Large-scale change needs time. It would help if the PP would not still be embryonic - they still embarrass themselves regularly and will need to go through a few schisms and cleansings, like all new movements and subsequent parties must. Still it's the first time these net topics are visibly on the agenda in Germany, and they won't disappear.
Obviously this won't power a car on its own anytime soon, but I thought you might find it interesting anyway: http://www.williamshybridpower.com/ Williams Hybrid Power is a spin-off of the Williams F1 race team that competes in Formula One. They developed this flywheel storage for use in their F1 race car, but IIRC under the particular restrictions of Formula 1 battery systems proved more competitive. It's been used to provide power for a "boost button" in Porsche high-performance cars though, and they are teaming up with other manufacturers, like Audi.
Whatever individual bugs may exist in the DE tools, are you really going to compare that to the design trainwreck that is nvidia-settings? Seriously? I also disagree that the screen config of individual users should go into/etc/X11. No other per-user settings do, with good reason: it's a multi user system.
The binary driver as such is fine, but the nvidia screen configuration tool sucks big time and for non-experts users is unusable for every-day tasks like dual screen setup, up to hosing your whole GUI. It desperately needs integration into the X facilities via the GUI tools provided by the desktop environments.
I am wondering how meaningful is that membership for end users. I haven't had any problems with Nvidia's proprietary drivers and Intel drivers included in Linux kernel work out of the box.
As other posts have noted, this is probably not about desktop GPUs at all. Nevertheless, while like you I haven't had any actual problems with their binary blob on Ubuntu, Nvidia's god-awful configuration toÃl stands out increasingly like a sore thumb the slicker linux distros (and Ubuntu in particular) look and work, and could do with integration into the screen configuration framework provided by X. In its current state the tool is not usable by non-expert users for every-day tasks like dual-screen setup, etc. Oh, and KMS, but that's even more unlikely.
Intel seems to finally have fixed the power management bug and from the comments on the bug report on Launchpad (LP#818830) it seems very likely that Ubuntu 12.04 will ship with rc6 enabled by default.
I don't know that the sibiling AC is on about, I have used Unity on a Sandybridge laptop with integrated graphics and found no reason to complain about graphics performance, including HD video. YMMV
The people controlling these things are just people. They are no different from your friends, your relatives, your neighbors, or any random joe you meet on the street. They aren't out to get you.
Poor argument IMHO, because groups of people exhibit emergent behaviors - behaviors which any single member on their own would not show. Take any large-scale abomination committed in human history, and the people involved were always no different to friends, neighbors, relatives, etc. This is no guarantee that they won't do terrible and stupid things.
Oh, sorry, I had misread the "to" in what you wrote about wicd.
I don't think I'm missing the distinction. What I meant was that some particular bug that leads to missing functionality is meaningless to users who don't need this piece, while a UI design problem may weigh more heavily, or at least may be seen such by whoever makes the decision, even if the UI piece is functional in a basic sense. So while "no matter of opinion is going to change the fact that PPTP on wicd on Xfce on Debian Squeeze does not work" is indeed a fact, it is still a matter of opinion which issues to focus on.
The answer to "Ubuntu already has/had one good UI. What's the harm in allowing it to persist?" is that Ubuntu did not make this decision, the Gnome project discontinued version 2. And as always, it's a question of resources, and spending resources on Gnome 2 and its concepts obviously does harm the resources the distro can put into their new direction. "Or, if you are going to reinvent it, allow crusty old fools like me to keep doing it the old way" is never going to end, and how many versions should they keep alive simultaneously?
I don't know what else to say... ok, you dislike Unity as it is now, and are unhappy about Ubuntu's direction... so try 12.04, which supposedly will fill a lot of holes in Unity and add a lot of polish, or look for alternatives. You will know that there are efforts to resurrect Gnome 2 it in various forms (either as a fork, or by tweaking Gnome 3), especially in the Mint distro. On the other hand, I like Unity a lot, and I'm happy Ubuntu does not waste time on Gnome 2 and Windows 95's UI concept.
Whether you call them a functional issue seems to me largely a question of the point of view. I understand yours, but for a user who does not need PPTP VPN, but who is annoyed by menu navigation, it may be different. Both are limited parts of the OS, and it would also be valid to say that a not working PPTP VPN also does "not keep the operating system from operating", only a tiny portion of it apparently due to a bug.
