Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

[curaga]

^ Nope, even after all these months, I still hate win7 UI and the new phoronix forums design.

[smitty3268]

Rubbish, those same people adapt to other OS's as well. There would be a whole generation that would be stuck in MS-DOS if that was the case. XP worked, did the job and had a whole crapload of other users to help support it.

People don't adapt to other OS's, have you seen the market share numbers for Windows? People instinctively react negatively to change, regardless of whether the change is positive or negative. Take website design, for example. When a big site changes the design, it almost always gets hit by a wave of negative response by users. People are used to navigating one way, and all of a sudden they have to stop and think to get anything done. Fast forward a month, and everyone loves the new design and can't figure out how they lived without it before. MS went through the same thing - everyone hated Vista, and then a few years later people had gotten used to it by the time Win7 came out.

Now XP did work reasonably well. But you can't ignore the fact that it's extremely hard to get non-technical people to move away from what they are used to.

[KuriKai]

They need something like this on the first startup

[deanjo]

Also it is a well known trend with MS people will usually wait a few years when ever they offer a new OS. Vista didn't take off because it was relatively short lived. By the time people could justify upgrading Windows 7 was offered. We have seen the same thing happen with pretty much every windows release

Loads of 3.1 users bypassed Win 95 and went to Win 98
Loads of Win 98 user skipped Me and 2K and went XP
The same trend is applying to XP to Win 7 users.

[deanjo]

No, it does not. XP is utter garbage.
People ?like? XP because a huge chunk of PC users never knew any OS besides XP. MS was so slow creating Vista, XP was the primary OS for almost 10 years. A whole generation grew up knowing only XP!

Rubbish, those same people adapt to other OS's as well. There would be a whole generation that would be stuck in MS-DOS if that was the case. XP worked, did the job and had a whole crapload of other users to help support it.

[Awesomeness]

The reason people like XP is because... it works.

No, it does not. XP is utter garbage.
People ?like? XP because a huge chunk of PC users never knew any OS besides XP. MS was so slow creating Vista, XP was the primary OS for almost 10 years. A whole generation grew up knowing only XP!

[admiraljkb]

For me, having used a combination of Gnome 1, Gnome 2, and Windows for most of my life, the global menus are more or less a dealbreaker. I've done global menus on the Mac, but they seem to handle them a lot more intuitively there -- I dunno, it just wasn't as much of a PITA on Mac. Maybe because they have proper support for easily switching between windows (the dock at the bottom).

I just can't get used to it. I hate global menus. I didn't particularly care for them on Mac, but they're terrible on Unity.

To me, back in the 80's/90's the menus following the windows were less useful on the desktop (and made much less sense) with small/low resolution (800x600 and 1024x768) monitors back in the olden days when every app was typically maximized in spite of being in a windowing desktop environment. You had to maximize them just to be able to see more than a sliver of the document and then flip back and forth because you couldn't afford the expensive and complicated/buggy setup of a second monitor back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I truly fail to see why global menus seem to pick up steam on the modern desktop at the precise moment they are obsolete on the modern desktop?

I haven't tried Unity yet as I couldn't get it to boot a couple of months ago, but my experience on a buddie's Mac when I was helping out on something real quick was with with lots of windows open, spread across multiple monitors. Now I have to move my mouse across two monitors to get to the app menu? Are you kidding me? Not very intuitive, and very user unfriendly. The Mac UI needs some modernisation to be sure, and dropping global menus should be the first thing done to get it into the 2000's... I don't see why Unity would pick up such a backwards "FF" (Fossilized Feature).

I don't have those problems on KDE which is much friendlier/easier to use on the desktop with 2 1900x1200 monitors, and then when on my Netbook, it uses global menus where it makes sense, and makes the UI easier to use, not harder. Everything has been quite intuitive with Kubuntu in both desktop and netbook mode. Crap on KDE just works the way I expect it to or better these days, which is saying a lot considering the disaster that was 4.0. 10.10's Unity hasn't impressed me on the netbook as much as KDE did. I'm increasingly satisfied with each new release of KDE on normal desktop machines with 4GB ram and decent graphics, so I'll probably stay with it for a while.

[liam]

Well, a few things:

Look at the specifications for the test system that Canonical used for this study. This is a typical Lenovo business laptop with fairly high-quality components, but the IGP is an Intel "HD Graphics". This tells me it's in the G45 family most probably, since the i3-370M is not a Sandy Bridge CPU. So this Intel IGP is in its prime right now: Intel has had years to work on the G45 generation's drivers; Intel IGPs continue to be immensely popular; and it has all the hardware features you could want for supporting something like Unity. It's a much more advanced chip than the 965G generation that preceded it, and it's been on the market much longer than the Sandy Bridge chips that, if they had used those, I'd have understood the crashiness to be a driver problem this early in the SNB game.

But, I've been running Fedora 15 Alpha using Gnome 3.0 and Gnome-Shell on my Lenovo ThinkPad X61T for close to two weeks now. The only things that have crashed are the Humble Indie Bundle games, and PulseAudio. Gnome-Shell has never crashed, and the PC has been on and in-use 8 to 20 hours per day. I'm using the open source graphics drivers on the 2.6.38 kernel, just like Ubuntu Natty would do. What's the difference? No Unity, no Compiz -- Gnome-Shell and Mutter instead.

