Many Ubuntu Users Still Hate The Unity Desktop

[moonlitfire]

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I dislike Ubuntu because it uses Gnome instead of KDE
Move on to KDE.



I think it is due to these kind of knee-jerk reactions, developers have stopped caring much. They look at the complaint list. Pick up those which make sense and would help the wider audience than satisfying someone's personal choices.

The only thing in this list I can completely agree to is Unity. It needs more time to improve. I am waiting till 12.04 release

I pretty much agree with your post. Especially the point about KDE. It drives me nuts to hear people whine about a distribution choosing not to use (insert desktop environment here) by default. Not only can a person just move to KDE without too much fuss; there are hundreds of Linux distributions available offering the desktop environment of their choice. Even Ubuntu has the Kubuntu derivative.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Unity made me switch to Xfce

I lived in Unity for a couple of months to see if I'd get used to it.

I didn't. It remained as annoying as it was when I started. Just because Apple and Microsoft are dumbing down their UI's to make them look and act like smartphones, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I ended up switching my desktop environment to Xfce just to make my computer act like a computer again.

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

[NomadDemon]

me to..i hate unity and i hate gnome and i hate gnome3

LOL... im a happy kde user..

go kill yourself.. hater...

[liam]

I'm glad you brought up bug submission. Too many times I had crashes trying to submit a bug only to hit the cancel button when I discovered I had to sign up to actually submit them. I don't need another account on the Internet. If you want bug reports, accept them anonymously.

This really bothers me as well (many times I've wanted to file bugs but the extra step needed to create an account was, frankly, too much). It makes sense that they want to be able to talk to you about your problem in depth (asking detailed questions, even explaining how to run a stack trace if neccessary), but this seems like it could be done by giving them your email, or making bug reports forum style.
Still, bug reporting the is most important thing a user can do to help improve OSS.

[Luke_Wolf]

Compare this to how many times you'll actually use two applications simultaneously to communicate within osx where those applications do not already talk to each other via alternative means.

I haven't played around enough with it to know what alternative menus you're talking about, what I do know is what one can see by playing around with a system, which is likely all the average user will know about.

I don't use lion, but frankly noone should be using beta software. Apple trying to merge the IOS and OSX interfaces is a bad idea and one which Ubuntu seems to be mimicking.

So OS X 10.7 Is Beta Software? Does that make Snow-Leopard and previous Alpha? But sorry doesn't work like that, if it was a release-candidate I was playing around with you could weasel out with that excuse, sorry but that was an actual release.

Boohoo, because something was always done badly it should keep being done badly? so we should all be using 16-bit cpus and ms-dos right? because that was a PC standard.

That's Apples to Oranges, You're comparing a hardware and OS standard to a USE standard. What this is the equivalent of is selling QWERTY Keyboards and using the QWERTY standard, but then all of the sudden when everybody else in the region is using QWERTY suddenly switching the standard the OS is using to DVORAK without changing the actual keyboards themselves.

And this new scroll method being better or worse is arguable either way, however it breaks how things are expected to work

position of this stuff was decided in older mac OS versions. Probably so right handed people don't accidentally click and close their programs.

I never said my complaint was just against Lion It should have been clear my point was against OS X in general, and tell me this how many times do YOU accidentally scroll up to the upper corners of your window and accidentally close it? You're just making up a rationalization, which of course doesn't pan out.

One system's paradigms should not be expected to be followed on other systems. Macs are not being marketed to people who already own computers, they are being aimed at people who do art, and people who are buying their FIRST computer.

You still haven't answered the problem of them being non-obvious, and you're wrong about the userbase, but I'll leave that to another time unless you really want to shift this conversation away from Usability.

By default the dock does not have zooming enabled, and folders are used to manage dock icons. You are only meant to have a few commonly used applications on your dock, the rest should be accessed via folders.

There's a difference between Theory and Meant, and actual practice, I mean lets face it in windows the wallpaper containment is meant to hold a few icons for commonly used applications and the rest are supposed to be accessed by the start menu, but how many people follow that? Same deal here with your dockbar.

Apple have been making a move away from application management towards document management. It should not matter if your application is open or closed, your application should just work, and not eat the entire system when you are not using it. A user should not need to know if a program is running or not. Just when something goes wrong. This is more a problem power users from windows encounter because they think they should be freeing up memory when in reality a modern system with many gigabytes of ram and proper scheduling should be handling resources efficiently for you.

You do realize that this behavior goes all the way back to the original macs right? This is absolutely nothing new.. Right? You did realize that what you closed window wise wasn't totally quit.... Right? Because the way you wrote that makes it sound like you didn't. Also Power Hardware is no excuse for inefficient or poorly designed software. I mean.. Unless you want everything to be like Firefox in that regard?

