re: Ubuntu Unity

I was going to reply to another Unity thread but it's apparently against forum rules since it's close to one year old. Soooooo i'll start another one.

What's the latest on this OS? I'm really looking forward to it. I checked the latest developer blog but no release date info. Do you Linux vets think that the Mint team might release Mint Unity? I love their work.

 

As I understand it, Unity is a Canonical creation - Ubuntu is their project. They will probably make Unity available via repository, but I'm not sure how many other distros will adopt it officially.

I've tried Unity in Ubuntu 11.04, and it's a slight departure, a little bit different, but in a bad way. The UI changes don't seem to have a point, aside from being more OSX-like. I've also been playing with Gnome 3, which is a dramatic departure from Gnome as we know it today, but makes some changes that I rather like.

 

I read that Mint 11 (May 2011 release) will not use Unity but instead will use Gnome 3.0 so i'm also looking forward to that as Mint is my all time favorite Distro.

 

This is what I feared. Ubuntu seems to be going for a more OSX feel. Started with left side min/max/X. Im officially worried.

 

They try to grab market share from the computer nob users that's all.
Guessing they go for commercialization next, as now you can see app store like features here and there .. music/apps.
From the 1000-s of free apps you will see a lot becoming payed soon .. .0.99$+ .. like all other app stores.
But I will find hell funny if a full install of ubuntu will cost more then windows one

As for unity .. just purge/uninstall it and back to gnome.

 

From what i've read it appears Canonical is building Unity to use on Tablets. Supposedly the previewer who saw it in action walked away very impressed. So that could explain the move away from Gnome and the left side buttons.

 

If ubuntu costs more then free Ill go elsewhere.

The left sided stuff is an easy fix. I just fear the flow of OSX as it is a painful OS for me now. I loath working on the wifes macbook, but if its all easy to get fully back to how ubuntu is now then I wont worry.

 

I'm currently using unity on both my Natty Narwhal installs. I quite like it. Ubuntu needed a bit of a lift, I feel.
I have, however, also been using Gnome 3/gnome-shell in other distros, which I like very much

 

Right. This is why I support Unity. It would be nice to have an Ubuntu tablet in the future.

On the other hand, Unity was awful on my netbook.

But really, you can install and session into any desktop environment so I'm not worried about Unity taking center stage.

 

Universal menu bar, nuff said. But when you think about it it's not all that bad, although I still haven't figured a way to make the unity dock hide when i want it to, the new layout gives you a larger workspace which I appreciate.

 

I have a large workspace already on Lucid, so I don't know what you're talking about. Just one task bar on top and bottom that takes up very little space.

 

Why are you shattering my attempt at finding an advantage in using Unity??? I shall now go and cry myself to sleep into a dark corner of my room...

 

Unity is suppose to drop sometime this month but I can't seem to nail down a date. I went to the Unity website and it's still in Beta right now.

 

Unity will be the default (I think) desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, which is released 28th April - maybe

 

I have been ignoring Unity for the longest time. I tried it out over the weekend in Ubuntu 10.10. Needless to say, I was very unhappy that I couldn't customize it by simply right clicking. That is one thing I've always love about Linux: the customization. Taking away that is like a kick in the crotch. I also had an issue with the applets becoming distorted when I rotated my screen. I promptly went back to good ol' gnome.

 

I honestly see a trend that Canonical is starting to lock things down and become more exclusive. Get you tied into Canonical more and more. I don't like it one bit. I see them becoming the microsoft of linux, and I'll jump ship if that ever happens.

 

Ha! I've already got myself thinking like that also

 

I can't disagree with that and my thinking is THAT'S exactly what they want to become and you start by making Unity very noobish. I can't fault them for that and I actually hope they succeed. We need more videogame developers viewing Linux as another mainstream alternative so they can make more games and that only comes by making your OS mainstream.

 

As a linux (Ubuntu) user, I also can´t disagree that Canonical is becoming more exclusive and I hope that they succeed. I am looking forward to installing Ubuntu 11.04 onto a new laptop with switchable graphic and it just plain works

 

There fixed

 

Good read.