I don't think I have to tell you that there are always more bugs and wishlist items than there is time on the project, so it becomes a question of prioritization and hence personal preference to some extent. I'm sure Canonical, just like all other OS vendors, would love to have a perfect OS without bugs and with all wishlist items implemented, but it just does not happen. Though the scheduling conflict in your particular example is probably not even real, because those able to fix wicd and those able to design and implement Unity improvements are most likely destinct people. (And I hope you are aware that wicd is part of the universe repo, so there was never any Ubuntu/Canonical guarantee for its functionality. I have no experience with wicd or PPTP VPN, but a quick google shows various sites explaining how to set it up with Ubuntu's default tool, Network Manager.)
For the same reason it is impossible even for a large and rich company to support all previous UI concepts indefinitely for simple economic reasons, and add on top of that the problems of complexity for both developers and users if various concepts and toolkits from different eras are available and in use. At some point everyone has to make a decision. All this goes even more for a tiny company like Canonical, even including the Ubuntu contributors. The beauty of free software is partly that you even had the option of switching to Squeeze and xfce while retaining your familiar set of applications along with its data.
Shuttleworth already summarized quite well in the blog post:
As a means of invoking commands, menus have some advantages. They are always in the same place (top of the window or screen). They are organised in a way that’s quite easy to describe over the phone, or in a text book (“click the Edit->Preferences menu”), they are pretty fast to read since they are generally arranged in tight vertical columns. They also have some disadvantages: when they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree (“should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?”), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorise and navigate that tree
I would add that they are not a very good presentation of the app's feature set, despite of all the people in this/. story who say that's what they use it for. At the very least they become very convoluted if the app is not simple - Microsoft claimed that most of the features requested during their research for a new Office version are made for features which already exist, but which users (including both Office novices and power users) could not find (hence, the ribbon, which I hate). Plus, of course, in GUIs without a menu bar at the top of the screen (i.e., not what Mac OS and Unity have) the menu bar target is difficult to aquire with the mouse.
We have the stated plans in the blog post (did you read it, as well as the designer blogs it links to). If you dismiss this out of hand just because, discussing this topic with you makes as much sense as discussing the origin of species with a creationist.
It is visible in the sense we are discussing here, as a hierarchical repository of the app's features, which you can scan visually. Whether you have to mouse to the global menu bar or not is not important in this context.
As for the menu's behavior as such, you may be happy to hear that the they are reconsidering (from the blog link I gave before):
We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of Ubuntu, we’ve actively diminished the visual presence of menus in anticipation of this landing. That proved controversial. In our defence, in user testing, every user finds the menu in the panel, every time, and it’s obviously a cleaner presentation of the interface. But hiding the menu before we had the replacement was overly aggressive. If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope you’ll find yourself using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when you are not using it. You’ll definitely have that option, alongside more traditional menu styles.
That quote is not the same as "targeted for beginners", it's just stating that it is helpful for them. And see the blog for the full story, not only whatever the PC Pro journo picked up on.
True. Clicking on the 'Bookmarks' menu is much harder to figure out than that.
Your sarcasm only works if by accident there is a menu with the same or similar name as the item you are looking for. There are endless examples for cases where it is difficult to know which menu contains a particular item, while the item's name itself is pretty straightforward (and will be tagged with alternatives, anyway)
Yes, it is also helpful for power users, so? Much of the focus of Ubuntu has been on newbs, what is wrong with caring a bit for power users? Though they claim that their user testing shows that it is helpful for both power users and newbs: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939 If you read the link, you will see that they do not plan to take away a visible menu tree structure. Plus, the search problem you mention can be solved by tagging and fuzzy search, at least for most cases. In Ubuntu's Unity, I can already (in 11.10) type, for example, "presentation" and Libre Office Impress will come up, the presentation program. Other systems have this as well, basically it has been solved for a long time.
Any UI designer is very aware of the problems with the menu-driven system. You may or may not agree with the proposed solutions, but claiming that there is no problem is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Large-scale change needs time. It would help if the PP would not still be embryonic - they still embarrass themselves regularly and will need to go through a few schisms and cleansings, like all new movements and subsequent parties must. Still it's the first time these net topics are visibly on the agenda in Germany, and they won't disappear.
No that would be called "Fair Use"
Fair use is a common law concept and does not apply in Germany.
Obviously not that much, or else they'd be pushing their legislators to fix the situation.
