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Ask Slashdot: Unity/Gnome 3/Win8/iOS — Do We Really Hate All New GUIs?
Brad1138 writes "You see complaints about the 'next gen' GUI's all over the place, but do we really all hate them? Personally, I don't like them — I tried very hard to like Unity in Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 before giving up and switching to Mint (I am very happy there currently). But is it the vocal minority doing all the complaining, or is it the majority? Are we just too set in our ways?"
... KDE 4, Windows 7, Windows Vista... some people hate ALL GUIs.
Me? I like Windows 7. I find it nicer and faster than XP's interface, actually. I also like gnome better than KDE in general, but I preferred KDE 3x or 4x. I have not tried gnome3/unity yet, so can't comment there.
I sometimes wonder how long this debate has gone on. I'm guessing people hated Windows 95 when compared to 3.1 (or equivalent Mac OS version changes). People probably tried to show how a monitor was a disadvantage from the teletype; afterall, with teletypes you had a permanent hard copy and didn't risk losing it! ... (I have no source for this, I'm just speculating ;) )
I do think there are some things that don't make sense though - such as touch-screen-GUIs used on non-touch-screens, or the other way around.
I generally like kde 4 design though they need to work on reducing cpu usage / latency. In my opinion, it's the only one that does it right in that the interface for tablet/netbook and desktop are separated seamlessly and easy switched between the two. Programs do not need to be compiled to two different gui and users can pick which interface to use and don't have to bother with the other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjO5X1ADUrE is an example.
My main problem with "next gen" gui is that they are too forceful. They try to combine desktop and tablet/netbook into one gui and do so badly at it. Windows 8 that forces you to switch between the 2 different guis depending on the software you use is an example of bad design.
Those changes aren't "horses -> internal combustion" kind, they are more "steering wheel -> rudder stick"-like
So where the fuck are these so-called "good UI designers"? Where is the software that they've created?
They sure as fuck aren't working on open source software. GNOME 3, Firefox, and Unity are perfect proof of this.
They sure as fuck aren't working on commercial software. This is evident through Chrome, post-Ribbon MS Office, Windows 8 and iOS.
They sure as fuck aren't working on enterprise software, either. Much of this software makes GNOME 3 pleasant to use.
So where the fuck are they? What projects or products have these "good UI designers" worked on?
no, silly! It's change for the sake of requiring the purchase of new hardware to run the new GUIs!
Close. The idea is to have the same interface on every device you buy.
Personally, I think that sux. See, I used to wish I could run Windows on my phone. Then, one day, I was able to vnc running on a phone... or ipad... or something small, I don't remember and was able to connect to my desktop. Again, I don't remember if it was Gnome, KDE or Windows, but I've tried them all and the results were the same. They all sucked! They sucked big time. It was impossible to bring up or pull down any menus. There was no right click, drag, or shift click. Scrolling using scroll bars or even accurate clicking was next to impossible. Well, let's just say it sucked. The problem is that the desktop OS was not made to run a four inch screen with a single touch or even multi-touch as an interface.
So, now, rather than making a desktop GUI fit on a phone, they are trying to fit the phone GUI fit on the desktop. The results are exactly what you would expect. Most of the right-click functionality is gone. In Unity or Gnome3, if you right click on the menu bar across the top, nothing happens. Gone is the right click and "Run As" dialog. Gone is the right click and "add to bar". Basically, the right click has been removed from much of the GUI functionality. Gone are the nested menus. Instead of "gnome-foot"/"start-button"/"K" -> System -> Whatever-You-Want-To-Run, you now have something like this:
Move the mouse to the left side of the screen and wait. Did anything happen? No? Move to the top left. OK, how about now? Do you see the program you want to run? I'm not sure what the icon looks like. Just mouse over everything and wait over each icon. It should tell what each app is. Is it there? No? OK, click on the top icon, click in the box, and start typing what you are looking for. Don't remember what it was called? It's like a CD Ripper but it's not called that? Hmmmm. I don't know what you'd type in. I know on the old system you would go to multimedia and look for it. Now-a-days... well, I guess you are just fucked. See, the developers that made your GUI didn't think that ABCDE was important enough to include on the main tool bar so you don't get to run it if you don't know what's it called.