Apple's shortcuts are older than Microsoft's why should they change their standards to match someone who copied them? and Linux hasn't got standards, just look at any application on linux and how many copy/paste methods there are to see how messed up linux copy/paste support/shortcuts are.

And Unix's Shortcuts, which Linux is based out of, are older than Apple's, which doesn't mean that Linux doesn't also have available what has become the standard controls. And okay so Linux has a ton of Copy/Paste Methods, tell me just how is that a bad thing? Having multiple variants that cover all expectations is better for usability because it means any of the people who actually know the shortcuts would be able to just sit down and use it. Rather than your stance which reeks of NIH

Here's another copy/paste combo to add to your list by the way
Shift-Insert
Ctrl-Insert

This comment makes no sense, you can customise many of the UI elements within OSX, some examples would be good.

Is there some way to reposition the dock and panel?

The entire posix filesystem structure is stupid and broken. Just look at /etc and /usr /lib /usr/lib /usr/local/lib /usr/share/lib and countless other stuff ups to see how broken it is. Also notice, as an end user you really don't need to care where your files are. Your home directory is where everything and /applications is where everything you care about will be. ~/Library for any settings you need to tweak. The rest of the system is pretty much a black box you don't need to touch.

/etc is a great alternative that is the kludge that is the Windows Registry, albeit it could be sorted a bit better but mine under slackware is pretty well clean.

Perhaps what you really need is to have it explained what these directories actually mean

/usr - Storage for Non-System Software
/lib & /lib64 - Storage for System libraries
/usr/lib & /usr/lib64 - Storage of Libraries for Non-System Software
There is no /usr/share/lib
and /usr/local/lib is empty, /usr/local/lib64 has perl in it

nice try, but no cookie for you.

And depends on the end user, I'm a Slackware user I like playing with my system's guts, but then I actually know something about computers, and how to compare specs and otherwise, which mean's I'm not the target audience

But okay "Your Home Folder is Where Everything is" so why couldn't they have just used /home rather than making their own?

"/Applications is where everything will be" ... So wait, You're telling me I have to open up a /usr/bin equivalent? I hope it at least has sorting.. otherwise that would just be hell if you expect the user to run stuff from there

"~/Library for settings" which has an advantage over ~/.* how?

The system allows pretty easy access to it's internals via the shell,

All *nix systems allow for easy access to internals via the shell, nothing impressive about that.

and it actually has a reliable gui for setting up networking. pretty impressive considering how big the company was compared to its competitors when those features were made.

Network Manager has always worked when I've used it on Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE, and WiCD works under Slackware

The power and flexibility of quartz composer and the other developer tools really stomp all over the competitor offerings. I've developed code on windows/mac/linux and mac easily had the best development environment. I'm a long term linux user and seriously, Linux is way behind on the application development toolkit/framework side. The consistency of the UI is also way behind on linux. getting applications to share data is a pain. on a mac you can drag images into text editors and it just does it. It doesn't complain. The object handling/linking system within OSX is breathtakingly well written compared to other systems.

Check out KDE if you want to see UI consistency, and under Linux Text Editors are meant to handle.. surprise surpise... Text, e.g. Code, and configuration files, therefore they're not meant to have a Markup Language backend (be it HTML, XML, or otherwise) which is required for images, you can drag an image into a text editor and it ends up as garbage, However something actually meant to have a Markup Language backend such as LibreOffice takes my image without any complaints whatsoever under KDE. Data Sharing is what Akonadi and Nepomuk are for.

as far as Dev tools I haven't played with those on Macs for obvious reasons however have you tried KDevelop and QtCreator?

[Luke_Wolf]

PA is OK
DEB owns RPM packages, RPM are crap. every distro have different rpm packages...
unity hmm.. not finished, cant grade it

i will never use RPM distro.. sorry

What's wrong with RPMs or is it just that you have NIH syndrome? The fact that each distro has different packages is natural, unlike Debian which has over 9000 flavours of Ubuntu (whose deb packages are supposed to be incompatible with debian mind you) and then there's debian and a few flavours based directly off of it meaning they're all part of the same tree. However the RPM families come from several distinct trees, Mandriva/Mageia are based on Red Hat only in their oldest origins and have spun far off from that past position, openSUSE was based off of Slackware. and has become it's own thing, PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva Derivative, and Fedora & RHEL of course are red hat linux derivatives, It should therefore be no great surprise than unlike the hundreds of Ubuntu reskins, that packages maintained by the systems would vary and have sometimes incompatibilities, this is not to say that you can't have universal working RPMs, that are installed and linked in a more generic way (see flash for instance or the HIB).

