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Are Power Users Too Cool For Ubuntu Unity?
darthcamaro writes "There are a lot of us that really don't like Unity. Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth defended Unity today, arguing that even 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use. Then again he admitted that some of us are just too cool even for Unity. 'There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them,' Shuttleworth said. 'Fortunately in Ubuntu there are tons of options and lots of choice and ways to skin the cat.'"
Unity is too cool for power users?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
It's fine if you don't mind a slightly looser integration of GNOME.
Plenty of eyecandy to spare.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But I fucking hate both GNOME 3 and Unity with a passion.
Canonical and the GNOME tools fucked up a good thing that was GNOME 2.
Now get off my lawn.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Jack of all trades, master of none.
There I said it. The first thing everyone does after installing 11.X on a desktop platform is install a different UI.
Mod me down all you want, working at a 50% ubuntu shop full of power users it's the truth.
>> 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use
I do. Thats why I avoid Unity.
Unity gets in the way. It takes way to many actions to find and launch something compared to gnome 2.
I think the unity interface looks kinda cool, and the first thought I had was that it would be neat on a tablet. However, it does nothing for usability on my desktop. Especially when programming via multiple terminal sessions. Which, is the only time that I really ever use linux. Thanks for judging me, one of Ubuntu's previous fans, asshole.
It's not about being "too cool". It's about being sick of a crappy, poorly thought out interface that caters to users that want everything done for them. Power users and people that know what they're doing typically don't want magic - they want to know what's happening on their system and to not have an interface like Unity shoved down their throat.
-- Cameron Eagans http://cweagans.net
is what comes to mind. Making users work hard for no reason since 199*.
Is it possible to mod the base post down as flamebait?
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
I tried Unity. It cut my productivity, so I switched to Xubuntu. Now I like it better than I did the original Ubuntu Classic.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
I don't like unity, gnome 3 is somewhat bearable
Every time I'm browsing and I have to hit the back button, poof unity swoops in and blocks me. This annoyed me so much after a week I have to apt-get remove unity. Then just install cairo-dock and thats all you really need.
The new slackware, in my opinion.
The unity interface turns every computer into a netbook interface that just isn't appropriate for regular computer use or users ....
Have gnu, will travel.
"It takes way to many actions to find and launch something compared to gnome 2."
ITYM "...the bash shell."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.10 and was very unhappy with Unity. Fortunately I found out about Lubuntu, which is "a variant of Ubuntu that is lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient by using lightweight applications and LXDE, The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, as its default GUI." It is wonderful, fast and efficient! Get it here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu#Get_Lubuntu
Am I the only one who uses KDE anymore? The latest in the KDE 4.x line is plenty stable, and imho it's the best, most usable, most stable, etc. desktop environment out there.
It's not that we're too cool. It's that Unity is too shit.
no problem.. will use Mint/Debian until they come to their senses!
That's the exact problem!
Unity is not usable. It is not easy to use or intuitive.
Right-clicking should allow us to alter things. Things should be consistent. We don't need have the screen taken up with giant buttons - that doesn't help and it's not easy to use! It's just annoying.
When Unity first came out I thought it was pretty neat. I liked it, thought it was a nice looking desktop. But it fell flat on its face the moment I needed to do some serious multitasking. At that moment I decided I needed a new desktop environment, and considering 11.04's bugginess I figured I might as well try out a different distro while I'm at it. I'm now happily running Arch Linux with XFCE. It's not quite as pretty looking, but it lets me get my work done without getting in the way.
Did I blink and end up back in primary school? Does anyone who refuses to use Ubuntu have cooties too?
And how ridiculous is it to say geeks are "too cool" to use a product. What are you smoking!?!? Geeks love new things that function well and allow them to do cool things. They do not shun these things based on idiotic social protocol.
So take your poorly written crippled little interface and put it back in a dark cupboard, or if you're out of room shove it somewhere the sun don't shine!
I am sick and tired of free software developers thinking that because their product is free (in both senses) they can dictate what I do or do not like, or what features I do or do not want. If you take a feature away, either give me a way to re-enable it or suffer my ire. Firefox devs, Google, Ubuntu...that means you. Apple, Microsoft, you're not exempt because I pay for your product.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I love unity and the slick interface it provides. Unfortunately, it doesn't love me. I want the launcher at the bottom. Can't figure out how to do this. It runs slower than KDE 4 on my netbook and I could have sworn it was a netbook interface. I can't justify the lost productivity as I wait for things to load or while I fruitlessly hunt for my stuff at the bottom of the screen. In my opinion it should run faster since there is less to it. Fundamentally, I switched to Debian and realized that I'd forgotten what a fast responsive UI felt like!
The terminal and bash shell are still there. They're just harder to find. I just went to this, and the abrupt change was disconcerting. I suspect I'll get over it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
at least give us an option.. gnome 2 worked great on my old laptop, unity doesn't! Isn't that supposed to be one of the perks of Linux?. rejuvenating old hardware?
Almost Shuttleworth... I don't use unity because I like to skin puppies... key difference.
I don't get why there is this push away from the program menu we have been using for over 15 years. I still like it. Just because it has been around a while doesn't mean it needs to be replaced. I switched from Ubuntu after 5 years to Mint to get away from Unity, now Mint is going to Gnome 3. I'll try that, but if it is too much like Unity, I'll probably go to Xubuntu.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Yeah man that one click is just killing me. I can't believe they made it so hard. Did I just get trolled?
I like usability, but usability doesn't just mean that a dumb user can figure it out, it also means that it gets the job done with the least amount of effort and Unity just doesn't cut it right now. One thing for example really nice in Gnome2 was that i could have multiple panels, spread across different monitors and filled with the apps needed for that monitor. With Unity I can't even move the dock thing, let alone place it on a monitor of my choice. Also starting an app: Yeah, for big applications, having the icon click be turned into a 'switch to already running app' is great, however for terminals is awkward as hell and makes no conceptual sense. That's simply not how you use a terminal and the dock doesn't provide any proper way to change that behavior. Menu on-top, same issue, great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
There are also very basic issues with Unity, such as: Does it even work? Well, right now with my ATI drivers, no it doesn't. It produces counterless ugly graphic glitches and problems that make it unusable.
I mean in essence I don't even get why Unity exists. Desktop environments are not that complicated, you have buttons to click on stuff and they make windows open, hardly anything has changed with that in 20 years. The thing that makes the environment more usable lies in making it consistent and bug free. Throwing what we have and starting a new doesn't make it better, it just makes it different for being different sake.
Wanna make application installation easier? Don't twiggle with the start menu, fix dpkg and allow me to easily install software from third party sources across distributions and allow me to install multiple versions of the same app.
Sorry guys Unity isn't nice or usable. I enjoy my macs for that aspect of computing. I find Unity annoying and clumsy without any benefit over gnome. That isn't to say gnome is the last word in usability (see the mac remarks) ... But Unity was a leap in some direction other than ease of use and/or forward
I used Ubuntu since I did not want to be bothered any longer with lowish-level sysadmin, and I've convinced a fair number of (formerly non-linux) users at work to adopt it. Seriously, what is the best option now? (no, this is a real corporation doing real work, it's not an option to move everyone to slates. It's also not an option to tell the two-monitor guys to just get by with one and pretend they are working on a slate.) IMO Ubuntu was just superb at giving a no-brainer reliable linux desktop for PCs.
What is the consensus best choice now? Reliability, being fairly up-to-date/secure, and low/zero sysadmin overhead is the goal here; I understand there are some tradeoffs in this wish-list. But I need an Ubuntu level of goodness and, moreover, _well known_ goodness so as to recommend to management.
(N.b. I kind of wish Ubuntu had not been free. We would have happily paid them nontrivial to keep maintaining desktop support - at least for a couple more years)
I run about 100 linux servers. Currently they are ubuntu servers and are unsupported. We are about to do a refresh and my boss asked me to get official support. I looked at ubuntu support, but honestly the direction ubuntu is going on their desktop and the way their mouthpieces act has caused my team and I to not want to risk staying with ubuntu. We are looking at Redhat.
I guess we are too cool to give them money.
Because if we were happy to have someone else dictate to us how we should use our systems, we'd have stuck with Windows or OSX. The UNIX world hasn't even managed to settle on a single window manager, much less a desktop environment that no one but the guy who created it seems to like.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I switched to Xfce, not because I'm too cool, but because I'd like to be able to use a menu if I need it.
I just installed Debian on my main computer the other day for the first time in 6 years. It was right after I did the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10. The thing is though, all the distro's are heading in similar directions, with Gnome 3 on Debian's horizon and already prematurely part of Fedora. I played with Gnome 3 briefly and found it slightly (but not much) better that Unity, but still not as good as Gnome 2.
While Debian is great, it just lacks the 'finish' of Ubuntu. So I've fallen back to a safe haven out of necessity but feel kinda distribution-less.
Mr. Shuttleworth should stop for a moment and think: "What if they are right? What if Unity is a poor design? What if putting a smartphone-ish interface on a desktop computer is a damn stupid idea?"
Circumcision is child abuse.
Yes.
The Ubuntu people better read this thread because I'm only going to say it once more..
It's a goddamn OPERATING SYSTEM!
People use it to start and control applications. It's not supposed to be shiny, wobbly and sparkly. I still set Windows7 to Classic Mode because I don't want it to use up resources for bullshit and the menus are set up sane in this mode. The only thing I somewhat liked about Unity is that you have more screen real-estate, but last time I used it, it was messing up even something as simply as Alt-Tab.
Mark Shuttleworth may classify me as 'too cool' and beyond hope of ever being pleased. But the fact is, I'm a pretty laid back user. The only thing I'm not is a 14 year old girl who wants everything to be pretty or a Mac user who values looks over functionality.
And what the hell is it with things needing to be changed for change sake? I recall most of my friends rebuilding their webpage from the ground up every 6 months, just so that it would be new. It seems Ubuntu is suffering from the same problem. Gnome2 was just fine, and if there was something wrong with it, they should've just fixed it instead of throwing it out the window. I still have to see any real advantage of Unity over Gnome2. All I encounter is a ton of things that don't work. And even if you make the argument that they are only small things, Unity is killing the user experience by a thousand cuts.
Unity is completely unusable. When I upgraded and it took over my laptop, I couldn't actually perform basic functions, like opening a terminal, or logging out, or browsing files. I tried to give it a fair shake, I really did, but when you completely remove nearly all basic functionality, you can't expect anything else. It's garbage. Switched to Lubuntu to get a sane interface, one that actually performs functions a user needs.
I'm too cool for an os interface that sucks my productivity, limits my control over a system I own, that doesn't allow me to multi task, that changes my security settings because I'm too stupid to know what I want to do to my system. Go fuck yourself Mark Shuttleworth. The power users have been the only thing that keeps your self important little distro in business over the last decade. You sniveling piece of human garbage. It's one thing to change your user interface. It's another to piss on the only people give a shit. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
If you add more click to go somewhere in a Gui i call this regression!
I've been using wmii for few years and gnome as the fallback DE.. All I do on any DE is assign a keyboard shortcut for terminal, browser and IM client. For most users that is good enough. And aren't power users on linux supposed to be good on the terminal anyway. I fail to see why desktop environments are an issue.. I think Mr Shutteworth was referring to self proclaimed geeks who really aren't .. And as to why he is thrusting Unity down our throats is convergence, it is because no one in the tech industry doubts that we are moving away from desktops, so Microsoft, Apple and Canonical are taking steps to ensure that they make enough changes to their DEs so that the shift to a primarily mobile crowd isn't that disruptive.. but some disruption _will_ happen.
I'm not a big fan of Unity, but whether it is good or bad is not relevant here. These ToysRUs desktops are here to stay (Windows 8, Unity, Gnome 3, iOS, ChromeOS etc)..
I have to agree with most of the previous posts Unity UI sucks! Unity feels like a half assed tablet UI. I was a big fan of the Gnome 2.0 interface, I love me compiz fusion, I love my screen savers (BSOD was my favorite) and I liked being able to add cute little stuff to the tool bar like local weather. Don't have any of that in new Gnome 3.0 or Unity. Far as I am concerned Gnome 2.X was a good easy to learn front end for linux with a lot of extras for the power user, KDE looked way to much like Windowz for me. Unity UI and Gnome 3.X is a step back.
To all those who make snide remarks about grumpy old UNIX geeks not wanting to change, I issue a challenge: Switch to a Dvorak keyboard for a week.
After all, the Dvorak keyboard is more efficient and more usable than the QWERTY one (at least according to Dvorak proponents.)
Oh, and if you are already using a Dvorak keyboard, you're obviously far too cool for Unity.
Ubuntu's abrupt GUI makeover isn't something radical. It's a sound marketing decision by Canonical, similar to the radical design of Chromium/Chrome OS Google has been quietly making for a while now. Many experts have predicted that the future is going mobile. Let's get real here. Even if Ubuntu dropped Unity, they still would have updated GNOME to version 3. In any case, Ubuntu still wouldn't compete with Windows on the desktop market. The next logical arena is the mobile market. Between iOS, Android, Win Mobile, and et al, Ubuntu would be a breath of fresh air, especially for the tablet market that has grown weary of Android-based operating systems.
Unity is why many left Ubuntu. Even part of the development team got fed up when Shuttleworth decided against their advice to go with Unity. I believe it had something to do with Gnome's refusal to go in step with Ubuntu's 6 month release schedule (it may be that he felt slighted that they wouldn't do his bidding).
Some of the development team went to other distributions to help with their development. One that I'm aware of went with Linux Mint Debian Edition to help them in their development. Another went to SUSE's dev team.
As a user (not part of the development team), I left Ubuntu because of Unity. I didn't even waste time trying it out after reading what it was like and some of the issues it had when it first became part of that distribution. I haven't settled on another distribution to stick with yet, but I've been impressed with Linux Mint Debian Edition and a version of Mint that used LXDE, which runs very well on an otherwise slow netbook. I have some time invested in learning Debian-based Linux distros, so I will likely stay with one of those.
I think the "power" of being head of Canonical and not being able to get Gnome to follow his lead went to his head and hurt his pride, so he settled on something different, anything other than Gnome, for the base Ubuntu distro. There already was a version with KDE and a couple of others. He just wanted to ditch Gnome.
Many just install Ubuntu and install Gnome, so you can have the best of both. But it could be much better if Ubuntu was developed with Gnome in mind.