Default Desktop Experience for 11.04 - User testing results

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html

 

I find Unity a lot more difficult to use as opposed to the classic gnome desktop. I'm already thinking about wiping my ubuntu partition because Unity is so annoying to use, and is pretty darn ugly.

I mean I quickly looked at the Gnome 3 environment, and damn that is almost as bad as unity! One of the reason's I decided to try 10.10 was because of the simplicity and the beauty of it all, and then I said hell 11.04 has got to be better. Nope Been using it for ~1.5-2 months

 

Holy hell. You mean they actually did user testing, got those results, and they're *still* going ahead with it?

Ugh. Those results show serious problems and numerous bugs.

I can't speak for the Ubuntu devs, but I know if the software that I'm currently working on had user testing results like that, we absolutely would not consider our work anywhere near done. We probably would seriously consider redesigning substantial portions of the UI. We definitely wouldn't consider it beta quality.

Their reaction to the results is also pretty telling:

What do you mean it "probably isn't important"? You're writing a DE/desktop shell. Showing what applications are running is one of its primary functions! Why do you think that Windows 95 onwards has the taskbar? Why do you think OS X has the indicators under dock icons? Why do you think Apple released updates to Leopard to make those indicators more visible? Hell, why do you think there is a dock in the first place?

No. That's it. Stop writing your message. Put down your laptop and go grab the people responsible for your window manager. Drag them back here. Cause bodily harm if you must. Got 'em? Ok.

Listen, guys. You know why you have all these weird bugs? Because complex UIs are difficult. They don't get easier when you start ripping them apart and rewriting large chunks of them with only a few months to go before release, and they *definitely* don't get easier when you throw 3D, compositing, and animation into the mix.

Now why do you think you have these bugs that "cramp [users'] style"? Hmm? Would it be because you threw out a codebase with nearly a decade of development refinement, turned your back on a large swath of the DE development world, and decided to re-invent the wheel all on your own? Could it be because you took on a massive task on a short schedule with little help from the outside community?

YES!

Here's the thing: those users are (presumably) your target market ('cause you sure as hell aren't courting the favor of more experienced users and people who don't want an OS X clone). If you have numerous bugs that "cramp their style" or features that they can't discover, your UI is fundamentally broken until those are fixed/redesigned. It would be another matter if they represented a small portion of your target market and if the bugs only affected one or two of them. They don't, and they didn't. This is a big problem.

---

< /rant> Sigh. I feel better already.

 

I'm starting to get a headache. I am not a fan of KDE but I may be heading that direction based on how Gnome 3 (no power off menu option without holding alt, other horrendous design decisions) and Unity (this user study and general bad taste [IMHO]) are turning out. I recently installed Gnome3 on my laptop and spent longer removing it than I did using it.

I need to give the fallback gnome3 desktop another look, in a VM this time, because that will be my last try before I rip my hair out and go back to WindowMaker.

For what it's worth about the Unity study, it was done with the first beta, and the second beta is supposed to have directly addressed the crashing issues.

 

You could say that, but Unity indeed has a lot of customization options now,if you know where to look(in advanced compiz settings, under the unity plugin).

I think usability problems are mainly there because people have been using more or less the same desktop forever. the OS X, Gnome, KDE, and Windows interfaces are not *that* different, but any change that changes that up(Gnome Shell, Unity) people are shocked by.

 

The link I posted about Unity was not in defense of it but rather some of the things they need to get ironed out before release. I hope they get around to fixing them before Final.

 

Groceries.....don't forget about Xfce 4.8 when it stabilizes That would be my fallback position. I do like KDE though, once you get used to it over time, there's no going back imho.

 

I love the look of KDE but it would always lockup on my Dell Vostro 1500.

 

I did a test with a friend and according to him this was how he would rank to different desktop environment I got him to test:
Windows(he is a windows user)> gnome 2>kde3(kde4 with kde3 menu style)>kde4>aqua>unity>gnome3(couldn't figure out how to change wallpaper without having to search for the control panel and also wasn't able to create shortcuts on the desktop; I wasn't able to find a way to do that either...).

