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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!
>> '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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 remember a friend who was really into slackware telling me he could put it right on my new Sony Vaio around 2000. Sure I said, and then after 10 hours of stubborn attempts he had it on. Not much worked, but it was dual bootable with win98. So anytime I needed to connect with the outside world, I'd dump whatever files into some dual drive space and reboot into linux so the modem would work. I am a little more practical now and over my need to have the most macho linux.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The first thing everyone does after installing 11.X on a desktop platform is install a different Distro.
FTFY
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
If you don't like it...uh change it? What's so crazy about that idea?!
Other than the fact that Ubuntu 11.10 no longer includes Gnome 2? And that Unity continues to infest your desktop even if you switch to another one (e.g. the retarded scrollbars)?
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.
Xubuntu. XFCE is the most usable and customizable interface I've seen.
> 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.
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.
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.
but it was dual bootable with win98
That says quite a bit, about the hardware (winmodem and similar?), and the state of Linux drivers at that time. If you had anything other than proper hardware, any using the OS required for what should be done by firmware, you had an adventure, and often got to do without.
I've not had a similar adventure since 2006 or so. Linux used since '98: Slackware/OpenLinux/Mandrake/Mandriva/Suse/Fedora/Slackware.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
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.
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.
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.
In fact, if I remember correctly, the big discussion at the time was when was linux going to provide usb support.
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.
so uninstall retarded scrollbars and global menus if you don't like them, where is the problem?
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.
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 just went into the compiz settings and set it so the launcher only pops out if my mouse is in the upper left corner of the screen... problem solved.
Aww.. let's be fair here.
Slackware is a fantastic distro. If, as a novice, you want to tinker and fail and tinker some more and gain experience with the inner workings of Linux, Slackware
is a great choice. If you're a pro, Slack is stable as hell and you already know what to do. Does it work 'out of the box' for absolute beginners who just want to point
and click? Not yet (though it's getting better).
I don't see it as cool/leet/etc. It is, IMO, honest. Like a box of Lego - you have the stuff, now try to do something cool with it.
Then again, I love figuring out how stuff works. Slackware + Fluxbox = hours upon hours of frustration, high blood pressure, cold sweats, and finally the reward of understanding how all of it goes together. :)
"One day you will be able to hurt your smart phone's feelings." - Mahhshall
- 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.
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
Maybe because we've already been doing just that for several releases now and have gotten tired at just how much work it takes to return the desktop back to a usable state?
Maybe because with each release it gets harder and harder to find out how to do the reversion because things keep on being changed around. One time it is a simple configuration edit, another time you need to replace a file with a patched one from a PPA, still another requires you uninstall a package, etc etc...
Or maybe we've been paying attention to what Mark says and seen he's serious about bolting the desktop to make changing it impossible--what he euphemistically calls "consistency..."
It isn't like people haven't tried to tell him this is a mistake, Mark refuses to listen and instead tries to generate his own little reality distortion field. The only choice left for us is to leave...so that's what we're doing.
Just don't expect us to be happy about it.
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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 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'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
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 ran Slackware with Fluxbox for a while, about 2004-2005. The "hours and hours of frustration" came with the effort of compiling and installing x.org, its supporting libraries, and fluxbox when Slack hadn't yet switched from xfree86...good times, good times.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.)
Personally, since about 2006 I have had MUCH less work getting Ubuntu installed and working properly than getting windows to the same working state.
Yesterday I spent all day trying to get 7 to install on an empty hard drive. Ubuntu installed in a half hour and is working great so far, putting my fears that I was working with malfunctioning hardware to rest.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
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.
I just realized that my sig is totally applicable to this conversation, since it is my mother's reaction to scanning in Linux with a brand new HP all in one that windows was having trouble recognizing as a scanning device.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
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.
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... 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)
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.
I was told Gentoo was the distro of choice for someone who wanted to learn Linux "from the ground up". I haven't touched Slack since my failed experimentation with it in '02 - it didn't recognize any of my hardware, X wouldn't use any sane resolutions without massive text file configuration and hours of research, and I gave up on it after a few days of hardcore effort attempting to make it work well enough to even surf the net.