[Edit: The Fact that Ubuntu has Caused so many derivatives trying to fix it's problems is a statement upon itself, other distros do have some derivatives but no one has as many as Ubuntu.]

RPMs actually are a huge improvement over .Debs because of Delta-RPMs, which will cut a 500+ MB update or so into maybe 80, because it just downloads the diff. This feature is actually the one thing I'm missing in Slackware with .t?z, I don't care about dependency resolution, I actually don't want it, but Deltas...

[Luke_Wolf]

I pretty much agree with your post. Especially the point about KDE. It drives me nuts to hear people whine about a distribution choosing not to use (insert desktop environment here) by default. Not only can a person just move to KDE without too much fuss; there are hundreds of Linux distributions available offering the desktop environment of their choice. Even Ubuntu has the Kubuntu derivative.

What's sad is that people consider that a derivative rather than an official spin or remix, or whatever you want to call it. I mean really... It's just Ubuntu with KDE bolted onto the side. This is really why we have the problem you're recognizing, and actually I think openSUSE handles it best with their installer (course I also think that openSUSE has the best installer for more normal people) of giving you the choice of what desktop do I want? That's how it should be done.

[NomadDemon]

What's wrong with RPMs or is it just that you have NIH syndrome? The fact that each distro has different packages is natural, unlike Debian which has over 9000 flavours of Ubuntu (whose deb packages are supposed to be incompatible with debian mind you) and then there's debian and a few flavours based directly off of it meaning they're all part of the same tree. However the RPM families come from several distinct trees, Mandriva/Mageia are based on Red Hat only in their oldest origins and have spun far off from that past position, openSUSE was based off of Slackware. and has become it's own thing, PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva Derivative, and Fedora & RHEL of course are red hat linux derivatives, It should therefore be no great surprise than unlike the hundreds of Ubuntu reskins, that packages maintained by the systems would vary and have sometimes incompatibilities, this is not to say that you can't have universal working RPMs, that are installed and linked in a more generic way (see flash for instance or the HIB).

[Edit: The Fact that Ubuntu has Caused so many derivatives trying to fix it's problems is a statement upon itself, other distros do have some derivatives but no one has as many as Ubuntu.]

RPMs actually are a huge improvement over .Debs because of Delta-RPMs, which will cut a 500+ MB update or so into maybe 80, because it just downloads the diff. This feature is actually the one thing I'm missing in Slackware with .t?z, I don't care about dependency resolution, I actually don't want it, but Deltas...

cant use mandriva packages in fedora, or suse, and all this combination fails, debian and ubuntu are 99% compatible.
rpm are mess, sorry
deb also isnt perfect

btw.. iam voting for unification for packages. "alien" suck.. cant convert 80% of packages i need
so.. no rpm and no deb, just one unified.

[Luke_Wolf]

cant use mandriva packages in fedora, or suse, and all this combination fails, debian and ubuntu are 99% compatible.
rpm are mess, sorry
deb also isnt perfect

btw.. iam voting for unification for packages. "alien" suck.. cant convert 80% of packages i need
so.. no rpm and no deb, just one unified.

You can rpm -i the package if you really want to, whether the software will work or not is a different question because distros customize things to their specific needs.

Debian and Ubuntu are 99% compatible because Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian, Ubuntu Packages work in Ubuntu Derivatives because they are Ubuntu Derivatives, and there really aren't any other major trees in that regard.

RPMs do not have a central Distro that Everything else is derived from, Thus for obvious reasons having multiple trees means that packages from other trees may or may not work if you install them. This does not mean that RPMs are a mess it simply means that there is diversification of the distros in where they come from.

Unified Packages will not solve this "problem", the only way your dream would work in terms of packages is if you scrapped everything and made Linux like *BSD, where there is 1 Distro to rule them all 1 distro to find them, 1 distro to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. This would of course suck for all of us because that means that instead of a diversified ecosystem with every possible governance model and otherwise that you can choose from, stuck into a cookie cutter. Please take time to really think about what you're suggesting before you suggest it.

That said there are universal installers (note installers, not packages) that typically end in .run .bin .sh, etc, and of course compiling from source is universal, The difference of course between an installer or compiling from source and a package is that a package is precompiled against certain libraries and locations, you change it stuff starts to break, an installer on the other hand typically configures your system for it's libraries, and of course compiling from source makes a system specific build.

Edit: of course you do have stuff like flash that installs in a generic way but that's special because you know that things are going to look is /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins as the case may be and flash is of course it's own standalone plugin, it doesn't depend on anything

[raulromania]

title +1
gnome-shell ftw

i won't support the idiots they wasted money on developing unity. if they putted all the "power" into gnome-shell, everybody were satisfied.