 

No, the usability problems are there because of things like the unintuitive layout decision you just mentioned. This is due to the fact that the Unity boys happily threw out some ten years of tuning and settings refinement... but I digress. "Compiz" is a cryptic name for most people. Now you can argue that since Unity has portions that are a Compiz plugin that the above is perfectly logical -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's absolutely idiotic from a UX perspective.

Imagine the outcry if Microsoft had placed, say, window minimization settings under the "Advanced Settings" section of a tab of the System Control panel labeled "DWM". Technically correct, as DWM is indeed what's responsible for window management... but still a bad idea. Of course Microsoft didn't do this because they do things like -- ready for this, Canonical? -- run focus groups made up of actual users to determine what said users want. Amazing. It's almost as if they spend time designing their UIs around their target market rather than around whatever the developers think is cool...

Changing topics ever-so-slightly:

The most-telling comment I've seen regarding GNOME 3 comes from this LWN comment:

And there it is. That's the problem.

The GNOME development team sees "feature complete" as "dead". The concept of a refined environment to which only minor tweaks and forward compatibility are required is completely alien to them. In their mind, the maintenance phase of a project is tantamount to its death.

I could stand up here on my soapbox and preach about how incredibly stupid this philosophy is, but honestly, JWZ said it best (also telling is the project to which his post was referring to all those years ago...). From The CADT Model :

I heartily recommend reading the full post. I also recommend printing out copies of it, rolling them up into little paper tubes, and whacking the GNOME and Unity devs about the head with them until they get the idea.

GNOME 3 and Unity both suffer from the exact same problem: their developers seem to have been distracted by the prospect of new and shiny and forgot to make something that the users actually want. I absolutely *do* lump both projects in together in this criticism because they both made the same mistake. In Canonical's case it was abandoning the large amount of GNOME 2 customization experience that they had and setting out on their own to create something full of exciting new bugs. In GNOME's case it was... actually, same thing.

Sigh. Maybe it's time to go back to fvvwm skinned to look like CDE. At least that look is consistent.

 

I can recommend tiling WMs, especially Awesome - everything is plain simple, controlled by hotkeys etc. Once you figure out hotkeys, you can do magic things

 

In Unity's dev team's defense, the changes are not as drastic as in Gnome3. The changes are big, some don't really make sense but I'm yet to have had as many "what were they thinking/moment as I'm currently having with gnome3....

 

The countdown is on the Ubuntu website. Looking forward to this to see how it all comes together from a noobs POV. I also noticed that Kubuntu releases the same day. Got my eye on that one as well. I always loved the KDE interface but got loads of system crashes with my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop. I'll be installing it on a Dell Vostro V13 this time, hopefully it plays nicer.

I love the look of KDE plasma and this release will be using KDE 4.6.2

 

That is why I appreciate Canonical popularizing linux; that and helping to insure that hardware drivers are available for the rest of us.

re Unity? I don't like it; on the surface it looks too asymmetrical. I didn't use it long enough to form any other opinion.

 

I think you don't know what you're talking of. For one, Compiz is almost never mentioned. It is there if you *want it*. Guess what? Moat people don't. Most people never look at the Windows Control Panel, either. Most people even stick to the default wallpaper. It's truth.

Also, there comes a point where change is *good*. If things did not change, computers would still be running DOS prompts and BASIC compilers with 64k memory with 5.25" floppies. After all - who really needs more than 64k?

The major problem is that in the last 20-30 years hardware development has accelerated at an enormous rate - but interfaces are still relatively the same. Gnome Shell and Unity are both designed to take advantage of touch-based hardware along with traditional pointers and keyboards - it is no easy task.

I've read the usability tests - I think most of them are due to the "newness"/"shinyness"/etc. of the new interface/linux in general. The problem isn't very bad in Windows because the interface is basically exactly the same(and yet people still freaked about Vista's UI refinements/changes to some notable degree). More so, Usability has and will be a primary target for the next few releases of Ubuntu/Unity - remember, this isn't an LTS, its stable but things change, and you should sort of "expect" a few minor issues. After all, isn't that why we have the classic desktop *installed by default*?