Pirate Party is currently reaching 13% in polls, which would make them the 3rd strongest party in an election.
Menu File | New and menu File | Save?
If car is too fast for your taste, step on the break. Anyone who panics in such a case should not be in a car but on the train in the first place.
Obviously this won't power a car on its own anytime soon, but I thought you might find it interesting anyway: http://www.williamshybridpower.com/
Williams Hybrid Power is a spin-off of the Williams F1 race team that competes in Formula One. They developed this flywheel storage for use in their F1 race car, but IIRC under the particular restrictions of Formula 1 battery systems proved more competitive. It's been used to provide power for a "boost button" in Porsche high-performance cars though, and they are teaming up with other manufacturers, like Audi.
Whatever individual bugs may exist in the DE tools, are you really going to compare that to the design trainwreck that is nvidia-settings? Seriously? /etc/X11. No other per-user settings do, with good reason: it's a multi user system.
I also disagree that the screen config of individual users should go into
The binary driver as such is fine, but the nvidia screen configuration tool sucks big time and for non-experts users is unusable for every-day tasks like dual screen setup, up to hosing your whole GUI. It desperately needs integration into the X facilities via the GUI tools provided by the desktop environments.
I am wondering how meaningful is that membership for end users.
I haven't had any problems with Nvidia's proprietary drivers and Intel drivers included in Linux kernel work out of the box.
As other posts have noted, this is probably not about desktop GPUs at all.
Nevertheless, while like you I haven't had any actual problems with their binary blob on Ubuntu, Nvidia's god-awful configuration toÃl stands out increasingly like a sore thumb the slicker linux distros (and Ubuntu in particular) look and work, and could do with integration into the screen configuration framework provided by X. In its current state the tool is not usable by non-expert users for every-day tasks like dual-screen setup, etc. Oh, and KMS, but that's even more unlikely.
Intel seems to finally have fixed the power management bug and from the comments on the bug report on Launchpad (LP#818830) it seems very likely that Ubuntu 12.04 will ship with rc6 enabled by default.
I don't know that the sibiling AC is on about, I have used Unity on a Sandybridge laptop with integrated graphics and found no reason to complain about graphics performance, including HD video. YMMV
That's not all there is to it. Unwanted behaviors can arise in complex systems, and they are not always steered from the top by authority.
Why?
The people controlling these things are just people. They are no different from your friends, your relatives, your neighbors, or any random joe you meet on the street. They aren't out to get you.
Poor argument IMHO, because groups of people exhibit emergent behaviors - behaviors which any single member on their own would not show. Take any large-scale abomination committed in human history, and the people involved were always no different to friends, neighbors, relatives, etc. This is no guarantee that they won't do terrible and stupid things.
Yeah, nothing new.
Oh, sorry, I had misread the "to" in what you wrote about wicd.
I don't think I'm missing the distinction. What I meant was that some particular bug that leads to missing functionality is meaningless to users who don't need this piece, while a UI design problem may weigh more heavily, or at least may be seen such by whoever makes the decision, even if the UI piece is functional in a basic sense. So while "no matter of opinion is going to change the fact that PPTP on wicd on Xfce on Debian Squeeze does not work" is indeed a fact, it is still a matter of opinion which issues to focus on.
The answer to "Ubuntu already has/had one good UI. What's the harm in allowing it to persist?" is that Ubuntu did not make this decision, the Gnome project discontinued version 2. And as always, it's a question of resources, and spending resources on Gnome 2 and its concepts obviously does harm the resources the distro can put into their new direction. "Or, if you are going to reinvent it, allow crusty old fools like me to keep doing it the old way" is never going to end, and how many versions should they keep alive simultaneously?
I don't know what else to say ... ok, you dislike Unity as it is now, and are unhappy about Ubuntu's direction ... so try 12.04, which supposedly will fill a lot of holes in Unity and add a lot of polish, or look for alternatives. You will know that there are efforts to resurrect Gnome 2 it in various forms (either as a fork, or by tweaking Gnome 3), especially in the Mint distro. On the other hand, I like Unity a lot, and I'm happy Ubuntu does not waste time on Gnome 2 and Windows 95's UI concept.
Whether you call them a functional issue seems to me largely a question of the point of view. I understand yours, but for a user who does not need PPTP VPN, but who is annoyed by menu navigation, it may be different. Both are limited parts of the OS, and it would also be valid to say that a not working PPTP VPN also does "not keep the operating system from operating", only a tiny portion of it apparently due to a bug.