Not only is he trying to clone OSX more and more every version, but now he's taking up an arrogant attitude about it as well. I wouldn't be surprised if his main computer is a Mac at this point.
i use it with unity2d + xmonad. but chromium is the only non terminal application that i use. I mostly use vim, make and a collection of compilers and debuggers, so i am not sure i am a "power user". I do really like the fact that all my hardware just works, it installs missing plugins and codecs. Ubuntu One is a pretty simple way to make sure you have the same .*rc files across all your machines :). I know I can do this with other tools on other distros, but the whole draw of ubuntu to for is that basically everything is preconfigured and ready to go without me having to do my own administration. I've used and loved Gentoo for 8 years, and it was a lot of fun to be completely in control of every aspect of my workstation, but I just stopped caring less about the machine i am working on and more about the code i am writing.
What i would love see them do is more default cloud integration, like making sure that anything you install on one machine is available on all your instances, remote desktop access/vpn for all your machines etc...
me fail english? thats unpossible
Power users are cool enough for XFCE + compiz running in virtual box on OSX in order to put a gorgeously well evolved set of tools on top of everything. Life is too short to get tripped up on what's pretentious, kool-aid driven, and unappreciative of complexity inherent in sophistication instead of using what is not.
After hiding out in Gnome 2.3 while the KDE folks got their shit together, I tried KDE 4.7.2 in Ubuntu.
I'm staying. It's spectacular. It's really, really nice.
While I didn't find Unity bad, I found KDE so much better.
--
BMO
Looks like you've been modded "-1 Disagree"...
But that is one of the stupidest things I have heard. Power users are usually people that use their PC for work, not fight to get Unity working the way it should.
To be honest, 11.04 should have been what 11.10 is but sadly, 11.10 is still a buggy peice of poo that slows down my working day.
When you fix your dual monitor issue and why unity mysteriously has a fit for no reason, then I might try convince my Mum and Dad to switch from Debian. (Yep, my folks rock a dual head setup!)
To be fair, Unity and Ubuntu has a place and I the community behind it allows a great stepping stone for newies to jump abroad the Linux ship but Shuttleworth need's to re-evaluate what who he thinks "Power Users" are.
I've used Linux since 1995, Debian since 1998 and Ubuntu since mid 2004, when the first 4.10 test release came out. Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 may be perfectly useful for computer newbies, who have no prior experience with any OS, but they are both very annoying for experienced computer users and unfortunately Windows 8 looks to be more of the same. So I switched to Xubuntu apparently the only decent option left, and I seem to be in good company there with Linus having switched to Xfce as well. I used to work for Canonical but really don't get what they are attempting to do. They kept talking about wanting to jump the chasm but it seems to be more of jumping the shark, losing a lot of their long time users in the process.
If they are attempting to reinvent all the OSes for tablet use, which is the only sane reason for this interface change, they are going to fail badly and lose their desktop and laptop share in the process. Apple's already won the tablet market, with Android trailing far behind, and chasing after it this late in the game is not going to be of much use.
The problem is not that the interface is accessible to people with no training and therefore not 'exclusive' enough for power users. The problem is a lack of capability that can be found in more complex UIs. Considering those are pre-unity compiz and KDE, they aren't particularly complex at the surface, just complex when you dig into it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As a proponent, advocate, and consumer of free open source software, I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community... I had read some many vitriolic comments about Unity before I ever tried it that I was profoundly skeptical of it and expected a massive failure. The reality has been completely different. If anything the extent of differences is fairly underwhelming, and I generally find it mildly more polished than the previous interface. It's almost the same in many respects, and I could not care less if I run Gnome 2 or 3 or Unity. As long as I can quickly bring up a terminal and they don't crash, they're all interchangeable.
With all due respect, why the hell are so many of these so called "power users" switching distros just because Unity comes by default? I moved to 11.10, hated Unity, and then reconfigured things to get Gnome back and my beloved Compiz cube. I'd consider myself pretty adapt, but I'm no Linux expert. If you don't like it...uh change it? What's so crazy about that idea?!
Eye Candy is fine. Unity turns my PC into a tablet. There is just a ton of stuff you can no longer do. It is about dumbing down the interface until morons can work it. Then intelligent people can't get their work done.
Tablets are fine, but they are not PCs. I don't want a 5 pound wrist watch that can watch movies, and I don't was a PC that can ONLY surf the web.
... And especially the comments. In my opinion they should go back to Gnome 3 and make that better (better and faster than gnome 2). I've stopped installing Ubuntu in friends and family PCs because of this mess. I tried Unity for a month and I had to bite my fingers to avoid uninstalling Linux altogether! Then I went to Gnome 3 and although not perfect, I like it much more.
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
I can handle changing UI -- if I have to. I don't want to, but it wouldn't kill me.
But what I really can't live with is wondering which "production" package that I use will disappear in the next distribution upgrade. I go through the lists of what's disappearing, but sometimes I miss something that I use regularly but not often. Then it's off to discussion boards and some PPA. I'm using a package-based distro to avoid the headaches of dependency hell, after all.
I am not a crackpot.
Power users use a shell, that gui crap is for browsing the web.
Got Code?
And some who who tried the early unity I have got to say that it is horrible for small screens.
The normal Ubuntu interface slightly customized though is near perfect and way better then Windows.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
> Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth defended Unity today, arguing
> that even 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use.
> ... 'There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something
> that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them'
Long-time computer guy here. Also, owner of several Apple products. Slick is just fine. Slick done well is great. Unity sucks out loud. I used to use Linux quite a bit but I don't much anymore. For the last several years, Ubuntu (since about 5.06 or so) been my "go-to" distro when I just need to put something Linux-y together in a hurry. I did that for the first time in a while a few weeks ago and HOLY FUCKING SHIT I can't believe what they've done. Why has ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING been removed? Why isn't there even a shortcut to Terminal in the default menus anymore? Luckily I figured out I could use the Spotlight-esque search thingie to bring it up, but FUCK... no wonder everyone is complaining.
Mr. Shuttleworth, in your first few years with Ubuntu you did some fantastic work, but you've really gone off the deep end in the last few releases. You don't HAVE to change everything every six months. And if you think you're going to beat Android (with a 3-year headstart and the backing of Google) with Ubuntu on handheld devices, I'm sorry but you're fucking high.
Apple has managed to have a nice, slow, steady progression to dominance over the last decade by steadily releasing and refining their products. The one thing they do NOT do is drastically change direction every six months like a scalded cat.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is a reason that most people disable compositing for their window manager.
+2
My reason for hating Unity is lack of personalization options. To add a shortcut to the bar there was a page explanation of how to do it. Is that your idea of easy shuttleworth?
Chris Sheppard
A lot of "Power Users" who got entrenched before Ubuntu are "too cool for Ubuntu," perhaps with good reason, at first.
Now, I'd say most of them are just frozen into their distro of choice because they know all the cool tricks there and they'd feel impotent in Ubuntu.
I honestly want to know who the target demographic is for Unity. I've used Ubuntu for 5 years now and am looking for a new distro. Apple is honestly the only company that has handled their traditional OS and the advent of multitouch devices appropriately. Ubuntu is making the same mistake Microsoft made for years trying to throw XP or Vista or 7 onto a tablet. A multitouch mobile device is a different beast from a laptop or a desktop and thus mandates a separate OS. Microsoft and Ubuntu are now making the same mistake Microsoft made for years trying to force a desktop OS on tablets in reverse. Forcing a tablet OS on a desktop doesn't seem helpful. That is why I would really like to know who they are trying to cater to with Unity. I just don't get it. It's not that I'm too cool, an OS is a tool just like any that are in my garage. If the tool doesn't work I'll find one that does.
It's a matter of usability. Far from being usable, Unity actively gets in my way. It's a pity, because I actually do like a small number of the UI concepts it uses (foremost among them the Mac-style unified menu bar). But on balance it's just not worth it: it's clunky and slow, and the search bar is simply no substitute for being able to organize things.
I'm on Lubuntu now, and much happier with it: faster, lighter, and more in tune with the way I work. I can even use LXLauncher for those times when a tablet-ized interface is actually useful.
He seems hell-bent on foisting Unity down everyone's throat, no matter what device they're using, by having it configured by default on a fresh installation of Ubuntu, and I think the backlash against Unity is because of that.
Unity does not work well on the traditional desktop meme. My desktop is NOT a tablet or a cellphone, and I do not want my desktop to look or act like a touchscreen device tablet or cellphone, nor are my monitors touchscreen devices.
I want my desktop to be a traditional, get-out-of-my-way place, safe from interference from anything like Unity - and Mark should know better than to have not given a choice at installation time whether one wants the "touchscreen interface" or the "traditional desktop interface". Sure, after installation and with 10-15 minutes of work you can end up with Xfce4 or other desktop manager of choice, but not offering the choice at install is bad - just that one choice would probably have made all the difference between people saying "the latest incarnation of Ubuntu is not bad" or "fuck Ubuntu and fuck Unity".
I consider myself a power user, and I like unity. I've been using Linux exclusively for about 10 years now, and I run my own mail server, database, web server, and I tinker with sshd config files, send my emails with gpg--the works. I had switched from Debian to Kubuntu about 2 years ago, and I've used KDE from 3.1 to about 4.3. I switched away from KDE because it was slow with compositing and switching windows.
Now unity does have its issues, but it has many strengths. The 2D interface is built on metacity, and it's very fast. One thing I like about unity is that the title bar serves the dual purpose as the status bar, saving about a half inch or more of vertical screen space on every window. I use the keyboard extensively for window management, and not having a title bar in addition to a status bar is a welcome change.
The launcher stays out of the way (behind windows), and it can be easily used to launch applications with a keyboard. A number associated with each application on the launcher panel such that it'll either launch a new instance or switch to an existing instance instantly when pressed. For instance, I can press Win+1 from anywhere, and it'll take me to my browser, or open a new browser window.
That said, unity definitely still needs work when it comes to managing a lot of windows. My typical workstation has 9 desktops with up to 9 windows on each. For applications, such as Gimp, that use multiple windows, minimizing and accessing different windows can be a hassle in unity. There are also some stability issues in unity.
However, I do think that unity 2D shows great promise, particularly for users that are adept at keyboard shortcuts.
i don't see what the problem is, i can still run terminal full screen.
Ctrl-Alt-t still does the trick. They haven't *improved that function yet...
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Count me also as someone that did not like Unity. I tried 11.10 on my laptop a couple weeks after it was released (my laptop here is about 1 year old), and while I appreciate Unity's prettiness and design goals, it just didn't work very well. I guess it's a problem with implementation, but oftentimes I felt that certain UI elements were slow, buggy, and just all-around kludgey. Why does this happen on my shiny 2ghz Turion II with 4 gibby's of RAM and a Mobility Radeon HD 4200? I loaded Fedora onto the same system and was greeted with a GNOME 3 desktop that was fast, smooth, and crisp. GNOME 3 feels solid and snappy, and you know what? It's not that much different from Unity. After comparing the two side by side I realized that Unity was nothing more than GNOME 3 that was monkeyed around with by amateur programmers. Boo Ubuntu--I expected better from you! One embarrassing bug I encountered was that right clicking on launcher icons would produce a frozen menu (couldn't click or select anything), and I'd have to close the menu and right click again. How could such a bug make it past release? OK OK, maybe I should have been running LTS--I'll be fair. Perhaps anything non-LTS should be considered experimental, but they really seem to present their releases as polished and stable products. Fedora, while just as experimental (if not more so), has given me far fewer such annoyances.
There once was a time when I used to run Fedora and Ubuntu in alternation on my systems depending on which one had released more recently. Both had their shortcomings and strengths, but they were basically neck and neck in terms of quality (or you can read this as stability). Unfortunately for Ubuntu, Fedora over time became more consistently stable for me, and Ubuntu was disappointing me more and more. Finally I just dropped Ubuntu, but I still try it from time to time to see how things have changed. I do feel that quality has improved, but I never liked their customizations to GNOME (even before Unity came around). Unity is kind of like a nail-in-coffin experience for me.
I thought one of the points of Linux was the wide choice of distributions and the fact that if you don't like the way something works you can change it! I sampled Ubuntu back a few years ago when I was looking for a distro that suited me. So far I have settled on Mepis and was comfortable with it up until version 11 which I am now running on one machine. I am not sure that it is an improvement over 10.x in any way.
I also have nothing against running more than one distro and using the one that works best for what I want to do. It is so easy to do that either as virtual instance or just multi-boot if you want to give each distro the whole machine. With the size of drives available today that is not a problem.
I do wonder why so much of the change that we see in this and almost everything else these days seems to be just change for change sake and is not really an improvement at all.
I feel like power users are too cool for Ubuntu in general. If they don't care for Ubuntu's UI streamlining, relative lack of customizability, and other newbie-friendly enhancements/impediments, perhaps they would be better served by a distribution like Slackware or Arch. Why complain about a distro that's not designed for your users like yourself? If you don't like it, switch distros and move on with your life.
Most of us just want shit to work without being dumbed down microsoft pablum where niche retards petition their benevolent masters to rip out decades old functionality for their pet program. I'd say fuck ubuntu but it's a polymer fucktoy with Mrs potatohead on it.
It matters not what 'distro' you choose, we real, true, 'power users' roll our own systems for our own needs...
Perhaps using things like FreeBSD....
Ahhh....
Thats the stuff....
If i should get used (=learn, test, adapt) to something new, i have to understand the advantage. I switch (small erratic test phases excluded) my working environment very seldom: From 1996 to 2002 i used (c)twm, from 2002 to 2006 icewm on slower machines and gnome on faster ones. After 2006 i only used gnome on ubuntu.
So why do i switch?
a) an old system "stops working" and that means its not well integrated into the current distro and compatibilities with standard programs are not checked. I like if things like network manager just are present on the standard desktop out of the box and if programs dont give erratic messages.
b) Better, unbeatable features, like better possibilities for integration between programs.
c) daily tasks get more easy by making better use of the screenspace
In comparison to gnome Unity has a small advantage on my dell netbook, which i only used to read email, surf the web and listen to music.
If i need more than 4 icons in unity then i use gnome-do. And i figured then i can just use the menu instead....
However, none of the options (that includes Windows) IMHO beats the 1992 OS/2 WPS. I am really disappointed that, whenever i tried to use drag and drop in the last few years nothing (or something weird happend). The plethora of stupid web-packed in exe-applications made that even worse.
--Xmonad User
changing something beyond recognition is one thing, but why is he dishing out key-note speech advice that is highly personal? wheres the logic? i really want to see any docs, comments, emails xchanges between the devs and him that derived at this design. btw- it gets the worst ever gui to have within a VM.
Just because they serve it up doesn't mean you have to eat it.
