they cannot understand how to use Unity, or that features have been removed, when I have watched children quickly learn to use Unity, point out features I hadn't noticed, and find in seconds the features that IT pros complain have been removed.
I'm beginning to think that the biggest challenge facing the FLOSS community is the hidebound parts of the community who cannot grasp that when usability experts and professional designers design an interface for regular users, the usability experts and professional designers may actually be more in touch with what regular users want than they are.
... were easily solved with four little words:
"Ubuntu Classic (No Effects)"
I don't need eye candy. Perhaps I should give Xubuntu a look?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Anyone else with NoScript or similar notice how many damn ad servers Tom's Hardware tries to pull stuff from?