While I, too, think that the "average user", AKA the "home user", is moving to a portable media consumption device for the majority of their computing needs, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that the guy that does the stuff that goes between the server and the tablet needs a system with more usability than the server, and more functionality than the tablet.
Moving everything to a mobile platform is just going to remove the ability for the mobile platform to function, because there won't be anyone to design the interface for the tablet that allows it to access the content on the server.
I always thought that Linux was designed with the idea in mind that not everyone is going to live in either a mansion or an efficiency apartment - there's mobile homes, condos, tents, treehouses... There's a broad spectrum of human preference, and Linux enables us to make our own choices. If the distro doesn't fit, throw it out and get a new one.
No, it's not. It's a windowing system. The operating system is what runs the show behind the pretty, shiny, wobbly, on-fire, or what have you windowing system.
You're apparently not only too cool for Mr Shuttleworth, you're too cool for facts, information, and research.
On the other hand, I agree with your statement that Ubuntu seems to be painting the deck chairs every time it looks like someone might actually sit in them.
you can still install another DE on Ubuntu but not on Windows
Actually, you can change your shell in Windows, too. That's what LiteStep is all about, for example. Not sure if it works on Vista/7.
Anecdotal evidence: I changed my shell from progman to mIRC back when I was running Windows 3.1 because I found the scripting environment to work better than the default program groups and folders full of shortcuts. I also briefly toyed with LiteStep in 2003, but found it lacking.
For future reference, that's what <code> is for. It uses a monospace font
and preserves your formatting without requiring you to permanently change a preference.
I don't get why there is this push away from the program menu we have been using for over 15 years.
It's pretty simple. Marketing does a survey, finds out that 99% of button-presses on a TV remote are channel up/do, volume up/down, and guide.
Correct response: Enlarge those three buttons, move them into the easiest to reach area of the remote.
Braindead response: Make those three buttons the entire front of the remote. Hide all other buttons behind a panel you have to remove with a screwdriver to access.
You, sir, win the prize. Canonical failed to even play this game.
If you could find something under XP, why can't you find it under 7? They are in the same place, but instead of having it expand right it expands down... fsking easy if you ask me.
Translation of "Ubuntu, african word meaning..." meme: The pathetic idiot who typed it hasn't got the time, ability, or inclination to research the subject, investigate the options, or actually to do anything more than parrot a bitter groupthink tagline.
Seriously, I'm absolutely sick of hearing this "joke"; it has become an immediate indicator for putting the person spewing it in the same boat with the jackasses who make the joke about XBox 360 and turning 360 degrees - obvious troll is not only obvious, it's retarded and so out of date that it's beginning to smell.
Disclaimer: I don't own an XBox[360], PS[1|2|3], or any console newer than the SNES. I use a PC for games, nowadays, when I have the time and inclination to play them. The mouse is a much better tool for FPS, RTS, or even puzzle games; more intuitive, faster, easier, and more precise than a joystick or gamepad for anything except driving games - for those, a steering wheel is a better choice of input device.
You don't think he's a Linux user? You don't think he's an Ubuntu user? In which case what do you think he's basing his opinions on, huh?
It's not him in particular, I see it all over sSlashdot. People whining, as if they deserve better, for something they have been given for free.
Or maybe it's people with a legitimate gripe about an operating system that is the product of millions of man-hours worth of labor over the past decade and a half. In case you hadn't realized it, Shuttleworth made Canonical into a profitable enterprise last year. As another example of profitable OSS, RedHat has been profitable for over 12 years.
Linux may be free and libre, but Ubuntu is not made of good will - they're in it for the money, like any other corporation.
Besides, people "whining" about what amounts to a broken Os are doing Canonical a favor by pointing out what a horrible job they're doing of getting and/or keeping the users they actually want - the guys who tell the big boys what to buy.
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;)
My SO is on gnome-shell right now, and finds it... usable. Misses her old themes though. She's been making noise about getting tired about it. Not sure what I'll do on her machine. Install Ubuntu 11.04 I guess.
Try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop at the bottom of the login screen. Worked wonders for me, and kept me sticking with Ubuntu in the hopes they'll shove Unity at the mobile systems and give us back our functional desktop systems.
I would find it surprising if that many "power users" were using hardware *that* old though.