Unity works to whither Gnome, which is bad for the Linux community. The user interface is terrible Gnome 3 is better but not perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You are exactly right. Why the hell would I want to use Unity which often requires me to move my hands between my keyboard and mouse, click extra times to do the same action, or look for another one of those hidden features that were implemented in order to save 10px of space on my 1980x1200 resolution screen.
I like seeing exactly what windows I have open and ungrouped. I like using my horizontal space to display these things. I like not having my file menu potentially hundreds of pixels away when I could normally access it a very short distance away. I liked dedicating launcher menus on a separate bar from my task bar. I like visible scroll bars and I most definitely like having dedicated buttons visible at all times just one click away from me minimizing and maximizing my windows. In my opinion, Beryl/Compiz/Fusion alone offered enough eye-candy mixed with the right options to enhance my productivity while making the experience pretty.
There are very good reasons why I preferred the old Gnome 2.x desktop UI over OSX, KDE, Windows, or anything like that.
Here's a tip Shuttleworth: Don't be a Jobs. Don't think that just because we don't agree with you 100% that we're enemies or a bunch of whiners who are whining for no good reason. You have many users who know what they want, who know what they like, and who know the reasons why. Don't insult us by acting like The King of Hipster Club.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
1) The launch bar permanently docked on the left is a complete fail. If you find yourself moving your mouse to the left side of the screen often, you WILL get annoyed by the launch bar popping out. The result will be you clicking on something you had no intention of clicking on.
2) While we're on the subject of the slide out. Sometimes it doesn't unless you minimize EVERYTHING. Fail.
3) The File menu being at the top of the screen is cool until you tile a window and suddenly it seems alien that your window is in the middle of the screen, but your menu options are at the top.
4) Speaking of the File menu at the top, sometimes if you close your active window, the new File menu that appears at the top is not the actual active program that is now on your screen. It's some window hidden underneath.
5) Alt+Tab is now completely and hopelessly broken. Got multiple windows open of the same program? It's so full of fail on that task I can't even quite explain it. You'll just have to experience that misery for yourself.
There's lots more to hate about the latest Ubuntu incarnation. This is just the Unity fail list.
Mark Shuttleworth, you have a severely broken product. If you don't fix it, I promise your user base will shrink even more quickly than it grew.
Linux Mint Debian Edition is the way to go...they have screwed up Ubuntu and now Linux Mint is a better Unbuntu.
Unity hides all of the GUI representations of programs, and you have to know what they are by name to search for them in the menu. If I wanted that, I'd just open up the terminal and be done with it. Now what's the terminal called in Unity again...? Not to mention it's slow, jerky, buggy, and not ready for grandma.
Is it worse than the global menu that Mac OS has had for the past two and a half decades? This was around before X, let alone before Mac OS X.
Quite the opposite as a matter of fact, I'm an old fuddy duddy who just wants to have a quick interface to launch my programs and maybe display a pretty picture in the background on my monitor. My 11 year old niece must be cool though because she loves Unity. She also likes having the TV on when she's doing her homework. I guess the yunguns are just better at filtering out silly wasteful distractions than us old farts.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Really, Unity isn't that bad. I just use it the same way I use Spotlight on Mac OS X. If I'm plugged in I use KDE, but I'll use Unity when I'm not because it doesn't suck up battery life like KDE does (the search function works way better in Unity, though).
I think the problem most people have with Unity is that they're trying to use it like the older Gnome desktops - the same paradigm that Windows and older Mac OSes followed. It took me a long time to adjust to using Spotlight rather than automatically clicking on folders, because it was such a drastic change in the way I interacted with my computer. But now that I've adjusted to it, it's increased my productivity (and also decreased the wear and tear on my poor mouse). I'm pretty sure if I hadn't gotten used to Spotlight first, I might really hate Unity b/c it would be too big of an adjustment. Apple was smart to add Spotlight but leave the interface otherwise the same, so the transition was smooth and gradual.
So I don't usually use Unity, but I don't see the reason to hate on it. It's not like a linux install is limited to using a single user interface. If you want it to feel like Windows (without the evil), just install KDE.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I used Ubuntu for about a year and a half. When unity came out, I gave it a try, quit using Ubuntu entirely because of it. Now I use windows and kind of dislike it but whatever. At least everything worked for me without having to tweak anything. I do miss several really nice features, though. But not enough to want to return. Ubuntu had a decent mix of ease-of-maintenance and ease-of-use, and then they ditched the ease of use and added an app store.
- I got used to the vertical launcher, but still feeld kind of awkward. I still wish i could make it horizontal at the bottom.
- I could definitely not get used to the global menubar. It's annoying. I figured how to remove it, though.
- I really miss docklets. CPU load or Net load.. really really miss this.
- I never ever use Dash, I just do alt-f2 and try to find wathever i need. Dash is just confusing so i don't bother with it.
- I used Windows 7 and OSX on the same 16:9 monitor, I still don't feel having a little more vertical space made a difference.
So that's about it, I can use it, but I don't love it. I absolutely couldn't get used to Gnome 3, the two weeks i tried using it was pure pain.
All I can think of is why do they insist on removing customization? I think customization is like this: Implement none and users are unhappy, implement a bit of it and most users are happy, implement too much and users are confused.
I have been a Linux user for nearly 15 years, I remember using Enlightenment and KDE before Gnome existed. I used Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 during their complete lifespans. I was a Red Hat, to Mandrake, to Gentoo, to Ubuntu user, and I have been looking for a way forward with Openbox and Debian as of late. Honestly the only good thing Ubuntu has going for it these days is its ability to get my proprietary video drivers configured. Today I am not a fan of Gnome 3 nor Unity and have been running XP because it is painful to get my ATI video card working with OpenGL here, This is coming from someone who wrote his own Xorg and yes xfree86 configs for over a decade. I do still run Ubuntu Server at work, and have dozens of them running, but I am losing faith in Desktop Ubuntu.
Power users? Fuck. What is this, 1995? My grandmother thinks Unity is shit.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't want to give up on ubuntu as a whole, but I do want a desktop operating system (read anything you operate with a keyboard and mouse) that works like a desktop operating system. I'm thinking of moving to Kubuntu on the next long-term support release. I still get most of what I liked about my system and only have to get used to a very slightly different environment. Who's with me?
I just kubuntu what choice do I have.
I've been mostly unimpressed with Unity. Gnome3 is a bit unfinished for my tastes. I tried Kubuntu and felt like I was back in the '90s, but with widgets... I'm giving both Unity and Gnome3 a chance, only because I found a useful site with documentation on making them useable http://www.webupd8.org/ has tutorials and tips on how to make these new interfaces almost worth using. I would be done with Ubuntu by now, were it not for that site.
I am tired of having upgrades available to me but messes up my entire system so I have to re-install. If it is an update package make it work properly, then you'll get more users for it. Right now, yes, unity is just putting eyecandy on a stinky pile of food.
unity and unstable ubuntu switched me to debian (testing is more stable than ubuntu).
using 'old' gnome now , but lxde will be next asuming continues off a cliff.
I use Ubuntu because out of the box, it has the best looking console. I like the excellent readability of font it uses, and i like the how the color scheme works really we ll with vi's syntax highlighting. To me the console is genius. I don't really like unity, it changes things up, yet offers no new innovations, or no new features, or anything compelling from the user experience point of view. Theres nothing in unity that has grown on me. There is nothing i really like, or hate for that matter. Mr. Shuttleworth says its a forward looking change that in the future the desktop won't exist and unity will be running on whatever replaces it. It seems there is currently no shortage of OS options in the sub desktop category, and Ubuntu will be the late entry to this market which is already pretty cut throat. His argument seems pretty absurd. To have a chance be significant in that market it would need to have some significant innovation, but its just a coat of paint over some stale features that aren't even new to the desktop. Unity is pretentious and I'm embarrass to use it. It just feels dirty.
People who like to customize their operating environment don't like to use an operating environment they can't customize!
/* No Comment */
geeks who intend to get the bills paid spend more time with word processors and spreadsheets and e-mail than doing the fun things one can do inside a terminal window. If you want to create ECAD designs by banging out Gerber files character by character in vi in a terminal in pursuit of geek cred, go for it. It won't work, but we'll get lots of entertainment if you put your efforts on YouTube.
For routine desktop productivity of the sort required to be able to afford the geek lifestyle, desktops matter.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I gave unity a fair shot, 1 month.
I am no fanboy, I have win7 and mac at home and work. Unity actually drives me to using windows. It sucks. It is slow, it does not look cool it looks half baked. It performs poorly on systems that compiz screams on.
xfce here I come.
That and it's slow as dirt. On a P4 3 ghz system it takes about 4 seconds before the "start" unity menu even shows up. It's like it was written in HTML 5... by a 5 year old... in the dark.... without a computer.
i've been using ubuntu for 4 years now, at home and at work. I've also converted my wife. She said herself that switching from xp was easy, everything was in the right place, plus she only needs a browser and some sort of document editor like open office.
I had been a desktop geek my whole pc life. I've openly drooled for a mac and installed all sorts of windows desktop shell or widget system out there before switching. I've always been open to this kind of stuff and i've tried all sorts of desktop paradigms.
first time i heard about gnome 3, then unity i thought they were cool. I've waited for them.
I've been avoiding unity for 2 ubuntu versions. I've just switched to 11.10 when that was out of beta and i'm using unity daily.
It just sucks! Nothing from my initial review of it was wrong.
Too big, too colourful, too optionless (plus this must be the only software for which you need another software package to configure the first. And it's not for unity per se, but for compiz.)
I thought that by using it daily and based on my previous love for desktop experiments, my initial reacton will prove to be wrong. I thought i'll get over having to activate a window to minimize it or to not having an intuitive click mechanism to switch between windows of the same app or for opening a new instance of nautilus or terminal (and no, fileknew window doesn't count, that's for grandmothers)roducti.
But there is small stupid stuff that i discover every day and that i find backwardds and counter productive.
I find this offending. This is the whole you're-holding-it-wrong thing again. Turns out unity is just perfect and i'm to blame.
oh, and there's a reason i mentioned how easy it was to get my wife to switch back in the gnome 2 days. This week a coleague switched, at work. She hates unity too. She's also wrong, right?
Curiously yours, crip.
and smartphones and tablets are sufficiently different environments that the best they can do is to annoy desktop and smartphone and tablet users sufficienty to switch to more specialized OSs more suitable for the devices they are used on.
You're posting from a Mac, right?
Tech Public Policy stuff
I was using GNOME 3.2 on my netbook quite happily... and then I decided to connect a second monitor. Turns out that all that shiny compositing doesn't do well with a second monitor at 1680x1050 - it was garbling so badly I thought it was an Xorg issue. Even when I want to log in to Fluxbox, it mysteriously fails to start. I ended up just setting the default runlevel to 3, or whatever the fancy-pants sytemd equivalent is.
Since when is alienating your customer base a sound marketing decision? All they had to do was give users a choice. Don't like Unity? Give the option to turn it off and provide a decent Gnome. But no, Shuttleworth tells his customers to stick it.
But that's fine with me. It's probably the best thing to ever happen to KDE and Xfce and I likely would have never tried Xfce had it not been for Unity.
While it's true that tablets are starting to find some market share, they will never replace the desktop and the desktop still needs a good OS. Ubuntu may not be as good as Windows (it never has been) but just as they're getting close, the cut themselves off at the knees. Not smart. But not to worry! Microsoft is about to give it's customer base the middle finger too if they insist on forcing Metro on the desktop. At least Window 7 is still good for at least the next 8-9 years.
What I'd like to see is Google make a desktop Linix distro that really gives Windows a run for it's money. They've got the talent and the experience with Linux to make it happen.
you and Shuttleworth and others who think You Know What Is Best For Us.
You and others who think like you do should feel free to run your ideas up the flagpole, but if they do not fit our perceived needs, don't be surprised if the salute you get is a raised middle finger if you are annoying enough about pushing it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This is not a matter of being "too cool". I don't care for Unity's appearance, and when I'm not just launching apps from a xterm (well, Gnome Terminal or Konsole on KDE...) I'd rather have menus than giant unlabelled icons that shift around at a whim. This goes for Microsoft's ribbon too, as well as the Mac.
I'm not going to say Unity is bad, I mean, I haven't seen anyone that cares for it but whatever. But, yes, Shuttlesworth, you CAN do something about it -- continue to provide a functional gnome desktop as an option. In 11.04 which "switched" to Unity, you can kick over easily from Unity to Gnome at the login screen -- if you have autologin turned on, just logoff (instead of shutdown), the choice of desktop is right there. 11.10? First, gnome is not installed (it's "gnome-session-fallback"), and second when I *did* install it it's pretty broken, I mean a bunch of apps are just piled up under "Applications->Other", there's broken and missing icons at random points, and so on.
This is all fixable, and I've seen pretty serious problems in Ubuntu releases before (that get fixed a month or two after a version is released...) but it came as a big shock when I installed 11.10 (luckily to a virtual machine) and found the gnome desktop unselectable and then broken when installed. I find this a bad software development policy, going from 10.10 not even having Unity by default to 11.10 not having a working shell like 10.10's. That's only a year.
I use Unity on big screen. Apps are always fullscreen or half. No need to use the mouse. During work it is hidden. I don't see the problem.
I had a friend in 2007 who had never used Linux. I gave her an Ubuntu live CD and she never looked back. Everything worked, was usable, and was sensible. It was great. These were in the days of Windows Vista, and Ubuntu really seemed like a better option to her.
Now I don't know what to do... I "upgraded" my laptop to 11.10 and everything has become much more difficult. Things I use every day were automatically uninstalled. It's unstable and sometimes won't properly load the window manager, or takes an excessive amount of time to load. I can't afford to "upgrade" my work computer because it's too much of a productivity suck. 8.04 was great. Now every year it just seems to get worse and worse, less and less usable... both Gnome 3 and Unity are problematic and I'm stuck without a reasonable window manager. I've tried xfce4 but I'm not looking for bare-bones. When I have time I'll try KDE4 again, but I really don't want to have to keep switching back and forth constantly looking for the stable window manager of the month or wasting disk space installing so many window managers.
I'm a software developer. I'm always having to learn new technologies and programming languages. I don't want to also learn new operating system interfaces and keyboard shortcuts every year. Keep it simple. Incremental improvements. So your grandmother can use it. So that once she's figured out how to use it, an upgrade doesn't mean starting the learning process over from scratch. I could get very non-technical people to switch to Linux in the days of Ubuntu 8.04. The UI was obvious and everything worked (unlike Vista). Those non-technical people are screwed now, many will just wipe everything out and move back to Windows because the simple experience they became accustomed to is no longer available. Windows hasn't substantively changed their UI since Windows 95. Even Vista was less of a usability leap than Gnome->Unity is. I've been using Linux since around 1996 or so, and I end up needing a whole different distribution every few years. This constant inconsistency is a huge problem for Linux usability.