Oh, but if you were on a phone, this would look awesome!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
i installed KDE 4 for a friend's friend. it took me 3 days to set up, because their ISP is very unreliable, at the extreme end of a broadband connection and they get 15k/sec (not kidding).
it all installed: i ran it, logged them in... and could i understand what the fuck was going on? not a chance. it was incredibly embarrassing. i spent 15 minutes _failing_ to do something as simple as set their background image. first we couldn't find it - i had to log in at the console and use "find . | xargs grep {filename}". then we couldn't find how to even _change_ the background image. on standard desktops, it's right-mouse, click "set background". done.
they now are so angry with me over how i told them that linux is great, and windows will result in their bank account details being stolen (a virus destroyed the bootloader, which is why i was called in), that they are no longer speaking to me.
now - you tell me that it's a great idea that KDE spent an entire multi-million Euros EU grant merely copying the UI of the most vilified and failed version of windows, ever, known as "Vista", and then make yourself known to me some day face-to-face i'll punch your fucking lights out.
gnome - i've never installed gnome, so i don't know about it. but, personally i'm sticking to fvwm, and i'm going to install LXDE for people, from now on. it's basic, it works, it's a known paradigm, and it's quick.
eventually i'll get round to finishing pyjdwm https://sourceforge.net/projects/pyjdwm/ though, and the first version _will_ copy the "standard" paradigm. window. bar. cross. menu at bottom. maybe :)
Gone are the nested menus. Instead of "gnome-foot"/"start-button"/"K" -> System -> Whatever-You-Want-To-Run, you now have something like this:
Everything you wrote is spot-on, except the part here about the "K". KDE is the one heavyweight Linux DE that hasn't drunk the one-UI-for-every-device kool-aid. The "K" menu is still there in the latest 4.7 release, and it isn't going anywhere. Furthermore, there's actually multiple UIs you can select in KDE; the default one for desktop PCs is "plasma-desktop" (you can see it running with "ps"). But if you're running a netbook, there's a different one that's optimized for netbooks, called "plasma-netbook". There's more coming for other devices (namely tablets; I don't think we'll see KDE on any phones soon; the tablet one will be touch-oriented as you'd expect). Unlike the other morons, the KDE guys have a totally different philosophy: they believe that different devices should have different UIs, though they can use most of the same underlying libraries and other software services.
Say what you will about KDE and their 4.0 screw-up, nepomuk, etc., but in this area, they have exactly the right idea.
Slashdot is always going to give you a tainted answer. slashdot'rs hate everything. If your curious about it tho, check out the downloads on Linux Mint. They've had record downloads, and are zooming up on Ubuntu at a record clip, according to most webstats. I switched to Linux mint instead of upgrading Ubuntu desktop, now it's on my laptop, workstation, and I'll probably try upgrading my company workstation to it when upgrade time comes along.
I still like ubuntu server! But I hate unity with a passion. Read what they plan on doing with Gnome 3! They're talking about putting gnome 2 stuff back on top of gnome shell, and making a hybrid Gnome desktop.
The Linux desktop Developers keep thinking that making the desktop simpler is the answer. And they're doing it by taking away options. Windows is busy putting options back into they're desktop. Someone needs to go beat the Gnome and Ubuntu developers with a clue stick.
Damn, now I'm sounding like a slashdot'r RATS!
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
My comment was in no way intended to excuse the actions of bad programmers. I am a firm believer in minimal programming, but that wasn't really clear in my post.
Instead, please consider my example as a harrowing illustration of just how much we accomplished with so little, and questioning why we now accomplish so little with so much.
More processing power is used to watch Youtube videos than it took to land on the Moon. More instructions are used to compose and print a corporate memo to authorize moving an office chair than it took to send astronauts 380,000 kilometers away through space - and bring them back safely. In the past 40 years, we've gone from epic journeys of exploration to grinding raids to buy epic mounts.
This makes me sad.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
No, he's not. That's just part of the question but as you showed, the slashdot reader is obviously biased. The headline clearly includes Win8 and iOS.
I'm assuming the question is if you want all the OS to become the average user OS where you click big buttons instead of the extreme power user where you preferably type most of your commands and tend to be more tech savvy.
And as the GP asked, I wonder as well, if this is the proper target audience for such question, particularly when I clearly hate limiting interfaces, but many people have found that iOS with all it's limitations to the user provides them with what they need.
'Amazon is at war with Facebook. Amazon has always been at war with Facebook.'?
And allow me to chime in from the other side of the aisle since he also mentions Windows 8. my customers are just your ordinary folks, the kind MSFT expects to sell Win 8 to. Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, everyday Joes. Now to put what I am about to say in perspective I showed screencaps of Win 7 as well as ran the beta when it became available and the reaction across the board was one of curiosity, they wanted to know what it did and how it stacked up to XP since nobody really liked Vista. oh and if everyone wants to know what killed Visa for ordinary folks, Canel/allow? constantly drove them nuts!
But I'm now up to about 130 of these normal folks that I've shown the Win 8 screengrabs to and about 20 that actually watched a little of the video and they all to a man absolutely fucking HATE it and have made it quite clear they don't give a shit WHAT it does its a giant DO NOT WANT. In fact the closest I got to an "endorsement" was this exchange by a sweet little middle aged female customer "Oh that is a nice looking cell phone picture, is it that Android? I heard that is supposed to be quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"
And from the mouth of an ordinary person comes truth. Instead of the curiosity I saw with Win 7 the biggest question they had for me was "But if I need another Windows 7 you'll be able to get me one, right?" which I would say is a sign that Ballmer's Folly does not look to be in a good position right from the start. I didn't even see this kind of hate for Vista this early, most like myself hoped they'd fix it. Hell the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is maybe Ballmer will be forced to "pursue other interests" and someone decent can be brought in to right the ship.