Ubuntu was a godsend in '07 - pretty much everything worked "out of the box" (other than some minor audio issues that I never did resolve, and were probably due to the retarded AC97 hardware, rather than any failing of the OS). '08 was even better. In '09, I felt like there was some regression, but chalked it up to "growing pains". '10 was alright, once I got my buttons moved back to the upper-right corner... but I was beginning to feel some buyer's remorse. I recently tried out 11.04, because I felt like I should; the misgivings were not minor. Unity is damn near unusable, for anyone who comes from a Microsoft background. This is not a good thing, since Windows still makes up close to 90% of the desktop market. I haven't bothered moving to 11.10 because I feel like Canonical has lost touch with their user base. When I get around to being excited about an OS again, it will probably be because I have moved to something with a more stable interface, that actually works, with only minor tweaking necessary (instead of the hellish battle with my own computer that any Ubuntu install/upgrade has become).
I can understand wanting to change things up a bit, to make sure the users don't feel like the OS has become stagnant. What I don't understand is why Ubuntu seems to have become an experiment to see just how much change the users will tolerate with each version before chucking it in the bin.
I can also understand wanting to make OS X users feel more comfortable with the OS - but it should be an option, not the default. Apple hasn't got enough market share for Canonical to get away with making everyone feel like they're trying to use a broken iPhone instead of a PC... and to be honest, neither does Canonical.
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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.
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
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.
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).
You don't really know what you are talking about, do you. It was exactly the other way 'round, Ubuntu is following Gnome's 6-month cycle.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I just chose "Ubuntu Classic" as my desktop when I logged in, then set that as default... problem solved
... at least until Canonical decides they have too many users, and makes Unity the only option, instead of the default.
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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
---
You could have just switched to Xubuntu. Unity isn't mandatory, you know.
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.
Amen, brother!
... from the forgotten corner in europe
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.
I switched to Mint, it looks like Ubuntu1010 without any messing about
sag
"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?!
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...
... 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.
so uninstall retarded scrollbars and global menus if you don't like them, where is the problem?
The problem, as I understand it, is that the default behavior has changed.
To be honest, anyone griping now should have jumped ship when they moved the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the other side of the window, for no apparent reason and despite overwhelming evidence that most users felt it was retarded and/or pointless to do so. This should have been an indication that Shuttleworth thinks he's Jobs. Unfortunately, Jobs had some things Shuttleworth doesn't - like charisma, and the ability to sell ice-water to Eskimos.
Canonical decided, despite the expressed wishes of their users, to force a change upon the desktop environment. Now they have completely changed the desktop, rendering it unusable for a large number of users... and people are dropping Ubuntu like the sickening sack of vomit that it has become.
Surprise!
Disclaimer: I'm still using Ubuntu, but if Unity becomes the de-facto desktop environment, then I'm jumping ship, too. Yes, I could "just change it", but I prefer to use a distribution that is at least similar to my preferred environment to start with, in order to minimize the changes required in order to make it feel like "my OS". That is to say: If I'm going to have to uninstall the desktop environment and install the one I wanted in the first place, why not start with a distro that already has (if nothing else) the environment that I want?
... or at least one that functions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Unusual. Most Slackware users I've come across on the net haven't been nearly that helpful. They'll tell you how Slackware is so hard to use that it will teach you how to do everything, but they'll never tell you what they can do. It seems to make nerd elitism grow in people. I'm actually surprised that he had a friend. /prejudiced
I honestly want to know who the target demographic is for Unity.
Idiots.
Ubuntu good, Unity bad. Mmkay?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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 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'm using xfce on ubuntu. Works great.
I'm sorry that you've had to deal with this (full disclosure: I'm a former Slackware user), but I view Slackware akin to a katana for the specialized or pro user, whereas Ubuntu is sort of a mace.. works as a bludgeon, an "everyman's" distro that allows you to operate with minimal tweaking. I like Slackware immensely, and still use it on a few specialized projects, but I really don't think it's an ideal newbie distro. People just want to get stuff done, not masturbate all over the hardware.
That being said, since so many of my work systems are RedHat based systems I find myself gravitating towards Scientific Linux for more homogeneity on the job, but am now running Arch at home for hacking on projects and playing. The whole "learning linux" argument has some merit, but if you really want to learn linux, go with Linux From Scratch for the low-level knowledge followed by an RPM based Redhat variant since that's what's used most often in the enterprise (at least where I live).