There are hundreds of blog posts all over the web explaining what's wrong with Unity. I see responses from so-called "usability experts" saying things like "our studies showed 8 out of 10 non technical people were able to find the close button." Is this supposed to be a joke? What about the other two people?? We saw Ubuntu as the simple desktop Linux that worked. At 8.04 it lived up to this. Now Ubuntu is becoming a wacky toy for usability geeks to pontificate on.
Go back to Gnome 2. Fix bugs. Fix obvious every-day major annoyances like the inability to block a spamming contact in the default multi-chat client. Things that actually impact users. There needs to be enough of a border on windows that they can be resized without futsing the mouse back and forth for 10 seconds. Make sure all common video cards and web cams (and now 3g modems) continue to be supported in your distribution. Make a *separate* window manager for netbooks and tablets. Keep things configurable so users have choices (personally, I've always used sloppy focus). Make sure the alternate configurations continue to work in a usable manner. Make sure new software and libraries are always available in a reasonable amount of time. Make the upgrade process safer and improve stability. Improve battery performance and startup times. If you want to work on "cloud," keep it up with "Ubuntu One," that looks like cool stuff. It's fine if you want to make it pretty too, I don't care, just don't get in my way when you do it.
I haven't met anyone yet who thought Unity or Gnome 3 in their current state are improvements. Listen to your users.
You're talking about a linux that has finally done what "Lindows" didn't accomplish: Create a flavor of Linux that caters to Windows users that holds your hand and does everything for you. Ubuntu has gained so much popularity because it lets "point and click' dummies" feel good about themselves because they're using the Uber cool geek OS linux, without having to ever learn anything about the OS because for the most part, it still works like windows.
$ startx
sounds like it is time again for good old easy slackware or zenwalk and a simple reliable ui
I am not a power user...but I know a terrible design when I see it, unity is an incredible resource hog that will not even run properly on a 2006 ibm t42 with reasonable ati graphics and pentium M. How in heavens name can the people at Ubuntu expect to keep a reasonable user base with a bloated gui that even makes windows 7 look good?
The kernel version 3 is not the problem ...the problem is Gnome3 and ridiculous graphics routines ...how in heavens name can they screw up gtk3 so bad that it will not even run properly unless you have over 64 meg of vid ram?
Either put out a toned down version of Gnome3 that has less graphics demand and re-enable menu function or.... Ubuntu, Gnome and Unity will die a horrible death ...it will completely alienate the entire Linux community.
Ubuntu has been great for Linux in general but this latest move toward a unified tablet style desktop is a serious mistake...enabling desktop high resolution animated buttons is really stupid ...even on a small screen with less pixels. High res icons are not the end all and be all of a ui design. Using functional linked text names are a more sensible answer especially on the desktop...something which the Gnome crowd has always sucked at.
Yes I understand the importance of translation problems with menu names and the stupid fact the if you name something the same as someone else did you can get sued. However a text editor/word processor named GWort or even Geschreibmaschine would not cause trouble ....hell even Gword might not even raise eyebrows.
The way I currently use Mint linux ...which is still far and away the most sensible Ubuntu variant ..is to create simple small scripts to launch pared down versions of interfaces. This way I can place icons on the desktop that will launch specific instances of programs. For example a simple script like:
#!/bin/sh
firefox https://goofass_job.ca/home/jscript/icaclient/user?login
Is good enough to differentiate my work from surfing the net from the "start menu" firefox ...which defaults to my home page.
Ubuntu......Get off your ass and design a way to simply place and remove buttons with easily customisable icons on the desktop ....for example allow the easy creation of launchers from with specific programs functions or web uis. Encourage program design that incorporates this ability...but first and foremost keep the essential program launcher readily available to the user!
Keyboard shortcuts. They're still a mess. I can't believe that anyone decided that hard-coding the Windows key would fly with the Linux crowd.
At this point, I say screw it. I want a standard keyboard shortcut interface. There's no reason why changing desktop environments should mean that the way I toggle windows between fullscreen and minimized, open/close windows and tabs, cut and paste totally changes. There's no reason I should have to define these common actions in every single app, or relearn them because someone decided that a Linux desktop should be *inflexible*. Linux was built by power users with their hands on the keyboard - why isn't this standardized as part of freedesktop.org?
I can work at a speed that's blinding to the mouse-bound when not tripping over these "improvements", and I'm not going to use something that hinders me.
I run several scientific/engineering apps simultaneously, and usually have 20-30 browser tabs open in multiple windows, so my system is often taxed to its limits. I don't like it when any desktop unreasonably deprives me or RAM, CPU, GPU or usable screen area, no matter what usability features are provided. I may not be anything like a 'normal' user: For example, I don't use the desktop itself for anything mainly because it requires me to minimize ALL my windows in order to see it, so I don't use any desktop widgets and I don't care what my desktop background is. I also use only a single workspace.
I have a LITTLE-big home setup: My primary desktop runs on an Atom-powered Acer Aspire Revo 1600 running Ubuntu 11.04 connected to a 42" HD monitor, which I use for running GUI-intensive apps. My compute server is a headless dual-Xeon Dell running Fedora 15, which runs my CPU-intensive and net-intensive apps.
One of my goals has been to seamlessly merge the resources of both systems into a single desktop interface, especially the application menus and monitoring widgets.
After my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 I decided to give each of the included desktops a try, starting with Unity, and including Gnome3, KDE, and XFCE. I found each of them to have significant issues, though I won't go into all the YMMV/IMHO details. I next tried some less popular desktops. While each had various usability and configuration issues for me, the one thing none did at all well (with one exception) was to provide a truly easy and intuitive way to merge my systems.
What I wound up with was Cairo-Dock (http://glx-dock.org), which runs on top of a minimal Gnome foundation. I run two instances side-by-side at the bottom of my screen: A 'full' Cairo-Dock instance locally on my U11.10 system, and a stripped-down one on my remote F15 system. The combination is a powerful, minimal, flexible, and drop-dead easy interface to both systems that was trivial to install and configure. Very highly recommended.
Though I've never been a MacOS user, Cairo-Dock should look very familiar to such folks.
I then uninstalled all the other desktops (and the parts of Gnome Cairo-Dock doesn't need) and recovered a surprisingly vast amount of disk space.
Slick is just fine. Slick done well is great. Unity sucks out loud.
What typically happens when somebody tries to make Linux look "slick" is that they paste some kind of one-way GUI on top of command line programs. So when anything goes wrong, you have to peel off the wallpaper and look at text messages generated by some program.
(The biggest design mistake in UNIX was that programs take an array of strings and a set of name/value pairs (the "environment") as input, but output only a return code. If programs, upon exiting, returned output as well defined as their input, programs as components would have been far more successful.)
So you admit to being a felon?
I hope the ghost of St. Jobs suffocates you with a pillow this Hallow's Eve.
Unity works just fine for my wife. She's the target user. She likes her apps full screen, one at a time, and she only uses 3-4 apps (Firefox, Gimp and Showfoto).
I have been a Ubuntu fan since a Ubuntu 4.10 beta, but Unity is TERRIBLE. I tried it for a week and I still use it on my wife's laptop and it kills my productivity. I tried Gnome Shell and was less dismayed, but still not happy. I am now a reluctant XFCE user. It has the features I need, but lacks the polish of gnome2.
I'm happy to recommend Ubuntu for friends and family, but next time I do an OS install for myself it's going to be clean Debian with XFCE.
I wanted to stay with a mainline Linux graphical environment that would grow & wouldn't break too badly with each release. So, I figured that I had 3 choices really for main-line Linux environments... Gnome 3, KDE 4 and Unity... and I was already on Ubuntu. Gnome 3 was/is not mature yet... I'd tried KDE4 and found it "wanting." And I'd tried Unity on a Netbook -- It was a bit slow, but usable and tweak-able with Compiz -- and hey, for Netbooks, right? -- they had to make it faster.
Well, I decided I liked the 6 month cycles & decided not to migrate to Debian or Fedora. I eventually bit the bullet & let Ubuntu upgrade my laptop to Unity, & "got used to it." I keep my eye on Gnome 3 but, PLEASE -- that's even more a joke. KDE 4 also still looks like a Windows knock-off & is still clunky. I'll stick with Unity for a while. At least I'm hopeful because it _has_ improved.
Given the options available and the directions KDE and GNOME are taking... I'm better off with Unity or rolling my own. YMMV, but I'll stick with Unity for now.
What really blows and noone here has mentioned is the global menu.
That's right, that menu in the top bar that is hidden unless you mouse over it. There is no way of knowing that the current window has a menu unless you mouseover the top bar. This is the one of the 2 most annoying things about Unity (the other one being lack of customization).
Yeah I know you can remove it by purging the correct apt packages but this abomination will stay there for most users because they won't know how to remove it.
This is horrible UI design.
Unity has extra features, fine. But, the think is, large icons and slower interfaces don't add to productivity.
Same thing goes for Gnome 3. Power users don't want interfaces designed for tablets. They want interfaces that make the best use of the (large) screen space and high resolutions.
This Unity stuff is difficult to work with, makes it take forever to find any of your apps, and just generally makes the system feel like a lobotomized iPhone. If I had a touchscreen, it might feel better... but I don't. Nor do any of my friends and family. Nor do any of the thousands of corporate and home users I have worked with in my capacity as a technician. That makes me feel like Canonical hasn't a clue what they're doing, or who their users are... and their lack of response (or deliberately locking the complaints threads with a response of "we're not going to fix this") on the bug tracking forums doesn't help.
The Unity interface is quite obviously designed for mobile devices - which is fine, since Ubuntu is now being put on phones and tablets. That being said, if they take away the option to use the "Ubuntu Classic", I'll just put some other linux-based OS on my boxen, and say "good riddance" to Canonical's bullshit. To be completely honest, I'm more than a little bit pissed at Canonical over the whole "Unity" thing, the "moving the buttons to the other side" thing, the "nothing goes in the panel anymore, now it clutters the hell out of the notification area" thing, and just the general "let's change how the desktop looks and acts because we haven't actually done anything differently for this version" mentality they've been displaying for the last 4 releases. At least we've finally gotten back the ability to take the user list off the login screen.
"Ubuntu Classic" works well for me, and is the default on my system. I switched from Windows to Ubuntu when the ungodly monstrosity that is Vista/7 hit the market, and I'm feeling no pain. There are a few games I can't play any more, but I still have a couple older machines sitting around with XP still on, if I really can't stand not playing those DirectX-based games. If I really feel the need to play them on "the beast", I can drop another hard drive in and reinstall XP.
I turned a lot of the eye-candy off, moved the stupid buttons back to where they're supposed to be (gconf-editor, apps/metacity/general/button_layout, menu:minimize,maximize,close), made a few other tweaks, and it feels almost as good as it did in '08, when it was climbing the charts and ripping users from Microsoft's clutches like there was no tomorrow. The OS was slightly different from the others on the market, but it wasn't a complete paradigm shift to use it instead of Windows XP - and as much as Apple has been taking off lately, they're still only, what, 12% of the market?
I wish Canonical would quit changing things just for the sake of change - when people are used to having a start menu, it's a helluva lot easier to make the switch from bottom-left to top-left. Having an additional panel up top that doesn't fill up with a bunch of apps is a nice touch, since I can add things like System Monitor to it and have performance graphs available at a glance. The Unity interface not only throws away those useful features, it confuses the hell out of people who haven't used OS X before, because they're not expecting to find the focused application's menu way over on the other side of the screen - they're expecting it to be in the app's window, like every other app they've ever used for the past 20 years.
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft screwed the pooch with Vista/7/"the ribbon", and for the same reason. "Usability testing indicates that users who have never touched a PC before are able to find things much more quickly this way!"
To which I respond "So what? The other 90% of your user base can't figure out how to save their office document any more!"
Open note to Canonical: My PC is a PC. It's neither a phone, nor a tablet. Stop trying to force crap down my throat that I don't want.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
... too annoyed by!
If Windows is like a car with the hood welded shut, then Ubuntu is like a car where they put the lever to unlock the hood in a different place with each model. And they don't tell the driver, because it would only confuse him...
(+1 car analogy)
I never found the group management tools in Unity, so I can set my user part of the group VBOX (VirtualBox).
Everywhere I look on the web, it says the same thing: install a tools or do it at command line!
How a novice can do that?!
I tried to use it for a week and I gave up... no time to waste on configuring an OS anymore.
So I run Kubuntu on all 4 of my machines, including the netbook. If some way is found to make it impossible to run KDE on Ubuntu, I'll go back to Debian.
Desktops are not smartphones,. The main differences are far more screen real estate (true even on a netbook with the screen the size of a tablet ...netbooks don't need virtual keyboards or touchscreen cursor control), a physical pointing device, and a physical keyboard. Optimising a desktop with a smartphone UI is a great reason to change distros or operating systems.
Certainly, a single unified UI is convenient for developers. But if the price of developer convenience is mass migration to the competition, it's not worth paying.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Haha. Super key, type term. Ooooh so tough
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
the desktop is dead, they say.
user now have tablets, notebooks, phones, they say
as computers become more common place, users will move away from the old desktop paradigm, they say.
but I use my desktop as a workhorse, I customize it, I use bash, I have my own views how things should look.
Yes, the desktop as a consumer device is dead, the desktop as a linux user device isn't.
Ubuntu has to decide whether it wants to please users or consumers.
It seems Mr Shuttleworth has become infected with the Corporate "agree with us or you're stupid" mindset.
Shame.
Personally, Unity is a mess. It's not the bugs, they're sortable. It's the abandoning of 20 years of accepted UI standards just to satisfy some delusional idea that Ubuntu can become OSX.
Add to that Mr Bacon and Mr Shuttleworth doing the rounds online, patronising and insulting anyone who disagrees with them. Apparently, they hid some of the controls in order to stimulate people's exploration because apparently we don't explore enough. When you get to that level of patronising nonsense it's time to check into the Bill Gates Clinic for the Terminally Delusional.
Killed Ubuntu stone dead for me (and I'd used every version since the first Beta and was recommending it to anyone who asked).
No matter. There are plenty of alternatives. Fusion Linux is a fine "works out of the box" Fedora based distro and it still uses Gnome 2.3. There are others. Mint etc.
Unity was supposed to be a user interface for all devices (hence the name). But I don't want an interface that is the lowest common denominator between my dual-screen laptop and my touchscreen mobile. They're not the same, I don't want them to be the same. I want to customise my PC. I want these icons to be right there, and not here, and I want this panel to be at the bottom, with the clock on this corner. I don't care if Mark Shuttleworth thinks it looks prettier in the middle.