 

I mentioned that earlier where I read that Canonical has been working on a tablet version of Unity and those that have seen it have been impressed with it in it's early stages.

I'm really looking forward to 4-28 so I can try it out.

 

Spare the ad-hominem, please. I disagree with the implication that it's OK to bury settings behind cryptically-named panels/tabs/etc. because "most people don't want it." We should be striving to make our software's functionality obvious, accessible, and available even if we don't think it'll be used by "most people". We absolutely should not take the approach of "make the base case good enough for most people and screw the rest".

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that Vista got as much criticism as it did was because Microsoft made major changes to the control panel layout. Sure, most users didn't need most of the functionality, but a great many needed some portion of it, and the re-organization bit plenty of novice users.

I'm not arguing that change is bad. I'm arguing that change for the sake of change and UI experimentation should not be done in the stable branch of a DE.

That's one of the problems that I have with them actually: they try to be a jack of all trades.

Touch based UIs have fundamentally different design goals than WIMP UIs.

Let's take a look at two approaches to that: Apple and Microsoft.

In 2007, Apple releases their first all-touch device. They use the Core Image, Core Animation, etc. tech from Mac OS X, but ditch WindowServer, Finder.app, etc. in favor of a UI developed specifically for the touch screen interface. They continue this with parallel development of iOS and Mac OS X, the latter powering their desktops and laptops, the former driving devices such as the iPad. Reviews almost universally laud the integration of gestures and the efficient touch operation of their phones and tablets.

In 2001, Microsoft begins pushing tablet computing. Reviews of devices running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition nearly universally pan the UI quirks and stylus-dependent operation stemming from the use of a WIMP UI adapted for touchscreen use. Further refinement of the UI reduces these complaints, but even comparisons of devices running Windows 7 derivatives to iOS-powered devices are not favorable.

Now with a look at its competitors, which approach do you think Unity should take? The all-in-one MS approach or the "play to the device's strengths" approach of Apple? I know which I'd pick...

Yes, it's a heck of a lot more work to redo things from the ground up to accommodate touch devices. But history seems to show that's the only consistently successful way to go about it.

Absolutely. But that's what I think is so messed up about the whole Unity thing.

They're alienating long-time users who *are* familiar with non-Windows OSs by making invasive changes that (for the most part) are disliked by that portion of the user base, and yet (if the usability testing is to be believed) those changes are failing to make it easier for newly-converted users to use the desktop. That seems to me to be the worst of both worlds: a UI that's exceedingly foreign to new users and foreign and disliked by old! (TBH, this is far more a problem with GNOME 3 than Unity.)

Now to be fair, I am a biased cynical . I've been using non-Windows OSs since... well... forever. I started on OS/2 and System 7. I currently run XFCE, GNOME, KDE, and LXDE. I don't use Ubuntu, and my experiences with Unity have been relatively brief (playing around with it on a test box for a couple days.) Still, from what I've seen, it seems to be a fairly radical departure in an attempt to make a one-size-fits-all solution that simply doesn't, and which does so at the expense of stability and reliability. Basically, I think it's far from ready for normal users, and I'm a little worried that premature release will drive away new Linux users and give them a bad impression of Linux as a whole.

 

I never worry about "no new users" just because the interface looks alien.
Techies will always be able to use Linux effectively, contribute and get used to it while noobs can stay on OS X and Windows.
What is the common denominator of Linux?
It is the (put your favourite shell name here) shell, if everything else fails there is always the bash shell.
Most importantly every implementation needs to be bug free.
If Unity is bug free by all means.