Sitting at my desk in my living room, looking at the following functional (and currently operating) desktop machines:
P4 2.4Ghz - Web Server P4 1.8 Ghz - Router (Yeah, ok, "server" type machines don't count, right? Read on. P4 2.8Ghz - "Guest Machine" running WinXP, with an install of WoW on it (Yeah, I know, it's not a powerhouse. Still gets 20-30 fps in dungeons even with a dozen addons, and that's good enough to be "playable") Sempron 3000+ (Laptop) - portable "entertainment center" for music and movies in the shed when I'm working on a non-computer project. My wife's AMD dual-core HP lappy My AMD quad-core RAID1 beast
Only 1 of those machines is less than 3 years old. The "little" laptop is 6 years old, and the P4s (one of which is a "gaming rig", mind you) are nearly 10 years old.
Consider yourself surprised.
Getting back on-topic, try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop next time you log in, and see if it isn't easier to use than Unity.
-- Long-time Ubuntu user, my foot. Get off my lawn.
And they do it all wrong. If Ubuntu is going to use Compiz by default they should setup the cube. Set fire to close windows. Genie for min/max (airplaine[sic], beam, something cool).
I dunno about the fire for closing windows, it seems a bit resource-intensive for slower machines. Genie for minimize is extremely useful for noting the location of that application's tab for later restoration, and feels proper for the function being performed - although ALT+TAB makes the whole thing somewhat pointless in the first place.
Eyecandy is nice, but if it doesn't serve a function, I tend to get rid of it.
On the other hand, some things aren't just about efficiency. Wobbly Windows, for example, makes dragging windows feel more... well, "right". A "grabbed" window seems to respond as if it were a sheet of flimsy that I just grabbed the edge of and am sliding around on my screen, and that just feels better to me. It doesn't necessarily add anything in the sense of functionality, but I find it nearly abrasive to use a system that doesn't have that feeling of "flow" that Wobbly windows engenders.
The cube is a nice touch if you have enough of a system to support it, but isn't actually all that useful to most people. That being said, I still use a transparent, 3-sided, spherical "cube" to make my Windows-using friends jealous. That serves enough of a function for me;)
When I started my transition from Windows, I found that I could tell I liked Linux simply because I started trying to close "Command Prompts" with CTRL-D, and ended up having to write a batch file and toss it in my %PATH% so I could use ls - apparently, "dir" was too hard to type.
It's just that I notice how often I just press the key on the top right of my keyboard that drops down Yakuake
Yakuake is for KDE. I use Gnome, so I installed Guake for much the same reason you installed Yakuake. Tagging F12 and tossing out a command line with a few parameters is something I do on a fairly regular basis. My few remaining Windows (XP) machines have "cmd.exe" and "notepad" at the top of the start menu for the exact same reason: they're used more often than anything else.
One day I realized the core problem: It's NOT simplicity that is the ideal we should all strive for. Because simplicity, driven far enough, makes it less efficient again.
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
"On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933); also published in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1934), pp. 163-169., p. 165. [thanks to Dr. Techie @ www.wordorigins.org and JSTOR]
There is a quote attributed to Einstein that may have arisen as a paraphrase of the above quote, commonly given as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” or “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
It's the same crybaby attitude people had about Vista's interface, KDE 4's interface, the Fark.com redesign, etc. etc. Heard it all before.
Ah, you mean the Vista interface that has not only geeks, but normal users literally tearing their hair out in frustration, because things that used to be easy to find are now hidden deep in a submenu of an application masquerading as a control panel dialog?
The new interface on Vista/7 was what caused many of my friends to move to Ubuntu in the first place... "If I have to learn a new OS from the ground up, I might as well pick the one that isn't $400 to get all the bells and whistles."
Of course, it helped that YouTube was deluged with videos showcasing Beryl/Compiz/Fusion.
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.
Or maybe it's not just power users, it's anyone who wants to travel the information superhighway - and Unity feels too much like being stuck in a handicapped parking space.
On the bright side, you can select "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop interface from the login screen. If they change that, I'll change operating systems again, to something that feels less "flavor of the month".
Or maybe it's not just power users, it's anyone who wants to travel the information superhighway, and Unity feels too much like being stuck in a handicapped parking space.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
While I, too, think that the "average user", AKA the "home user", is moving to a portable media consumption device for the majority of their computing needs, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that the guy that does the stuff that goes between the server and the tablet needs a system with more usability than the server, and more functionality than the tablet.
Moving everything to a mobile platform is just going to remove the ability for the mobile platform to function, because there won't be anyone to design the interface for the tablet that allows it to access the content on the server.