I had been really happy with Ubuntu right until the arrival of Unity. The previous version at least allowed you to stick to "classic Gnome", but now even that has been f'ed up to make it look more like Unity (who was the brains behind that idea?).
Unity is the best thing going for Linux Mint right now - it's driving loads of people from Ubuntu to their distro.
There are people like me who use debian/unstable for, at least, 10 or 15 years... and...
I am too cool to post on slashdot... :D
Just want to say that I am glad HAL is gone... and Havoc Penningten is a Nazi...
Keep on going!
I agree with Mark, Unity is very easy to use and it's a very discoverable environment. That's not the problem. The reason I don't use Unity as my main desktop is it's not configurable. Power users like easy-to-use and accessible, they also like to configure things to suit their work flow. That's what makes them power users. Unity is also a bit buggy (as of Ubuntu 11.10).
apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I'm a long time CentOS/Fedora user but I try new linux variants as they arise.
Unity was just frustrating, once it was up and running I spent a fair while installing all the stuff I needed to be able to work with the OS, why doesn't it just come with all the useful stuff already pre-installed ?
Found a large bug which seems to be attached to LightDM, basically my mouse clicks wouldn't work and the keyboard stopped working on certain windows, I could move the mouse and if I tabbed around I could find a window the keyboard would work in, uninstalled LightDM and put GDM in it's place, voila problems go away. I can't imagine I am the only one to have had that problem.
It reminds me of the Fedora Live CD that booted without any networking - great advertising these small issues are - "Hey Mr New to Linux, try this unusable POS, it'll make you run back to windows real fast". The forum post on Fedora went - " Oh thats easy to fix, just drop to shell, edit this file, restart networking". Yeh a doddle for your average windows user - not.....
What the people writing this stuff seem to forget is that the aim is to attract people to Linux, not drive them away by making it overly complicated or so simple and completely new that even your average Windows user doesn't know where to start.
I ended up installing XFCE, it just works....
My main menu is never farther away than the nearest open piece of desktop. One right-click, and there it is. Of course, I'm using neither Unity or Ubuntu; I'm using XFCE on Fedora.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I am a power user. I use CL continuously. I have also been using KDE since last century. AND I LIKE unity. Its different, it works (in 11.10), my programs (graphics and text based) run equally well as in KDE (SuSE), and CL is a only click away for power users. Thanks Ubuntu; we have yet another Desktop choice in Linux.
Ctrl-Alt-t still does the trick. They haven't *improved that function yet...
Guake gives a drop-down terminal, in the style of Quake, at the press of F12. Stylish, efficient, utilitarian, and looks nice with a decent background picture (or (semi)transparency).
Pressing F12 again hides the terminal window.
Installation: sudo apt-get install guake
The KDE version is called Yakuake.
Installation: sudo apt-get install yakuake
Pressing one button instead of three sounds like an improvement to me ;)
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Try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop at the login screen. Unity is poop, but you don't have to smell it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
because they cannot track the bugs people report against the package in that piece of shit launchpad.
Ubuntu, please do not release your new UI before you have debugged it.
I'm a power user, and I love the slick design of Unity, but ALL THE BUGS KEEPS ME AWAY.
That Ubuntu does not contain a good development environment (Always need to additional install everything), and now a TOTALLY UNUSABLE UI.. Is so much for me. I have started to look for other OS options (yes Linux)
Before sounding to negative, yes Ubuntu has been a blessing for Linux, I really like what it has done for the desktop during the years. I always have had a mixed feeling about Ubuntu, it never really been the development OS I need, but it always been pretty and worked good. That changed with the release of Unity.
So please, fix your UI, or dump it.
Power users want ease of use... Unity makes doing everything 10 times harder... if not impossible.
Power users want comparability... to make it fit their needs specifically... there are no options that are worth a dam
Unity is getting a bit better, but it is flawed from the start.
Power users want to be able to control the computer from a mouse only, or keyboard only... or a mixture of both.... and Unity cannot be controlled at all... even with full attention on it. No way to sort the menus meaningfully, bad
It isn't the users' fault if a user interface isn't good. GNOME 3.0 was a big disappointment as well; it just wasn't ready yet. On the other hand, if a user interface IS really good, it will be praised by average users and power users alike. For example, pretty much everyone seems to agree that the Nokia N9 "desktop" UI is very well designed and executed - there's no need to make a distinction between power users and Average Joes.
Years ago I worked on product that put Linux on low power devices with a very simple user interface (mainly for older people that wanted to be able to just use internet etc.) The interface we created was very much like Unity, albeit with a lot less eyecandy. Big buttons on the side with just the applications we thought they needed and if you clicked again it would not open another session, just put your open session upfront.
I liked seeing that Unity went the same way and tried using it for a while. But in the end it annoyed me too much and reverted back to Gnome.
As the product we worked on is still being sold I guess the approach is ok, unless you want to do more then just using the basic apps
---
First two panels better than one. one panel is program launch and the other is active program selection. I sometimes have 6 0r 7 applications running at a time, shell or two running a server, a editor, and browser, mail, DB admin program, skype, music,....
Unity gets too full, now there is scroll issue. launch and running on same panel very bad idea.
with one panel as program launcher, on click to launch a favorite program, click, slide, slide, click to launch ANY program.
Unity one click for favorite, (limited space), click, click, search, click click to launch any other program,
You have to search( type) to find a particular program
After a month, you have loaded most of the programs you need, STOP asking me to load other programs. helpful for the first month for newbies, sucks after that.
I want more control over what programs are installed, ( power user) Software center may be great for newbies, I hate it.
Unity sucks!! I upgraded to 11.10, big mistake, I am telling my employees to stay with 11.04.
If I could install "ubuntu classic" with one click, OK, stay with Ubuntu, but I will move away from Ubuntu, because of Unity.
For newbies OK, for any person that knows computers Unity is very bad.
It's a nice opportunity to get it off my chest: I don't like unity. It's big and colorful and gives me the idea i'm being treated like an idiot by my own GUI. KDE suffers of much the same problem, by the way, so it's not just Unity or Gnome. Far too much time is wasted on "looking slick" and "cool effects" and it's seriously taking a bite out of usability. I use a computer as a tool, not a toy and the profusion of big, colorful pictures and "kewl" effects in the latest batch of GUI's is seriously getting on my nerves.
I've watched some videos about Gnome 3 and Unity and didn't like either. So I installed LUbuntu and missed some things. Than I installed XUbuntu and liked it but it also missed some little things. So I installed KDE and liked it but it made my overclocked i7 with 12G of RAM seem slow. So I gave Unity a try in a virtual machine. Turned out to be not that bad. So I installed it on my overclocked i7 with 12G of RAM... NOW WHEN I MOVE A WINDOW, IT'S TOO SLOW TO FOLLOW THE FRAKING MOUSE CURSOR. I have the latest NVidia drivers, hardware that had never give me any headaches with Linux (Gnome Shell works just fine on the same installation). But Unity makes me feel like I was an owner of a 386 with 4M of RAM. So what I'm not cool enough to not being able to adapt to Unity. It won't work with my hardware, information on which graphic card I should upgrade to or what I should do to debug the performance problem is nowhere to be found. I don't like Gnome Shell. Turns out I'm working more and more on Windows 7 these days :-(
Power users are too cool for ... anything but the shell interface.
It's not that I mind Unity or Gnome-Shell, but I just can't find any way I can be as productive (fast) on them as on Gnome 2.xx. I find the interface to be in the way of what I'm trying to achieve. It would be a great interface for my phone, but for my computer I'd rather have something that was specifically designed for less clicks.
I got that Unity wallpaper http://iloveubuntu.net/sites/default/files/field/image/unity_shortcuts_wallpaper_1.png and learned all the shortcut keys, I am also using Synapse since I don't think the lenses are yet mature enough for example they cannot return "Deja Dup" for a string like "DeDup". I have been using the mouse very rarely for the past year. Unity is not yet mature, is not configurable enough but it's really cool. I really don't understand why is the Linux community against Unity and Gnome3. I think I am going to try out Gnome 3 to see how that works. It looks cool. PS: I also shrunk all those dock bar icons to the minimum from ccsm.
That's not a "power user" thing. That's basic accessibility stuff.
Until I can't move it down, I will not use Unity.
"There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them."
When I upgrade, I just want shit to work. I like it to look really slick, but I need my computer to do stuff more than I need it to look cool. It has worked just fine for many years and has looked awesomely cool causing people that see it for the first time to make "wow"-like sounds. Now I upgrade, notice my transparent Compiz Cube is gone (which is a fucking great productivity tool, allowing me to keep an eye on all my virtual desktops through my transparent terminals), notice my shortcut keys to switch desktops no longer work and can no longer be configured at all. I could hardly do anything without touching the mouse. Re-enabling the Compiz Cube gives me a message that the Compiz Unity Plugin needs to be disabled since it conflicts with the cube. Fine, click OK, end of working desktop. Unacceptable. I'm back to Debian.
Or so I thought. The next thing I tried, was to upgrade my Debian box. The result was even worse. X no longer starts. Most video codecs are missing. And when I finally get X running, I get Gnome 3. Well, if you thought Unity was bad, wait until you see this. Focus follows mouse is half broken and in order to configure the panel, you need to click alt + right mouse button. However, out of the box, it does not recognize alt as alt. After an hour of fiddling with the gnome layout options and xmodmap, I gave up, grabbed my Android Phone and enjoyed how it Just Works.
My much less computer-savvy girlfriend has no problem at all with Unity or Ubuntu in general. In general, it Just Works. She would have a problem with X not working after an upgrade or with the braindead new Gnome 3. So, yes, we can be angry at Canonical for not respecting its users and the features they use, but at least their shit works out of the box.
0x or or snor perron?!
I hardly use Linux, but I remember once a few years ago when I was installing Ubuntu with Gnome to get a really minimal OS-experience. I thought Linux / Ubuntu would be perfect for it. Unfortunately, a shit load of software was installed without me asking for it and I wanted most of it gone. But I couldn't: Gnome wouldn't let me uninstall anything because everything has something that depended on it.
I maintain a few Ubuntu installations for friends that are simply not technical enough to use Windows (they easily get dubbed by viruses...). They love Ubuntu and Unity, and I do as well.
I gave Unity a fair shot when it came turned on by default in my latest Ubuntu install. I used it for a few weeks and finally decided that I really didn't like it as much as the classic interface. The buttons are big and take up too much space, and I disliked not having all of the applications at my fingertips. Sometimes linux programs can have strange and obscure names, but now they're only accessible with a search bar! Why would you make me try to guess like this?
I'm not a computer science person at all, at best I'm a hobbyist who needs to be able to use linux for scientific applications. I am definitely not too cool for Unity, I simply don't like it.
After initial release i was somewhat annoyed. But now everything is working fine. I like the apps menu up in the top where it does not waste space. I always had my toolbar left and popping up since my days with fvwm2. This leaves more place for content, too. The design is quite nice and the whole thing is light weight. Particularly when compared to KDE. And last not least: It is easy for people who are not hackers or cool power users to adapt their knowledge of their mobile phone to Ubuntu. Why in hell do most of the self acclaimed power users and pros "hate" it, or "like xyz better"? It does what it was designed to do and is nice and functional. Perhaps many people here simply don't like new things...
Unity and Gnome 3 are dictating to users what the desktop will be, and that's not a good thing. Even worse is how the ability to configure the desktop is being removed. We have no choice other than use something else. I migrated to KDE.
If you want a case study in failure, look at the TNIV Bible translation. The company who produced it, Zondervan, dictated to evangelical Christians that the TNIV would be their new Bible translation, in the face of fierce opposition. The launch of the TNIV was done via a marketing blitz to force the TNIV on Bible readers. Evangelical Christians, who are normally sheep-like and buy whatever publishers tell them to buy, rose up in a firestorm and rejected the TNIV. Zondervan fired their CEO, hired another CEO to kill the TNIV, and then fired her.
The TNIV=Gnome3/Unity, Zondervan=Canonical/Red Hat, evangelicals=desktop Linux users, etc. Same situation.
When someone in control of something dictates to its customers what they want rather than listening to them, the outcome is always the same, the end is abject failure.
... that scaling the Desktop down to the size of a phone screen failed for the same reason scaling the phone GUI up to the Desktop fails.
They are completely different interface paradigms. If all LCDs were touchscreen, it might be doable, but "swiping" is very different with a mouse - different enough that it just doesn't work.
But I don't like Unity.
Classic Gnome or KDE are fine.
I wish Ubuntu was stable on my Dell Vostro 1400. Locks up constantly. THAT is what I am concerned with, not the desktop of the month.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
the best i found so far is Linux mint. its like windows 7 running Linux under the hood so you get all the custom stuff that you want. i love the search especially, and how they turned down unity. unity should be only used as an option for touch oriented machines and devices, never getting rid of tested and true. merely give you options like kubuntu etc... unibuntu is what it needed to be.
The funniest part of this comment is that he thinks power users use ubuntu.
Slashdot is not a game, Slashdot is not a game. Crap, I just lost points.
Then why do you even have a GUI?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I wasn't sure what to make of Unity back on 10.10 when I had my first taste of it, but since then I've become more fond of it with the improvements it has gotten in each release. Sometimes I'm still not sure whether switching it to Compiz instead of Mutter was a good idea, but it was what people who couldn't live without flaming or wobbly windows wanted, so that's what we ended up with in the end.
Around the same time I got GNOME Shell compiled and running alongside Unity on my laptop, and decided I liked it so much I just replaced my GNOME 2 session with it altogether.
I now currently run Ubuntu 11.10 on both my desktop and laptop, where I use GNOME Shell on my desktop and Unity on my laptop (the latter mainly to save screen space, and frankly because I think it looks prettier to passerby looking over my shoulder and asking, "Oh, cool, what is that?"; you don't get the same response out of ordinary people if you run GNOME 2 interface, nor something obscure that looks like Windows 95 resurrected from the dead). My parents' Windows XP machine was dual-booted a little while back with 10.04, and whenever I have to help them with something I simply miss being able to just search out and start applications by search. I also have gotten used to Unity's Launcher and Windows 7's taskbar, and I find the one in GNOME 2 clunky and outdated now. I've become more keyboard-oriented with Ubuntu since I've first started using it, and between typing out application/file names and Alt+Tab I can take care of any window management without touching the mouse once.