 

You fail to grasp one thing - touch based interfaces are nearly *all* WIMP. On the settings, it's not hidden, not at all actually, but it's not throwing a thousand options in your face. On Apple's "interface to device" and MS's "all-in-one" approach...Apple's iOS interface is specifically designed for smartphones: 2-4" devices or so. Apple's Mac OS X is very mouse driven and document based, it doesn't work well on touch devices. So there was a real need. Unity is designed to scale across 7" touch based interfaces to mouse driven 20"+ interfaces. It works very well for that, and exceedingly well on 9-13" devices - my personal "sweet spot". The WIMP model exists in nearly all interfaces today - iOS, Android, WebOS, Gnome, KDE, Windows 7, Apple Mac OS X, etc. - it scales.

 

I guess if you're taking the term literally, then sure. But consider the 'M' part of that for a moment: the implementation of menus in Android, iOS, etc. is substantially different than that of menus in Windows 7, and it's obvious why.

Yes, technically you can have things that correspond to the W, I, M, and P -- but they're certainly substantially different than their desktop counterparts.

Windows

iOS/Android - none. Applications are fullscreen with a single optional modal.

Desktop - overlapping/tiling windows are the norm

Icons

Desktop implementations tend to allow more flexibility in terms of placement, but otherwise quite similar.

Menus

iOS/Android - modal or "sheet" style. Take up most (or all) of screen, typically no shortcuts.

Desktop - attached to parent window or present in fixed location changing depending on owner of window with focus

Pointer

iOS/Android - none. No concept of focus due to no overlapping/tiling windows. All controls manipulated by touch.

Desktop - obvious

---

IMHO there are some pretty big differences, even if you can find something that corresponds to each one of the features of a desktop UI.

 

Most of touch uis were designed for low res devices (android, ios), thats why they lacks of overlapping/tiling functions (Could you imagine doing so on 480x320 3.5" screen? It would be really impractical).
Touch based interfaces lacks of advanced options because there *was* no need for those, but here we are now - tablets with 7-12" screens are taking over.

 

Does anyone know when Canonical might upload the new release of Unity?

 

Man I seriously don't understand all the hate for Unity. I installed, rather painless and I love it !

Very noobish, which is good enough for me and you can still get to whatever your looking for. I just view the side apps bar as a dock i.e. quick launch AND it changes as you open newer apps.

Unity found all of my hardware which is good, now off to install Kubuntu 11.04 in dual boot.

 

You can just download the Kubuntu-desktop metapackage in synaptics and select whete you wnat unity or kde when you login.

 

The grub allows me to do that on startup unless if what you mean is different to the boot grub.

 

Wow I really like what they did with this OS, it's very OSX like, only better cause it's free !

I like how it's so well integrated with the menu/taskbar. It took me a bit to find my settings in Firefox. I realized the pull down menus are on the taskbar and only appear when you place your mouse cursor over it. As an example if you have your program opened it will display it on the taskbar. In this case it's Firefox. If you put your cursor it will enable your program selection and preferences for that program. Take the cursor away and they disappear. Nice touch.

Linux veterans may hate this but noobs like myself will love it.

 

I think he means that you can install the KDE desktop onto you current install of Ubuntu, and at the login screen you can choose which desktop environment you want (thats how I have mine set up). That way, you can maintain files and programs across different desktops. I found the KDE desktop in synaptics.

Regarding Unity: I'm not a huge fan of the desktop as of now, but I will certainly keep using it once in awhile to see if that changes.

 

What else will you be using when not using unity?

 

I'm still relatively new to linux, so I' really appreciate what Ubuntu has to offer. But I prefer Gnome 2.x and KDE 4 to the unity desktop, so I switch off between the former two.

 

I downloaded an installed (yay for Wubi!) 11.04 today.

Overall, I'll say that Unity is really nice and surprisingly easy to use and figure out.

IMO they've done better than gnome 3.0. When I tried gnome I felt they went a few steps too far with making things "simple" and clearing up the desktop. It seems like Canonical has figured out a better balance between what to keep visible and what to hide.

I'm actually really glad Unity was created. I was a fan of KDE 3 and Gnome 2 but have not felt comfortable with the directions they are moving in now. It's nice to know I can have a nice composited desktop and not feel forced to something like XFCE.

My only gripe (so far) with unity is that it's somewhat sluggish on my older (2004) computer. Gnome 2.x+compiz was really responsive.