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
I don't know if I'm feeding a soft troll or just disagreeing with you, but anyway...
I have to defend my favourite distro, Arch Linux. I think it's important to realise that an operating system like this does not simply lead to unnecessary work. In fact, part of the point of it is to keep things simple and avoid complicated hacking to achieve something simple ("unnecessary work" in my book). It is certainly not for everyone, but that's because it demands a reasonable level of knowledge and understanding. Equipped with that, maintenance is quite easy (in other words, you don't have to keep working). A well-set up system can be achieved in less time than for Windows. At that point, it doesn't require extra hard work at all. Update everything: pacman -Syu. No nonsense at all.
Note that I haven't
--
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.
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.
XFCE, or Awesome - if you're feeling particularly adventurous..
... as in Kool Desktop Environment (KDE).
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 problem that I had in Arch was that the 'pacman -Syu' was usually followed by three hours of figuring out why the hell my mouse wasn't working, or something similar.
I eventually learned to upgrade one package at a time, as they became available. So long as it was my primary system, it was great. Boot it after letting it sit for a month, and you had a full day of maintenance ahead of you.
Learn about Photography Basics.
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
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?"
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
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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
The desktop is dead because they killed it.
aaaaaaa
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
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.
Unity isn't just unusable for someone coming from a Windows background. It's unusable for someone coming from a Linux background (I've been using Linux for over 10 years; started on Red Hat, then TurboLinux, then back to Red Hat, then to Debian, currently on Ubuntu). Unity has me casting around for where to go next. Back to Debian is the most likely direction. Mint is a possibility, so long as it remains Unity-free.
Since '07 I've also been using Macs a lot and in a nod to that I make my Linux machines somewhat Mac-like (Avant Window Navigator, move the window buttons to the left side and put them in Mac order, single-click to do things where possible) and I think Ubuntu is utterly missing the target if they want to be Mac-like. Apple has a really great UI for most people (even most highly experienced/professional users). Sure, forcing a one-size-fits-all on everyone is not optimal for some people, but at least that one size fits pretty well. Unity is a one-size-fits-none piece of crap, and it's fugly, too.
Beyond that, releases of Ubuntu have become so flaky that I only use LTS releases on bare metal. I can only trust regular releases in a VM and never put anything important in them. It seems that Ubuntu has become perpetually not ready for prime time. You nailed it when you said they've lost touch with their user base and Ubuntu has became an experiment to find out how much change people will tolerate. It's now more than I will tolerate. Even my kids, who are in 3rd and 4th grades and have Linux and Mac experience, tried out Unity and said it was horrible. I had to replace it with AWN and Gnome on their netbooks.
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!
(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.
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?
I guess "proper hardware" should be replaced with "not OS software enabled". If the device is built cheaply, without all of the hardware or firmware necessary for its task, but instead relied upon one OS to fill the gaps, it isn't "proper hardware".
This is what I was meant by Winmodem
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
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
that is a very 1993 opinion you have there, say how many dip switches do you set on your linux enabled wifi card? that's right JACK FUCKING NONE cause I/O addresses, interrupts, and DMA are all handled by software and has been for nearly 15 years
welcome to 15 years ago.
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.
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.
s/02/1994/
But isn't that part of the fun? I had to get a copy of the Pink Shirt Book off the shelf to understand what the fuck it was talking about in partitioning. Which is knowledge that I've used time and time again. Ditto resolutions.
Sadly, I have to agree you on the hellish battle front. And I'm afraid that next time the battle comes around, it's going to be a new distro. I'd better order a new hard drive for experimenting on.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
- 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).
Ummm, from the parent post of my first reply:
...Sony Vaio around 2000. Sure I said, and then after 10 hours of stubborn attempts he had it on. Not much worked, but it was dual bootable with win98.
Yep, around 15 years ago.
I'm not sure where dips come in. The hardware I'm thinking about was as little hardware as possible, AMRs and junk like that, with what should have been firmware moved to the driver.
Installing Slackware 4.0 on a Vaio built for Win 98 is something that I would expect to be a challenge.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
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.
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....
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!!