GNOME 2 is dead; I say good riddance to it and time to move on. One of my biggest complaints with it was also what many people who love it consider one of its best features: menus for everything. I don't want a maze of menus anymore, I could care less where stuff is spatially organized like that. It's almost like a disease to me when people get upset that application X has moved elsewhere and they can't get to it by leftmost menu > scroll down to submenu y > scroll down to submenu z, a precision operation that must be repeated over and over and over again. There is NOTHING quicker about that than just searching or hitting a launcher icon. I just find it maddening now that we've got something I feel, frankly, is better.
One last note, for all the people out there who feel Ubuntu is betraying them by switching to Unity, and GNOME by the switch to GNOME Shell, and similar-minded folk: you are NOT the target market. Stop lying to yourselves already. Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for human beings", and it was always intended to be the easy solution for people who are new to Linux or computers in general. Few non-technical people like having a tangled mess of options and terminal windows thrown in their faces whenever they just want to send an email or look at some pictures or browse YouTube. Ordinary users don't think in terms of "I want an efficient interface for doing stuff with speed that can be measured in milliseconds of precision"; they think along the lines of "I want a friendly, simple interface that looks nice when you use it and just lets me get at what I want and nothing else". GNOME is trying to aim for these same people. So in general, Ubuntu really isn't for power users, because it was never intended to be just for power users. The power's still there if you want it, but frankly most people outside the geeksphere don't.
If people are still going to bitch and complain about Unity, then please switch to something more obscure already and stop bellyaching about it. I'm surprised and disgusted that we still have arguments over this by this point. Linux is about choice, and no one's forcing you to stick with the same OS you've been using since who knows when. Look at Debian or something else.
I'm using xfce on ubuntu. Works great.
I ambitiously updated my DVR to 11.10 based on the fact that I thought the Unity interface would be okay for the DVR, and the reported improvements in stability.
It has been bad, to a point of Windows ME bad. I've had a log file error generating 1.5 Gb kernal logs.
One day it wouldn't recognize the DVD burner - in the end I finally had to restart. Except it won't actually restart, the restart won't leave past the login screen - finally, regretfully, I do a hard reset. The DVD Burner is re-recognized, and all is good . . . except
Evidently the restart was being stopped by Banshee refusing to exit . . . and it will no longer run, at all. Doing a complete uninstall does nothing - something in Banshee has fallen and won't get up even after config files are removed and reinstall. Try to install Amarok - it won't run; Rythymbox no longer comes up in the repositories. Totem is 75% stable. That is to say, the first time I play a large movie file, it get's 75% through it, then locks up.
Various other programs that never had problems running in the background consistently crash after a time.
Despite the vaunted Linux community, I have virtually never gotten a response to any problem I posted with Ubuntu -- but by and large before now I never had *that* many issues, and they were typically irritations that I eventually figured out on my own, not genuine problems. I'm *not* a power-user though, and this last version is an unmitigated disaster - if you haven't upgraded yet, I highly recommend just holding off until the next release.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I use Ubuntu for work and Unity is an unmitigated disaster. I receive reports in many different formats, PDF, DOC, JPEG, HTML, PNG etc and need to refer back and forth between them. Pre-Unity this involved glancing at the bottom tool bar and clicking the report name. With Unity - I have to stop and think, "where is the switcher" oh yes it's on the left. Move the mouse to the left and then wait for it to appear. Now I don't know what format the report is in so I have to start at the top with Firefox and work my way down the different programs. If I am lucky I only have a few reports in each format and if they are distinct I can spot the one I am looking for with ALT-TAB. However more often than not I have to switch into the report to see if it is the one I need. If I have more than say 15 reports open I can forget where I am and go around in circles looking for reports. This rigmarole takes forever and is mentally draining. I have swapped back to Gnome2 now and it's a great relief. Mark Shuttleworth - the man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
He says "Geeks are too cool for Unity". No Mr. Shuttleworth, You see we outgrew "Romper Room" at an early age. I have no desire to return to something so basic that its not even productive any more. I realize that its your Operating System and you can do with it what you want. However, When you start dictating to Users and quit accepting fair criticism of the operating system then you are no better than Microsoft. If you are willing to drop your main users of Ubuntu for a very small handful that like your Unity then be preprared to take the consequences. Deciding that Unity will be the default DE was a real slap in the face to alot of us users.
In reality Mr. Shuttleworth, You are making a grave mistake like others have and you are the one that will be left behind as we all move on to other flavors that provide better productivity and support. Its not like Ubuntu had the market all sown up. I for one will leave it as the classic DE becomes non supported. As far as Gnome3 is concerned, You can carbon copy this to them too.
This really is a textbook example of how not to run a business. My last question to you Mr. Shuttleworth is: "Hows that Change working out for you?".
From what I have seen so far Unity gets in the way of usability and refuses to let me make my desktop look the way I want it to look. The people I know who have upgraded regret it. I'll stay on Ubuntu 11.04 until they stop being stupid. First it was GDM (no more login customisation) now they want to dictate the desktop. Screw that.
There are lots of negative feedback on Unity in linux forums and blog comment fields... I am quite happy with Unity - it works well and looks nice. I am still able to do whatever I want the way I've always done it but maybe this is because the terminal is where I do my work anyway. I think one reason for all the negative feelings aired about Unity is that it is mostly people who are annoyed that care about venting frustration on the internet. Others just go by their work and care about other things instead, such as football, beer and family. What I like about Unity is that it lets me do my work (terminal) and allows my family to use my computer without constantly asking "how do I...". A win-win for the power user if you ask me.
Okay, so a lack switching tasks with just the mouse, having to middle click to launch a new instance, and right click not doing very much of anything on the menu. I think these were mentioned above.
How about:
- randomly re-sizing my carefully placed windows to full screen. This at least happens when I switch workspaces (which I do frequently).
- not allowing me to select a menu from a visible window, without first assigning focus to that window (i.e. I can't directly click on a menu for another application)
I'm trying to give it a fair shake, but I find it very painful to use so far. I don't see any advantage over the other system right now.
and ease of use. That's why I don't like Unity.
You are exactly right. Why the hell would I want to use Unity which often requires me to move my hands between my keyboard and mouse, click extra times to do the same action,
I don't use my mouse at all with Unity... we must be talking about different things?
or look for another one of those hidden features that were implemented in order to save 10px of space on my 1980x1200 resolution screen.
I use a side taskbar in both Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my laptop. When you have only 768px of vertical resolution on a 16:9 screen, it makes sense to move the stuff out of the vertical space. But I do agree that it would be nice to be able to move the launcher to the bottom, or the right side (which I am used to from Windows)
I like seeing exactly what windows I have open and ungrouped.
Use the Expose-style switcher? (Shift+Alt+Up, I think, can't remember) I don't use it, though. I tend to have windows opened full screen or tiled, across multiple (7-8, usually) virtual desktops and just switch desktops when I want to switch apps; Super+S gives me an overview. Again, it would be nice to disable grouping on the tasbar or have Windows 7-style previews
I liked dedicating launcher menus on a separate bar from my task bar.
There's the desktop, and I think you can still run other docks as well as Unity
I like visible scroll bars
Agreed, not entirely sure why there isn't an option to use normal scroll bars, the new, extra-thin ones in Ubuntu are just plain annoying
I most definitely like having dedicated buttons visible at all times just one click away from me minimizing and maximizing my windows
Not sure why being visible is an issue, although this probably could/should easily be an option. eg. when enabled, it makes the Max/Min/Close buttons permanently visible and shifts the global menu across
I think Unity needs some more work and definitely needs to be more configurable, but it is usable enough for me. I have no major complaints with it other than the default Alt-Tab switcher and not being able to move the Launcher. The former can be fairly easily be changed and the latter I can live with, although I see no reason why it shouldn't be configurable
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
It may take more "actions" (if you consider a single keyboard press an action) but since you don't have to use the mouse it's a lot faster
XFCE, or Awesome - if you're feeling particularly adventurous..
... as in Kool Desktop Environment (KDE).
That is why I will always use Xubuntu. I don't need any fancy bells and whistles, just the power of Linux.
It's pretty funny that anyone is referring to Linux or Unix users as "cool".
too cool to use something that looks really slick
No, Mark. Unity looks really bad, like it came out of your ass. It it less usable than alternatives and hinders productivity. I, like many others, dumped your distro because of that crap and went to another.
I run almost exclusively netbooks and old computers, none of which play nicely with Unity. I run the latest updates on a virtual machine, still no cookies. The only real deal is Linux Peppermint right now, hybrid desktop/netbook OS with LXDE and OpenBox. Add what's needed, Nautilus, Kupfer as launcher, Libre Office, Inkscape, Gimp, and you have a race and work horse, just as Ubuntu used to be. Easy to use too, the former file configurations get more and more GUI-tized. It's nothing short of bizarre, how formerly excellent systems don't capitalize on their strengths but self-destruct, by trying to be hip.
Hi, nice to meet you. I'm a power user (Network Administrator) who has used Ubuntu for many years, SUSE/RH about evenly before that, and... Overall, I like Unity. Sure, it's different, and took me a while to get used to it. But, considering I have an actual use for the Windows key now, I really enjoy it. I just hit Windows Key, and type the name of the program I want. There are some bugs still, but I'm looking towards the 12.04 for the finishing polish.
Because, I'm a power user, and I know what I want, and I don't need menus, because I grew up on CLI. To argue against that functionality is to argue against CTRL-R. That's a command power users know, and is now mapped to a single key, with a bit of search to bring up programs we remember the function for but not the exact name. Such as doing "update" or "software" to see all of the package managers.
So, while you may not "want" to meet anyone who disagrees with you, here I am.
I8-D
The current computer gui trend is moving towards "one size fits all" devices and this is badly flawed.
The usability of the gui interface on a 3" smartphone is different from the needs of a 7-10 inch tablet or a 17" and up desktop monitor.
What works on one may not work well on another.
The size difference alone between a phone and tablet means that the touchscreen interface on these devices are not ideal if they are exactly the same, never mind trying to use the same interface on a non-touch desktop computer monitor of 17 inches. And most are larger than that.
The ideas behind Unity are good- for the touch-enabled displays on portable devices. Not so good on a far larger, mouse-driven system.
Why is it so difficult to understand that different tools work differently?
How effective is it to use a pot for banging nails or spray paint to write the address on an envelope??
There are four modern classes of consumer computing devices and they each have specific interface needs, although some crossover exists at times.
The priority considerations:
1) Desktop computer- large screen, keyboard input and mouse driven
2) Media Center Computer- very large screen, remote control navigation and typically no keyboard or mouse
3) Smartphone- very small screen, touch-driven input with one hand*
4) Tablet- mid-sized display, touch-driven input with both hands*
*Smartphones and tablets have the most crossover but even there are NOT the same: icons should be a different size for visibility and usability, and phones are typically used with one hand and tablets with both. The gui interface SHOULD address this.
People are changing things to make all these devices look and work the same and THEY ARE NOT THE SAME.
unity, as well as gnome shell seem to me like a half finished, unoptimized, design study. they are as unfunctional as the early 3d-ui-experiments and in addition they're even slower. The only PC i own where i could use any of both is my desktop which comes with a large enough (HD) display and just enough power to make the whole shebang run almost fluid. I mostly use my netbook and servers, though. In addition most end-users i know, come begging me to install gnome2 again shortly after they upgrade their respective ubuntu installation. ;) ;)
long story short: especially unity wastes more pixels than Aero, while being slower and laggier than OSX 10.0, while being as static and inflexible as can be. I'd recommend a rewrite of everything
If you want a stylish modern snappy and stable environment i'd recommend OSX
People who wanted to use a Unix based OS and didn't find MacOS appealing, but still wanted a UI that doesn't make you learn everything anew from scratch, turned to Ubuntu. Ya know, it was easy to use, mostly self-sealing, stable, little update overhead, the whole "what we'd love about MacOS but we don't wanna have MacOS because we don't like the way it looks".
Now they're pissed because it is looking like MacOS. Simple as that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
After several minutes of cussing (well, hours) I finally started searching for a solution to Unity. Finding out I could install Gnome 3 (which has other slick UI options as well) I did so and never looked back. I loved having my Applications neatly organized and readily available. They completely buried them and made it a chore to dig them up. The attitude is ridiculous though. I wouldn't be so pissed if I could have moved the unity bar to the bottom, but they saw fit to decide where I put the damn thing. That was the leaf that broke the monkey's back. Even Microsoft lets you put the damn task bar where you want it. The Mac OS X thingy (??) is nice too, fairly easy to manipulate and update with your apps. I love Ubuntu, but Unity was like throwing tacks onto a dance floor. I don't mind change, especially if it is super intuitive they way they think it is. But Unity is not intuitive. Maybe it is OK for someone who has never used Linux before, but it took me ten minutes to find terminal.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Have you tried Wine for your games? What about VirtualBox for your XP instance?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Mark, You violated what Linux is "FREEDOM". The timing of Gnome3 couldn't have been worst when the Whole World is in an uproar about Freedom, Choice and Dictators. When you strip people of their freedoms you better expect a backlash. Thankfully, 10.04 LTS is still available for Netbooks, Laptops and real Penguin Tower's driving the motor that powers the Internet. Unity is a Tablet, and Phone software release, nothing else in our view from the outside.
>> 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use
I do. Thats why I avoid Unity.
Unity gets in the way. It takes way to many actions to find and launch something compared to gnome 2.
I completely agree. If I wanted an Apple interface, I wouldn't have been using Ubuntu.
And they obviously have done 0 regression testing with multi-monitor setups. Your have an app in monitor #3 and the menu for it is in monitor #1? They have no clue what usability means.
As new releases come out, I do whatever hack is necessary to disable Unity. Once I can no longer do that, Ubuntu is gone.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
When you have to make multiple clicks to get to the same area that only need two clicks you ask: Why was this changed?
When you are greeted with a search box instead of categories of needs/tasks again you ask: Why was this changed?
I have tried it on new, old, semi experienced and none of the users came away pleased or found it intuitive. The UI is supposed to be an enabler, not get in the way and become a blocker.
Outside the computer world people have needs, the computer entices people into its world by providing a tool or service that makes peoples lives better, more efficient, easier etc.
Unbuntu has done a great service to the computing community, I hope that the developers take the community response, adapt themselves and improve vs being stubborn and not listening to reason.
You are exactly right. Why the hell would I want to use Unity which often requires me to move my hands between my keyboard and mouse,
Oh dear lord! Not moving my hands!!
I'd be a lot happier with Unity if it didn't try to do away with a "Start menu".
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
They took that away with the latest Ubuntu release IIRC, if you are on 11.04 or earlier though you are good.
