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Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

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  • #51
    So? Feel free to use it if you think it's any indication of a good OS. Linux hat ~1%, so it must be bad then??

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    • #52
      Originally posted by Awesomeness View Post
      Then go away and use XP if you love it so much.
      You're obviously too young to remember that nice Lovesan virus. Oh, that was great: Distributing to XP computers without any user interaction. Fresh XP install and before one could even download any updated, boom! PC shuts down.
      The only two workarounds were either to record a new XP installation CD and manually slipstream released updates to that medium or to download the updates via an unaffected OS, record them on CD, unplug the wired network connection and reinstall XP from scratch. Neither is user friendly in any way.

      I've seen lots of people talking about Win2000 like you do about XP. XP was perceived as downgrade to a sluggish and crash-prone Fisher Price OS while Win2k was the OS that ?just worked?.

      It took MS many years of bugfixing, Service Packs, and hardware evolution (faster CPUs, more RAM) to get XP from completely crap to somewhat bearable.
      Maintenance of the system has nothing to do with the overall user interface and usability of the system. I don't care how easy the system is to maintain, if my day to day productivity is hindered by crappy design it's a crappy os. The inverse is not true; a system that is difficult to maintain but very easy to use will catch on because most people don't care about maintenance, let alone do it daily. The (unfortunately) dive into the car analogies, people aren't going to skip buying a car simply because it takes 12 hours to replace brakes.

      XP was not popular when it came out because most users were still on 98/ME and skipped 2000 (rightfully so, because 2000 was not intended for a casual home user). People were delusional that their 3 or 4 year old PCs could upgrade to with the same speed a new OS, let alone switch from a DOS based OS to an NT based one, which always had steeper requirements. 2000 users derided it as a "Fisher Price" OS because the biggest additions over 2000 were Cleartype, the "fancy" themes, and more brightly color icons. XP's increased crashes were from the consumer items it picked up from the 98/ME lines; 2000 users had a more bug free experience as their hardware had been supporting the NT driver model for several years.

      At any rate, as you said, it took years for Microsoft to perfect XP. Canonical decided LAST FALL that "Hey, we're going to ruin 11.04 by building a GUI for which we don't even have specs for yet." Some might call that admirable, I call that a failure to understand the software development process. KDE 4's first release was in January 2008; they had their first alpha release in May 2007. That's 8 full months of actual testing; 8 months ago nobody even knew Canonical was going to do this! And even after that, KDE 4 was wrought with bugs that tooks years to get ironed out.

      That's what's wrong with Canonical. It might be considered ambitious but it reeks to me of amateurism.

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      • #53
        Yep, they are ruining things every single release yet putting out awesome products that are getting more and more widely used - growing at rates no other Linux-based OS has ever seen on the desktop (and fairing not too poorly in the cloud and home/small business servers, while at it!).

        Real amateurs, they are.

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        • #54
          Originally posted by Vadi View Post
          Yep, they are ruining things every single release yet putting out awesome products that are getting more and more widely used - growing at rates no other Linux-based OS has ever seen on the desktop (and fairing not too poorly in the cloud and home/small business servers, while at it!).

          Real amateurs, they are.
          You're extrapolating their use of and growth under Gnome 2, which has almost a decade of refinement and bug fixing, to a homegrown 6 month old project that hasn't even seen version 1? Tell me, what other DEs have they authored, maybe I missed this. The closest thing they have done is MAYBE the notification popups, and that's magnitudes away from an entire DE.

          What part of amateurs am I missing?

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          • #55
            Are you saying that the already-released Gnome 3 that has had zero usability studies done on it, compared to Unity's which is going head-to-head with it and has had already two performed, is amateur UX work?

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            • #56
              Originally posted by Vadi View Post
              Are you saying that the already-released Gnome 3 that has had zero usability studies done on it, compared to Unity's which is going head-to-head with it and has had already two performed, is amateur UX work?
              Nope. Gnome 3 dev group wrote Gnome 2, right?

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              • #57
                That's the point. They also performed no user testing, and their DE is on equal par in all discussions so far on the net. So why exactly is one way worse than the other in terms of development quality?

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                • #58
                  Originally posted by Vadi View Post
                  That's the point. They also performed no user testing, and their DE is on equal par in all discussions so far on the net. So why exactly is one way worse than the other in terms of development quality?
                  Because they're not packaging Gnome 3 as the default desktop environment for the distribution with one of the largest user bases when two weeks before the final release it's still in alpha shape.

                  Ship Unity now as an opt in, not opt out choice. Label it as beta, which it is. Target it for full release in the next LTS. It is Canonical's first attempt at anything like this. Forcing something clearly flawed on users is something people do when they know it won't be taken up en mass on its own merits (See Explorer, Internet).

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                  • #59
                    Okay, get back to me two weeks after the shipping with user feedback on Unity.

                    I've actually been using it consistently, and they have been making by-daily progress on fixing a lot of things, and listening to user and usability feedback. For those who are in the "in-testing" crowd, your current stance reflects the community's as it was about... two or so weeks ago. Things, today, are much different and I myself have no doubt they know what are they doing with their go-ahead on this awful, downright forced, paradigm shift that everyone has been waiting for.

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                    • #60
                      Breaking: Beta software crashes, news at 11

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