I always thought that Linux was designed with the idea in mind that not everyone is going to live in either a mansion or an efficiency apartment - there's mobile homes, condos, tents, treehouses... There's a broad spectrum of human preference, and Linux enables us to make our own choices. If the distro doesn't fit, throw it out and get a new one.
It's a goddamn OPERATING SYSTEM!
No, it's not. It's a windowing system.
The operating system is what runs the show behind the pretty, shiny, wobbly, on-fire, or what have you windowing system.
You're apparently not only too cool for Mr Shuttleworth, you're too cool for facts, information, and research.
On the other hand, I agree with your statement that Ubuntu seems to be painting the deck chairs every time it looks like someone might actually sit in them.
you can still install another DE on Ubuntu but not on Windows
Actually, you can change your shell in Windows, too. That's what LiteStep is all about, for example.
Not sure if it works on Vista/7.
Anecdotal evidence: I changed my shell from progman to mIRC back when I was running Windows 3.1 because I found the scripting environment to work better than the default program groups and folders full of shortcuts. I also briefly toyed with LiteStep in 2003, but found it lacking.
For future reference, that's what <code> is for.
It uses a monospace font
and preserves your formatting
without requiring you to permanently change a preference.
The thing that makes the environment more usable lies in making it consistent and bug free.
Yep, and Unity is neither. That's pretty much the crux of the matter, right there.
It's pretty simple. Marketing does a survey, finds out that 99% of button-presses on a TV remote are channel up/do, volume up/down, and guide.
Correct response: Enlarge those three buttons, move them into the easiest to reach area of the remote.
Braindead response: Make those three buttons the entire front of the remote. Hide all other buttons behind a panel you have to remove with a screwdriver to access.
You, sir, win the prize.
Canonical failed to even play this game.
If you could find something under XP, why can't you find it under 7? They are in the same place, but instead of having it expand right it expands down... fsking easy if you ask me.
... and where is that menu in Unity, please?
Translation of "Ubuntu, african word meaning..." meme: The pathetic idiot who typed it hasn't got the time, ability, or inclination to research the subject, investigate the options, or actually to do anything more than parrot a bitter groupthink tagline.
Seriously, I'm absolutely sick of hearing this "joke"; it has become an immediate indicator for putting the person spewing it in the same boat with the jackasses who make the joke about XBox 360 and turning 360 degrees - obvious troll is not only obvious, it's retarded and so out of date that it's beginning to smell.
Disclaimer: I don't own an XBox[360], PS[1|2|3], or any console newer than the SNES. I use a PC for games, nowadays, when I have the time and inclination to play them. The mouse is a much better tool for FPS, RTS, or even puzzle games; more intuitive, faster, easier, and more precise than a joystick or gamepad for anything except driving games - for those, a steering wheel is a better choice of input device.
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.
This may be why Apple has less than 15% of the desktop market.
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.
You don't think he's a Linux user? You don't think he's an Ubuntu user? In which case what do you think he's basing his opinions on, huh?
It's not him in particular, I see it all over sSlashdot. People whining, as if they deserve better, for something they have been given for free.
Or maybe it's people with a legitimate gripe about an operating system that is the product of millions of man-hours worth of labor over the past decade and a half. In case you hadn't realized it, Shuttleworth made Canonical into a profitable enterprise last year. As another example of profitable OSS, RedHat has been profitable for over 12 years.
Linux may be free and libre, but Ubuntu is not made of good will - they're in it for the money, like any other corporation.
Besides, people "whining" about what amounts to a broken Os are doing Canonical a favor by pointing out what a horrible job they're doing of getting and/or keeping the users they actually want - the guys who tell the big boys what to buy.
Try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop at the login screen. Unity is poop, but you don't have to smell it.
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 ;)
My SO is on gnome-shell right now, and finds it... usable. Misses her old themes though. She's been making noise about getting tired about it. Not sure what I'll do on her machine. Install Ubuntu 11.04 I guess.
Try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop at the bottom of the login screen. Worked wonders for me, and kept me sticking with Ubuntu in the hopes they'll shove Unity at the mobile systems and give us back our functional desktop systems.
I would find it surprising if that many "power users" were using hardware *that* old though.
Sitting at my desk in my living room, looking at the following functional (and currently operating) desktop machines:
P4 2.4Ghz - Web Server
P4 1.8 Ghz - Router (Yeah, ok, "server" type machines don't count, right? Read on.