So I feel for ya Linux guys, I really do. Its like all the DE designers drank the same poorly mixed Kool Aid and became Bizarro developers "Quick things am stable and users am happy! Must make big mess, throw out years of work, and make things am confusing! Users am unhappy now? We do good!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are countless futuristic movies in which there is this fantastic intferface or sentient computer that makes ordinary tasks we never do seem so much more convenient. When have you really checked a detailed weather forecast before going out? I live in Holland, the weather will be grey and rainy with the wind blowing from all corners at once. Same with checking mail or arranging meetings. The sci-fi movie never happens. Or take the Star Trek computer. It seems so fluent that interface the TNG crew uses but have you noticed how what they do on the keyboard never has any relation to what is happening? That is because it ain't real but how many touchscreen fanboys wanted a computer with a touchscreen keyboard because of it?
Same thing with speech control, that sounds nice but needs to exist in a world where "help" is not a long google session.
The interface of tomorrow isn't happening because the tech of today just ain't there and PART of that tech is our own body. My voice is very different in the morning. If I had to use a voice command to turn the lights on, it would remain very dark. Coffee first but how do I get Mr Coffee to regonize my groggy voice?
The existing standard gui's on the desktop are very much based on the idea you have a surface on which you arrange windows containing applications or parts of an application. It ain't perfect but it works well enough since it means all each application developer has to do is present a rectangular box that either fits all screens (dialog) or can be resized. It is fairly easy... it is so easy in fact that on netbooks a LOT of windows and dialogs appear to far down and are cut off. They can't even get that right.
But Unity suddenly wants to throw this away and present an intelligent and smarter way of doing the same but different... and it doesn't quite work and most of us have years if not decades of experience doing it the standard way.
There may be room for a joystick driven car but if it crashes everytime I sneeze I am not going to unlearn my steering wheel skills.
Gnome and Unity are not just changes we do not want, their basic functionality was broken at the time of launch. Both crashed, had zero customization and removed widgets people had come to rely on. this would be like introducing a joystick controlled car that crashes when you sneeze with no windscreen no passenger seats no luggage space and an action radius of a half a mile. You can then bleat on about how good the joystick is, the hate for all the other stuff will kill your idea for ever.
Gnome 3 and Unity should have stayed as a research project for at least another year and only have launched for real when they were feature capable with the software they replaced.
As for Metro... am I the only one having flashbacks to active desktop? I am typing this in a fullscreen browser, like my toes, I haven't seen my desktop in years. Somewhere out there there must be people who run one app at a time, who have just 1 tab open in opera (mine are so small it takes totally mastery of subpixel clicking to get one) and when they are done they close everything to have the desktop re-appear.
It is not that we a stuck in the past with your basic window managers, it is that everything else has been tried AND deemed NOT to work. Try this one. Tell an Apple user that you do not think he is a complete faggot and fanboy and then ask him to honestly speak about the unified menu on a large screen setup. Handy no? Having to move your mouse for miles to get to the menu (people who use OSX just for photoshop and moved their menu to their touch pen thingy don't apply, you bought an expensive gadget AND spend ages to learn it to get away form the menu on the screen being out of easy reach.
Maybe like so many other things we have just gotten used to, the standard desktop gui just works. And if it isn't perfect then at least it is better then the usual attempts to fix it through half-finished code implementing barely thought out ideas that only apply in a few cases.
Ta
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The global menu is the problem for a significant number of people.
I could learn to live with just about every other Unity change, but the global menu drives me bonkers. When my visual focus is on an app window on my second display, I expect to be able to go to that window in order to work with the app. I don't expect to have to click on the window first, then move my mouse to the other display in order to access a menu that (oddly ) isn't located anywhere near my application window.
I've never understood why Apple sticks with this setup. It made sense with the original Mac, which had a tiny screen and didn't really support multi-tasking. It's a huge usability problem for modern desktops with multiple, large displays.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The first fallacy of HCI is they start with things like user surveys. Users always say they want contradictory things like "make the same interface work well on a desktop and a phone". Anybody can see these are mutually exclusive things, but users say that sort of thing all the time. Users can never tell you what they actually want/need until you give them what they ask for.
The second fallacy here is that HCI is somehow scientific. HCI types try to sound scientific, there are statistics and measurements, and even so called laws, but interface design is not scientific because its acceptance is based on individual preference. Its sort of like saying "We have statistically analyzed popular music and produced the ultimate song based on users requests and what they listened to before". So these UI's are the UI equivalent of the Monkees or Milli Vanilli.
Designing UI's based on telemetry, user studies or Fitt's "Law" does not insure a good UI, some common sense must be used as well. The New and Improved Windows 8 interface, for example, does not permit multiple overlapping windows and the browser does not run plugins. Those are considered features not bugs. Statistics will not fix stupid.