I duknow, I happen to think Unity isn't to bad overall. Yeah, I can't use it vanilla. I tweaked it. And? Everyone* tweaks their UI. On the other hand, Unity is 1) new and 2) not all there yet, and 3) has its own problems. (I could go on about this, but I shan't...)
First paragraph: I think that everyone except narcissistic masochists want a system that is easy to use. Count command-line-only elitists among them. Command lines are amazing in that they are unmatched for the ultimate in automation, but the average user should be able to conduct day-to-day tasks without having to go to the command line - and yes, this includes the ability to set up a basic network server using centralized authentication for a small office/home office environment.
This is one of the reasons Microsoft Small Business Server is so popular; you almost never need to go to the command line. The down side of Windows is the lack of the ability to automate maintenance and make the system self-healing. It has become possible through PowerShell, but even though it has come a really long way, when Microsoft reinvented the wheel they made it a hell of a lot more complicated. But, Microsot SBS is easy to use and even a relative novice can set up a complete network without ever opening a command line.
In short, there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a system easy to use. For the problem, see below.
Second paragraph: "Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done."
Part of "get things done" means being able to get things done, and the GUI should either foster that goal.. Hiding functionality from users is one of Gnome's shortcomings, and Unity took some of Gnome's worst aspects and expanded upon them. Flexibility and power are KDE's best strengths, and it can be stripped down visually to be as easy to use as a Mac, while retaining all of the functionality that it boasts as arguably the most powerful desktop environment in existence today,
There are always hipsters who shun anything that is vaguely cool, with their "being uncool is hip, and so is poor hygiene" mentality. Who cares what they think. And the narcissistic command-line-only elitists? Nobody likes them because they're invariably jerks, so who cares what they think?
A cool, easy-to-use interface is nice. I loved Compiz-Fusion+Emerald+KDE and miss it. It looked really slick, added a lot of practical functionality, and made even monotonous tasks a little less boring. However, unlike Unity (and Gnome) it doesn't get in the way of doing your work. That's what the ideal GUI should be: easy to use, but it should be so easy to use and powerful that you really don't think about the UI. In other words, the GUI needs to get out of the way and let people do their work. This is where Windows 8 goes wrong: they are (reputedly) adopting the iPhone/iPad-like interface, where everything runs full screen. Wasn't overlapping windows Windows 2.0's BIGGEST selling point? Why on Earth would ajyone with normal vision want to run a browser or a word proc
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You are exactly right. Why the hell would I want to use Unity which often requires me to move my hands between my keyboard and mouse,
Oh dear lord! Not moving my hands!!
You mock but it interrupts workflow, you ignorant twat.
About once a year I try out Ubuntu to see what it's like, although IIRC I didn't use it last year. For a while, my need of certain Windows apps has prevented me from moving to Linux. But I'm almost at the point where that isn't a problem anymore, so I like to see what's going on. I've always found that Ubuntu is easy to use, and I like it even though I grew up downloading Slackware on floppy disks at the local library.
Unity seemed alright to me, possibly because I use OS X at work and found some similarities with the dock. I was really thinking about using the disk I had just put Ubuntu on as my primary OS, only booting to Windows for the occasional app. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily) I started running into a variety of bugs with the Unity interface. I would right-click on an icon in the dock to get a submenu (for example, to create a new terminal) and find that I could not select anything in the pop up menu. I had weird problems with the search box too, and it seemed to break entirely after going in and out of the multiple desktop view (forgive me for not knowing the exact terms). Suddenly, using my computer became a lot more frustrating than anything I happened to not like about Windows XP!
I thought to myself, "well there are some bugs so it will take time to work it out." But I remembered that this was a major release, an LTS release, and then I was left with a rather sour impression.
I also found other things that weren't bugs that I didn't like, such as giving me an option not to have the freaking panel sliding in and out whenever I moved my mouse to hit the back arrow in full screen Firefox. Heck, I can even do that in OS X! I know that the issue of Ubuntu and configurability has been brought up all over the place, but the reason why I was looking for this simple option was because _the default behavior was interfering with my use of an application_. The hiding of the dock became so intrusive and annoying to me that I found myself simply not running anything fullscreen. What sort of UI testing did they do?
I've been learning to program so I wanted to install Haskell. I went into the Ubuntu Software Center and searched for it. I found applications that use Haskell, but not Haskell itself. I was a bit confused, because I remember in previous versions that I was able to search for pretty much anything in the old package manager (Synaptic?) and find it. To make a long story short, I had to do this through the command line. Now I understand that any programmer should know the command line... but doesn't the Ubuntu Software Center give a rather false impression of how much software is out there? What's the point, for the end user, of not listing everything in the repositories?
If the point of Unity was to create a smoother user experience, I haven't been able to experience it. I was frustrated by some of the UI choices, frustrated by the bugs, frustrated that installing software (one of the major things I liked about Ubuntu) suddenly was nerfed. I remember trying Unity back when it was only used on the netbook distro of Ubuntu and it had its own share of problems. That was years ago... and it still doesn't work right?
I write this rant because Ubuntu used to be what I would recommend to people who had PCs but didn't want to pay $200 for Windows. It used to work great, with a familiar but powerful UI. It used to run well out of the box. I thought it was a great product and I would have used it myself were it not for some apps tying me down. Now I see that it's a mess and a lot of people are unhappy with them. What happened?
Forget Unity, Ubuntu just sux. And I use Ubuntu nearly every day.
Gnome is still a crippled gui, all sorts of voodoo just got remove the redundant maximize button.
KDE is a second-rate citizen, even on Kubuntu, with it broken wireless network management.
I switched from Kubuntu to Fedora which was an improvement but still lame, then OpenSUSE than a year ago and haven't looked back.
Gentoo wasn't bad, but I ditched those assholes because they were spending more time on top-posting flame wars rather than actually updating the system; and they wouldn't update their old ass version of python because there one app that they wanted that depended on that old version of python. So after 3 years of that bullshit I ditched them.
So ... not only do large numbers of existing Linux users hate Unity, but Shuttleworth is either denying the fact or mocking us. The fact is, with this much of the existing installed base rejecting Unity, it only makes sense to offer a well-supported classic desktop as a top-tier option. Not happening, though -- and because of this, one must then begin to wonder: without the slick desktop, what does Ubuntu really offer that stock Debian doesn't?
After five years as a happy Ubuntu user, I've jumped ship and moved to Debian, where Xfce is just as good as it is on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has jumped the shark.
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What I was hoping is this topic would have "here's how you reset things back to Gnome 2" thread.
My initial reaction "what the hell". It took me a couple of days to be able to say WHY I did not like it.
More clicks and changing of window focus to use the applications the way I have been using the X Window System for years.
I'm spending more of my time managing the windows than in the past. 10-15 seconds VS 1-2 seconds to go from one process to another. Add up the context changes over a day and it does add up to 5-10 mins.
I'm looking for the 'here's how you reset' thread along with the 'here's the problems with the reset' thread so I can decide if the new boxes deployed will be ubuntu or something else like RedHat.
Unity is nice only when you look at screenshots. In fact, it's designed to look nice on screenshots.
Nothing works properly, no right click, no alt-tab, no menu. it's empty.
Slutterworth breaks the desktop in order to enter the tablet and phone business. Seriously ????
This will fail ! The desktop users will be pissed off, and he really thinks they will get mobile devices with ubuntu ??????
Also, manufacturers look ubuntu as crappy now.
Personnally i now stay with 11.04 classic, until i need to upgrade, i will probably choose Lubuntu (if not another distro, or a yet to come gnome2 alternative)
aaaaaaa
>> 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use
I do. Thats why I avoid Unity.
Unity gets in the way. It takes way to many actions to find and launch something compared to gnome 2.
The desktop is dead because they killed it.
aaaaaaa
I know people who are still too cool to use anything other than C shell. We get set in our ways. And cranky. Very, very cranky.
It stems from one singular aspect of Unity that Canonical won't back down on, whether or not the task bar should be /locked/ to the left side of the screen
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668415
The keyword is LOCKED. Mr Shuttleworth has asserted and defended the position that this would be one user-option too many. The pre-bandwagon-jumping majority that spoke out simply wanted a way to not have the task bar in an inconvenient place -- e.g for myself, the left (or right) side of the center screen is inconvenient - keyword center...
I do believe Unity can be usable and powerful in the future, but Linux desktop environments were always about giving users the choice of freedom (to customise, for instance). I see a few main complains: 1- Unable to move the launcher to the bottom or right side of the screen - So why can't we move it where we feel is more comfy for us? I remember Mark said he wanted it to be "close the the dash launcher button". Ok, That dash launcher button was taken away from the task bar (WTF?) and put in the launcher, so why can we still NOT move the launcher? 2- Unable to move the task bar panel - Again, why can't we move it to where we feel is more comfy for us? 3- Dash launcher button. In the first version it was on the task bar. Now it's part of the launcher - Why can't we choose whether to place it on one or the other? 4- The Dash itself - Why can't you give us two easy options? Use the new dash or the old style menus. 5- Global menu and app window buttons that disappear when mouse is not over the task bar - WTF? I like they way Unity is thought, but feel I don't have a choice any more.
I know people who are too cool for anything but C shell. We are set in our ways and cranky. Very, very cranky.
Where does the signature go?
That feature has been removed for Ubuntu 11.10
Even if you manually install gnome, the login screen setting annoyingly always defaults back to unity (whereas 11.04 preserved the last-selected WM)
our fingers do up-down movements on the trackpad intuitively than left right, so having the dock icons at the bottom makes most sense for launching and switching. why is that so hard to grasp?
fifteen jugglers, five believers
I tried to use Unity in 11.04 and found it unusable - not for a true power user, who knows all the program names already, but for an low intermediate user who might be working in a foreign language. I could live with the new-to-me vertical dock; it does make sense to use more horizontal space on ever-wider monitors. I missed the weather gadget, but I'd lived without one.
What I couldn't handle was having no subgrouping of applications whatsoever. Instead of being able to open up a list of all (graphical) preference-setting frontends, I had to ID them while sorting through a list of every single one of the ninety-odd programs on my computer. That got very old, very fast. If I were a power user or used to a CLI and had the name of every program I might want to invoke memorized, it would have been quite convenient to type the name and pull it up. If I were utterly undemanding and just wanted a browser and word processor, the dock buttons would have been very convenient. But I'm an intermediate user, and I spend a fair amount of time looking through program lists for a name that sounds relevant, possibly in Japanese.
Those are the big problems I have with Unity; the UI design hangs intermediate users like myself out to dry, and the system configuration/updating programs are mixed in with the other programs. The designers should have noted that GNOME 2.x, Mac OS X, and Windows all separate those out, for the very good reason that they threaten to overwhelm the "regular" programs, and done the same. That wouldn't fix the fundamental unfriendliness of its design towards users who are neither power Linux users nor lazy users - which I suspect are most of Ubuntu's base - but would make it much more usable. As odd as it sounds, I think Windows is on the road to getting this right and KDE is close to there; add a search bar to the standard application-subgrouping menu!
Incidentally, I switched to Kubuntu for 11.10, before discovering that the amount of disk space that could just fit Ubuntu 11.04 was simply inadequate for KDE and migrating all the way to Fedora 16 LXDE (if I had to give up my comfy desktop environment, might as well learn more about the Linux world). I don't have an intelligent opinion on Fedora yet, but I would suggest that Canonical start including LXDE with Unity; it doesn't take up a lot of room and offers the classic Windows-style program menu we want.
The Unity search box is great.
Try to find the usb install disk creator in Gnome2 menus.
Is it in System Tools? Or Accessories? Or Programming? Or System Settings? Or System Administration? Oh, there it was!
In Unity: usb
ANY user worth their salt will want to customize keyboard shortcuts.
they simple never worked with the first version of ubuntu that came with unity as default window manager.
It didn't have other hundreds of customizations settings... but you could control the speed and reflexions and what not of the dock eyecandy.
so i will never touch unity ...at least for a long while.
Had Ubuntu/unity installed - for about 5 seconds... Back to fedora with Gnome 2.
Can I wash my hands now?
It's not the usability and ease of use - it's stupid crap like removing the ability to right-click and get a menu of things to do with that menu item, instead of just having it kicked off... it's burying the UI customization where it can't be found easily, and removing the easy tailoring options in favor of the "Unity" standard.
We just rolled back...
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
With every word I become more and more disappointed at Mark.
Of course he can make his ubuntu however he wants. But trying to spin this issue is just deplorable.
No one ever said that Unity is bad because it's not cool enough. Basically, he's lying.
People complain about Unity because of specific and objective reasons.
- It increases the number of clicks to get anything.
- It increases mouse travel distance.
- It is the sluggiest desktop of any OS. Slower than Gnome Shell and KDE. Slower than Gnome 2 + Gnome-Do or any other keyboard launcher.
- It is not configurable. When Windows 7 and OS-fucking-X provide more options than a Linux desktop you know something went wrong.
These are the main reasons people complain and there are other, but they are actual, observable, objective issues. Where is this "crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick" he's talking about? I'm sorry, but Shuttleworth is just full of shit. He has jumped the shark for me.
Meaning of ubuntu: "I am what I am because of all the money I made so I call the all the shots and don't care what everyone else says."
But... the future refused to change.
- Scrollbars you can't even see unless you put the cursor on _exactly_ the one correct pixel, and then you can't just click-click-click to advance pages, you have to drag, which means you have to keep track of page boundaries with your eyes
- Hide all apps unless the user knows the name of the app he's looking for. WTF?
- Constantly drawing these shaded rectangles over the screen. WTF? I _think_ the computer thinks that I'm trying to resize or reposition a window and it's using some kind of smarts to "help" me position it where I want it, but in fact I'm not trying to do either, I've merely clicked on a window to bring it to the front. Helping me out is great, but please wait until I'm actually doing something you can help with.
- Moving the menu from the window I'm actually using waaaay over to the top-left of the screen. WTF? You _want_ me to take longer to do my tasks?
- Breaking all of my favorite indicators.
On the plus side we have ... nothing at all that I can see.
Unity is the most user-hostile thing I've seen in ages.
You have hit it spot on and not only that, but Ubuntu was getting faster to start and shutdown with each version, Oops, startup and shutdown times have just about tripled in Ubuntu 11.10. The whole thing seems slower, much of the functionality and features have gone away! What makes sense on a touch screen tablet or smart phone, does not necessarily make sense on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse! You can some or most of the "Classic" stuff back, just sudo apt-get install gnome-panel, then log out and before you log back in click the gear icon on the log-in prompt, you will have top and bottom panels available and you can switch between running app with a simple mouse click in the bottom panel, you can install applets and custom launchers to your heats content! haven't managed to get the System menu back where it belong, it is now under Applications menu but everything is back where it belongs!