P4 2.8Ghz - "Guest Machine" running WinXP, with an install of WoW on it (Yeah, I know, it's not a powerhouse. Still gets 20-30 fps in dungeons even with a dozen addons, and that's good enough to be "playable")
Sempron 3000+ (Laptop) - portable "entertainment center" for music and movies in the shed when I'm working on a non-computer project.
My wife's AMD dual-core HP lappy
My AMD quad-core RAID1 beast
Only 1 of those machines is less than 3 years old.
The "little" laptop is 6 years old, and the P4s (one of which is a "gaming rig", mind you) are nearly 10 years old.
Consider yourself surprised.
Getting back on-topic, try selecting "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop next time you log in, and see if it isn't easier to use than Unity.
--
Long-time Ubuntu user, my foot. Get off my lawn.
If I knew the first few letters of the app, I wouldn't need the fucking search box.
Not showing what's installed coupled with Linux devs coming up with cute names for their projects makes Unity a really, really awful interface.
Agreed 100%.
Plenty of eyecandy to spare.
And they do it all wrong. If Ubuntu is going to use Compiz by default they should setup the cube. Set fire to close windows. Genie for min/max (airplaine[sic], beam, something cool).
I dunno about the fire for closing windows, it seems a bit resource-intensive for slower machines. Genie for minimize is extremely useful for noting the location of that application's tab for later restoration, and feels proper for the function being performed - although ALT+TAB makes the whole thing somewhat pointless in the first place.
Eyecandy is nice, but if it doesn't serve a function, I tend to get rid of it.
On the other hand, some things aren't just about efficiency. Wobbly Windows, for example, makes dragging windows feel more... well, "right". A "grabbed" window seems to respond as if it were a sheet of flimsy that I just grabbed the edge of and am sliding around on my screen, and that just feels better to me. It doesn't necessarily add anything in the sense of functionality, but I find it nearly abrasive to use a system that doesn't have that feeling of "flow" that Wobbly windows engenders.
The cube is a nice touch if you have enough of a system to support it, but isn't actually all that useful to most people. That being said, I still use a transparent, 3-sided, spherical "cube" to make my Windows-using friends jealous. That serves enough of a function for me ;)
When I started my transition from Windows, I found that I could tell I liked Linux simply because I started trying to close "Command Prompts" with CTRL-D, and ended up having to write a batch file and toss it in my %PATH% so I could use ls - apparently, "dir" was too hard to type.
It's just that I notice how often I just press the key on the top right of my keyboard that drops down Yakuake
Yakuake is for KDE. I use Gnome, so I installed Guake for much the same reason you installed Yakuake. Tagging F12 and tossing out a command line with a few parameters is something I do on a fairly regular basis. My few remaining Windows (XP) machines have "cmd.exe" and "notepad" at the top of the start menu for the exact same reason: they're used more often than anything else.
One day I realized the core problem: It's NOT simplicity that is the ideal we should all strive for. Because simplicity, driven far enough, makes it less efficient again.
From the Wiki on Albert Einstein:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
"On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933); also published in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1934), pp. 163-169., p. 165. [thanks to Dr. Techie @ www.wordorigins.org and JSTOR]
There is a quote attributed to Einstein that may have arisen as a paraphrase of the above quote, commonly given as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” or “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
It's the same crybaby attitude people had about Vista's interface, KDE 4's interface, the Fark.com redesign, etc. etc. Heard it all before.
Ah, you mean the Vista interface that has not only geeks, but normal users literally tearing their hair out in frustration, because things that used to be easy to find are now hidden deep in a submenu of an application masquerading as a control panel dialog?
The new interface on Vista/7 was what caused many of my friends to move to Ubuntu in the first place... "If I have to learn a new OS from the ground up, I might as well pick the one that isn't $400 to get all the bells and whistles."
Of course, it helped that YouTube was deluged with videos showcasing Beryl/Compiz/Fusion.
A more appropriate "Soviet Russia" meme-based joke might be "In Soviet Russia, Unity uses you!
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.
Unity is too cool for power users?
Or maybe it's not just power users, it's anyone who wants to travel the information superhighway - and Unity feels too much like being stuck in a handicapped parking space.
On the bright side, you can select "Ubuntu Classic" as your desktop interface from the login screen.
If they change that, I'll change operating systems again, to something that feels less "flavor of the month".
Unity is too cool for power users?
Or maybe it's not just power users, it's anyone who wants to travel the information superhighway, and Unity feels too much like being stuck in a handicapped parking space.
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.