I don't think I have to tell you that there are always more bugs and wishlist items than there is time on the project, so it becomes a question of prioritization and hence personal preference to some extent. I'm sure Canonical, just like all other OS vendors, would love to have a perfect OS without bugs and with all wishlist items implemented, but it just does not happen. Though the scheduling conflict in your particular example is probably not even real, because those able to fix wicd and those able to design and implement Unity improvements are most likely destinct people. (And I hope you are aware that wicd is part of the universe repo, so there was never any Ubuntu/Canonical guarantee for its functionality. I have no experience with wicd or PPTP VPN, but a quick google shows various sites explaining how to set it up with Ubuntu's default tool, Network Manager.)
For the same reason it is impossible even for a large and rich company to support all previous UI concepts indefinitely for simple economic reasons, and add on top of that the problems of complexity for both developers and users if various concepts and toolkits from different eras are available and in use. At some point everyone has to make a decision. All this goes even more for a tiny company like Canonical, even including the Ubuntu contributors. The beauty of free software is partly that you even had the option of switching to Squeeze and xfce while retaining your familiar set of applications along with its data.
Shuttleworth already summarized quite well in the blog post:
As a means of invoking commands, menus have some advantages. They are always in the same place (top of the window or screen). They are organised in a way that’s quite easy to describe over the phone, or in a text book (“click the Edit->Preferences menu”), they are pretty fast to read since they are generally arranged in tight vertical columns. They also have some disadvantages: when they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree (“should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?”), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorise and navigate that tree
I would add that they are not a very good presentation of the app's feature set, despite of all the people in this /. story who say that's what they use it for. At the very least they become very convoluted if the app is not simple - Microsoft claimed that most of the features requested during their research for a new Office version are made for features which already exist, but which users (including both Office novices and power users) could not find (hence, the ribbon, which I hate). Plus, of course, in GUIs without a menu bar at the top of the screen (i.e., not what Mac OS and Unity have) the menu bar target is difficult to aquire with the mouse.
We have the stated plans in the blog post (did you read it, as well as the designer blogs it links to). If you dismiss this out of hand just because, discussing this topic with you makes as much sense as discussing the origin of species with a creationist.
Cool, thanks. And also for correcting my error when I wrote "file lense" instead of "application lense"
It is visible in the sense we are discussing here, as a hierarchical repository of the app's features, which you can scan visually. Whether you have to mouse to the global menu bar or not is not important in this context.
As for the menu's behavior as such, you may be happy to hear that the they are reconsidering (from the blog link I gave before):
We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of Ubuntu, we’ve actively diminished the visual presence of menus in anticipation of this landing. That proved controversial. In our defence, in user testing, every user finds the menu in the panel, every time, and it’s obviously a cleaner presentation of the interface. But hiding the menu before we had the replacement was overly aggressive. If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope you’ll find yourself using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when you are not using it. You’ll definitely have that option, alongside more traditional menu styles.
That quote is not the same as "targeted for beginners", it's just stating that it is helpful for them. And see the blog for the full story, not only whatever the PC Pro journo picked up on.
Shuttleworth gives credit to Enso, Ubiquity, Jeff Raskin, other UI designs, and even the MS ribbon
All your point subtractions are based on the false assumption that they are removing visible menu trees. They are not.
True. Clicking on the 'Bookmarks' menu is much harder to figure out than that.
Your sarcasm only works if by accident there is a menu with the same or similar name as the item you are looking for. There are endless examples for cases where it is difficult to know which menu contains a particular item, while the item's name itself is pretty straightforward (and will be tagged with alternatives, anyway)
Yes, it is also helpful for power users, so? Much of the focus of Ubuntu has been on newbs, what is wrong with caring a bit for power users? Though they claim that their user testing shows that it is helpful for both power users and newbs: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
If you read the link, you will see that they do not plan to take away a visible menu tree structure. Plus, the search problem you mention can be solved by tagging and fuzzy search, at least for most cases. In Ubuntu's Unity, I can already (in 11.10) type, for example, "presentation" and Libre Office Impress will come up, the presentation program. Other systems have this as well, basically it has been solved for a long time.
Any UI designer is very aware of the problems with the menu-driven system. You may or may not agree with the proposed solutions, but claiming that there is no problem is ridiculous.