So we have to not like it because we are too cool?... I don't like it because older flavors of Ubuntu actually followed a format. What you did was jump from win 3.1 to win 7 and didn't think anyone would care. Personally I like the terminal... I get scalded because I actually understand how Linux works... I thought these guys were different but it sounds like they prescribe to the MAC business model. "the phone isn't broken, your just holding it wrong..."
We are too cool for unity. We use Debian or Slackware. Unity only comes with duplo... errr, I mean Ubuntu.
(this comment intentionally left blank, because 'nuff said)
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
If this was LeenuxSux88@hotmail.com's blog post, then it would have been trolling for Slashdot to link to it.
But this is an explanation for why Unity sucks, written by the man most responsible for Unity. It's not an explicit, *intentional* explanation, mind you, but the chasm between intent and reality here is just another part of the implicit explanation.
The guy doesn't even understand the power geeks he's stereotyping. Most of us *love* graphical bling. That even goes for silly fun like wobbly windows or funny-shaped window border decoration themes, not to mention actually useful features like translucency. Regardless, as long as it's optional (i.e. designed correctly), it's a great option to have. It's even a fine default option, so long as you automatically fall back properly for incompatible hardware and you don't make it too hard to turn off for unimpressed users.
What we hate is systems with fewer options and systems with less usefulness. If there's something that used to be possible or even simple but is now impossible or more complex, then the system has become worse. Gnome 3 has become worse than Gnome 2, and Unity is worse than Gnome 3.
Have you tried Wine for your games? What about VirtualBox for your XP instance?
Yes, I have tried wine for my games. Unfortunately, pure DirectX games (such as the original Dungeon Siege, to pull an example from my experimentation) seem to have severe issues. It is totally acceptable for other games, of course, but having my screen turn gray and/or cease to receive input is rather detrimental to gameplay.
VirtualBox is one of my tried-and-true methods for dealing with applications that absolutely must have Windows in order to operate properly, but my favorite method by far is to simply find an open source alternative. If you were referring to using it for gaming, well... the games just aren't as important to me these days as they used to be, and I do have other gaming-capable machines with XP installed should I feel the itch.
Having said that, I don't understand the relevance of this angle of discussion to the "Unity sucks" theme we have going here, but I do appreciate the attempt to assist usability. Thanks for trying.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Well, first, sorry for my English, is not my primary language. Second: The mistake is to think Canonical is your friend, as any company they are here to make money. I don't really know what business model they have, but they are going for mobile devices, tablets, netbooks, etc.. they are a lot more of those than desktop pcs. I guess that's why they support Unity. So they are not going to ear us on this.
One more thing.. Unity Sucks.. I I am looking for another distro to switch.. any recommendation?
The problem with all of the various distros shipping with default gnome is that marketing them is like selling bananas. Bananas are all genetically identical, so it makes no difference if you are buying a Dole Banana or a Chiquita Banana. It's the same banana. Since you can use yum or apt to install basically any package you want regardless of the linux distro, what really differentiates Ubuntu and Fedora... Mark Shuttleworth solved the product differentiation problem by adding a couple of things to compiz and shipping it as NEW... its still just gnome really. It just LOOKS different. And in Ubuntu 11.10 you can install gnome shell anyway. This is really no different than how banana companies try to differentiate their bananas by putting a sticker on the banana with a brand name. Give me a kernel, a terminal and a package manager and within a few hours I can pretty much make any linux distro into in any other linux distro. yawn.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
What the Linux Gui interface developers have forgotten, is that we want to click onto a data item, and have the appropriate function open. Instead, with Unity we must search for the function, start it, and then search for the corresponding data item.
And when we want one two monitors or two different views, such as a desktop, and one second for a related information, or if we are working with dual displays, the Unity interface just does not meet the requirements.
If however, the Unity view would include options to work both ways, that is to show static directory views, and to select data to invoke functions, the best of both worlds would prevail, and it would be a winning interface.
I have actually switched to Ubuntu's LTS version, for my two small netbooks, as more of the screen is available to me to use, without the column of icons on the left side getting in the way.
I give Unity two more generations of output before we see new paradigms.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Like a lot of /.ers, I'm the person my friends and family call when they have computer issues. I got tired of troubleshooting Windows (Another reinstall? There goes my Wednesday afternoon!) so a few years ago I started pushing people over to Ubuntu. After a quick sit-down and walk-through, people could pick it up, and the number of support calls I got started dropping off as things worked more reliably for grandma et al.
When Natty came out last April, I made sure everyone was still on "Ubuntu Classic" to avoid Unity, which was very clearly Not Ready for Prime Time. I crossed my fingers and hoped Canonical would clue in or make some incredible improvements to Unity by October. That didn't happen. Now people are clicking to update, finding their desktops have changed, and getting weird glitches, bugs, and crashes. The number of calls I've been getting in the last few weeks has skyrocketed.
Mark, when your power users leave you behind, they're going to bring their friends and families... aka your entire user base.
I tried Unity, and I have several issues with it beyond whether it works or not. To begin with, it actually consumes more of my screen space than what I am using (Gnome 2). I use only one panel at the top and I autohide it. There is nothing on my desktop except a semi-transparent clock in the corner. When I want to access the menu, I roll up, click on menu, roll down through to sub menus and click. The reason I don't care for KDE is that many distro's implement that click to slide to sub-menus. It is too much. The bar is on the screen, unmovable, no auto hide, and with ridiculously huge icons that are not resizable. In application windows, making the scroll bar very tiny, like in Mint, is more usable if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, but I use an optical track ball. It is the only way to fly. Finally, when looking for an application not in the bar, you have to go to several presses and some scrolling to find something. The part that irritates me the most about that is that Unity shows me all the crap I don't have installed (and not interested in) first. I don't need anyone trying to sell me their shit while I'm trying to get work done. Even then, the icons in the sub menus are so huge and spread apart, it is no wonder you actually have scroll the screen to find something. I can't see it usable on a small screen for the same reasons. The launcher bar gets in the way, not out. Just about everything in Unity and Gnome 3 is exactly counter to the way I use a computer. I'm not fond of LDXE and lighter desktops because of the lack of decent menu editors, but they do beat the hell out of Unity and G3.
Unity = FAIL (Gnome3 also = FAIL) . The sooner Shuttleworth and his zombie-ish followers admit it and design a full featured gnome2 interface desktop environment replacement the sooner this mess will calm down and resolve. Even win 7 can be rolled back to look almost like 98. Why is that so hard. Don't even try to pass off that gutted "classic" annoyance either. He has messed his pants and he is trying to hide it. Just stop denying your mistakes and fix them. Pride is a hard thing to face head on Mr. Shuttleworth. The sooner you acknowledge it the easier it will be. Choice and options always wins out. Isn't that what made Linux and Ubuntu great to begin with?
Look at windows 8. Run the win 8 dev preview and you will see what I mean.The Start menu is now an app screen with grid layout buttons. It is a design for tablets more then PC's. So learning from windows might not be the best idea here. I say quit putting touch screen style layout on my PC ! "And get off my lawn !" Leave them on the phones and tablets where they belong. Unity and gnome are pretty toned down compared to win8.
What. A. Hipster. Doofus.
Does Shuttleworth honestly think he's drawing the line between "cool" and "hip" here? Is cognitive dissonance somehow perceived an sovereign right of industry leaders?
Let's turn back the clock a bit... see who else has made claims that cut across the "cool" grain:
In 1987, Bill Gates said: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." In 1994, he said: "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years." ...and the infamous one: "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."NOTE: Emphases are my own.
(s/good/slick)
Let's hear from Steve Ballmer as well (circa 2007): "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."If I were Mark Shuttleworth, I would STFU and learn from the foot-and-crow gourmets that came before me. There's no reason to get personally invested in your own innovations. Steve Jobs once insisted that the Macintosh would never have a cooling fan, didn't he get fired once? (What? Too soon?)
This Unity farce kinda reminds me of the rally MS put forth for "Microsoft Bob" after the first few bad reviews. Yeah, I said Microsoft Bob and they said it "looks really slick" too... back in the day. I admit it. I was, and am "too cool" to use Microsoft Bob. I don't use Unity either.
I'm sure Unity has it's place, it's place just doesn't happen to be on the desktop.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
My first reaction to Unity (on 11.04) was rejection. I switched to Gnome2 less than 5 minutes after first trying.
But last week I was working on a remastered Ubuntu 11.10 to promote our new products, and I decided to leave Unity as the GUI for the time being. And guess what? I actually liked it. I decided to install it on my main system too. And it is still there.
All comments here about having to search apps in the dash prompt just indicate ignorance. You only have to do that once, then you can add the apps icon to the launcher.
You can now launch multiple instances of already open apps like you do with, say, the Cairo Dock.
Alt-Tab works as expected, with the nice added feature of a nested view of windows belonging to the same app.
There are still some rough edges and the fact that the dock cannot be moved from the first monitors left screen edge is extremely annoying. But it has a lot of potential and deserves a little more appreciation than the bashing by people here who obviously haven't tried Unity, but nevertheless have string opinions about it.
I really do like Unity, but I don't feel like it is as effective as the previous Ubuntu versions. I find that I don't really use Unity intuitively because I still really just use terminal to launch and control apps. Also, Unity tends to 'hangup' and freeze/get stuck a lot more than I would like.
It is not about being cool. Its about being productive. I've been using Unix and unix-like OS since the mid-1980s. my fingers know how to use them. I don't want to change to something that is not clearly better. Its about making me productive.
Hey people, just relax! I really like that Gnome3 and Unity stuff because of that, I tried something different: fluxbox. I really love this piece of software and It's a really efficient gui. Thanks to all Gnome3 and Unity developers for programming bloated shit. Without you, I would have not met a really *great* gui. Beside this: why are people scared about Gnome3 or Unity. We are living in an open source world, so you have the choice. Linux/BSD is not Windows, you can switch from one graphical user interface to another. Who cares about Gnome or fuck-buntu.
Great link for removing Unity and going back to classic
http://linux-software-news-tutorials.blogspot.com/2011/10/ubuntu-1110-oneiric-remove-unity-and.html
and no I'm not too "cool" to use Unity but I have work to do and messing around with a poorly thought out interface isn't on my list. If I had wanted to live with someone else's idea of how I should do things and have arbitrary decisions forced down my throat I'd have stayed with Windoze!
i didn't ask for unity. unity meets no need. please go away
- I really miss docklets. CPU load or Net load.. really really miss this. - I used Windows 7 and OSX on the same 16:9 monitor, I still don't feel having a little more vertical space made a difference.
Considering most monitors sold maddeningly use proportions are nearly 2x as wide as long, it seems the best use of space is the left or right areas. Notebooks are especially prone to this when you only have 800 vertical pixels to deal with.
No one said Unity was cool, or was trying to be cool. It's a bare bones WM. It does what's needed. I don't even see what issues people are having.
You have an integrated launcher/active app bar so people can do their mousey-clicky thing. It has the gnome-do functionality that lets you find apps quicker than any mousey-clicky scheme (other than custom icons on the launcher). Docklets are coming along (i.e., check out indicator-multiload). It's very easy customize the launcher (drag/drop to re-order), right-click "Keep In Launcher" to make the app icon stay there, or do the opposite to remove it. Simple stuff.
There are very few real complaints I can find in here.
"I can't relocate the launcher." Considering most monitors today have 2x the horizontal resolution as vertical, the sides seem to be a more logical place to put a launcher so I can live with that. "I can't reset hot-keys" Yes you can, just go to "Keyboard->Shortcuts" and set it to what you want...(yes you can change the main meta key to something else). I've got my own set of complaints but this is pretty much what a WM needs to be (though I wouldn't mind having a menu to see a categorized inventory of apps).
There is going a lot more mobile computing in the years a ahead. Most people will still have their primary desk at home and work where they tend do most of their work. Same way many people tend to use the same chair at office and at home.
Nothing about the space age or internet culture change desks very much. As long as people have a need for desks, there's going to be a need for desktop computers.
Shuttleworth is right. He cannot serve the power user and it was never his intention. Program menus are power user design for power users. What nobody seams to realize: Common users don't use menus! My mom doesn't use menus. My girlfriend doesn't use menus. They use what is right there. On the desktop or in a panel (or launcher). It's the same reason why most people mess up their desktops instead of maintaining clean folder structures. Hierarchical structures require discipline and structured thinking. A talent most people lack.
Unity gets closer to OSX in every iteration. Coincidence? I don't think so. Unity is main stream design that was proven to work. Maybe it is not mature yet, but it will make the game.
I'm running 10.10 on my personal laptop. I loaded 11.10 on a VM to see what it looked like. The result: I'm switching to Debian and Xfce.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Unity is a slap in the face for power users. It's like Mark Shuttleworth is giving us the middle finger and saying "tough shit .. live with it". Well, I have news for you Mark - FOAD!
someone is in denial haha....
Power users (of Linux) dont use Ubuntu, period.
IMHO, Unity is in fact well thought for power-users. We like keyboard shortcuts, real-estate for apps, etc. and this thing where in mind on the design. These are some new features we get:
- New window switcher (Alt+Tab) features application groups (more on this below).
- New launcher (Meta key) is maybe less usable for newbies, but is faster for keyboard-freak-power-users! remember gnome-do?
- New real-estate changes (app menu on panel, skinny scroll bars, taskbar on the side...) is maybe less intuitive for newbies, but gives us (power-users) more space to work.
But it seems to be that the power-user community doesn't feel comfortable. My theory (yet to be fully proven, I have to admit) is that we're simply too used to the Gnome2 interface (and others similar) to see the advantages of Unity. In my case, more than not finding the menu or close buttons (solved in seconds), there where some other things that where bothering me, but over time I've been solving them. Some of them follow:
- New window switcher (Alt+Tab) makes me wait for a group to open: /usr/share/indicator-application/ordering-override.keyfile ~/.local/share/indicators/application
Use the arrow keys.
- Where is the location bar in Nautilus?
Hit Ctrl+L.
- Where is the system monitor panel indicator?
sudo apt-get install indicator-multiload.
- Indicators display in an ugly order.
sudo cp
gedit ~/.local/share/indicators/application/ordering-override.keyfile
The thing I find problematic about Unity is that it is buggy. It is buggy enough for me to stop using it. I have Xcfe installed alongside and use it for work (when only doing light stuff I go back to Unity to keep testing it).
I find it somehow understandable because of its age. My conclusion is that its time isn't here yet, but I'm really looking forward 12.04!!