The performance is also fantastic, even with the X61T's aging 965GM chipset. Transitioning from a maximized browser window to a gnome-shell window present (tap the Super / Windows key, similar to Unity) is smooth as silk. Now on my Radeon HD5970, the same transition does lag a bit sometimes, but I chalk that up to performance issues in r600g yet to be resolved :P

But on both chipsets, with Unity, I can get the same rate of crashes, drops in FPS (noticeable lag when hovering over icons), and lag when viewing the "Present" view of open windows, as reported in the usability study. So I'm basically one more person able to confirm the problems with Unity, and I've tested on both r600g and i965 classic.

And don't think the binary drivers are any better, either. ATI's support for Unity in Catalyst is still pretty rough around the edges; they made a release specifically to get it minimally working on Unity, but they admitted that there are still defects and crashers present. I've tried the same Catalyst driver on Fedora 15, and while still being woefully proprietary, it does indeed work well with Mutter and Gnome-Shell.

I can't speak to the NVidia binary driver as I don't own an Nvidia card.... but if the Nvidia binary driver is the only driver that works well with Unity, that's still a really big problem. The percentage of people who (a) have an Nvidia card and (b) know how to get the proprietary drivers working is probably about 20 - 30% of all Ubuntu desktop users, conservatively. Don't believe me? Look at the past Phoronix Linux Graphics Surveys, where some 80% of users just run whatever driver is installed by default in their distro. What's that for Nvidia cards? Nouveau, am I right? How well does Nouveau cope with Unity? Fermi cards?

All that aside, I 100% agree with you that Unity can rock. Any software can be trivially said to have the potential to be excellent at some point in the future, because no software is ever barred from the possibility of future enhancement, refactoring, etc.

And indeed, Unity is already doing things that would predispose it to rock in the near future. But will it be near enough for Natty? I still have my reservations!

Having run GS for well over a year now (must be getting close to 2 I think) I can say that if you follow the development WITH the nvidia blob you are getting crashes...alot (for me, it happens nearly exclusively when entering overview). OTOH, I put alpha on a a first gen acer aspire one netbook and to my knowledge it never crashed (I'm not the primary user of it, so I can't be sure, but I know that gdm had issues, but I heard nothing about GS itself) AND the animations were very smooth (compared to the stop motion of my nvidia card).
Now, we put the latest fedora snapshot on my gf's T510 (intel graphics) and it is absolutely velvety smooth and stable.
My last experience with Unity was back in Nov and then I had never gotten it to work on the netbook. Froze on login ever time.

[mugginz]

For me, having used a combination of Gnome 1, Gnome 2, and Windows for most of my life, the global menus are more or less a dealbreaker. I've done global menus on the Mac, but they seem to handle them a lot more intuitively there -- I dunno, it just wasn't as much of a PITA on Mac. Maybe because they have proper support for easily switching between windows (the dock at the bottom).

I didn't find global menus very different to OSX myself so I wonder if that's a consequence of my Amiga experience coming back?

I didn't like the min/max/close buttons on the left either, but at least that's something I could get used to. Left vs right is not nearly as difficult to adjust to as global vs application-level menus.

At least with that positioning of the buttons there was a way to send them back to where they once lived. I made a post on how to change it here --> Lucid_Alpha_Window_Button_Position

I can't overstate how much I miss the window list at the bottom of the screen. That's my biggest gripe by far, and it also applies to Gnome-Shell. I notice myself using alt-tab a lot more, but if I have 8 or 9 windows open, "alt-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab" is a lot more work for my fingers than moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen and clicking. I'm more of a visual memorizer than a muscle memorizer: I remember where each window is in the window list relative to the others, so I know just where to move the mouse to switch to another window. That ability is lost now, on both Unity and Gnome-Shell.

Having a direct path to your window list such as in the Gnome2 panel or WIndows task bar is another habit that can be broken, but some people may wonder why anyone else would want to.

If you replace this functionality with a dock of just about any description there's probably a need to acclimatise to it. Even the default Windows 7 behavior can take a little getting used to even though it's probably the closest to the old way of any of the newish desktops. Even just activating "auto hide" to a Windows XP task bar can throw some people.

Still, it's not always broken to just want what you're used to. Although if you find the Unity launcher particularly more broken than it needs to be from a usability perspective then that's different although myself I'm mostly happy with it.

I'm using Gnome-Shell on two Fedora 15 computers now, and I still like it a lot more than Unity. But they both have similar design goals and limitations. The difference is that Gnome-Shell is much more polished and stable right now; Mutter performs better than Compiz on the open source drivers; and each DE has its own slightly different Super Key shortcuts. Fedora 15 isn't to be released until next month, and it's already much more stable than Ubuntu 11.04 which is being released in two weeks. A perfect storm of Unity bugs, Compiz bugs and open source graphics stack bugs are primarily responsible for the problems on Natty. Mutter seems to deftly avoid any potential buggy paths in the open source drivers; either that, or Fedora has pulled in a newer version of Mesa with important fixes.

I'm fairly sure we'll either see drivers get fixed so as to reliably support Unity or we'll see Unity be coded to work around driver bugs but either way we'll see stable platform support for Unity. Code can be fixed. What I want to see is any bad usability design be changed or at least alternative work flows be supported.


On the side of weird perspectives (especially from the OMGUbuntu commenter's) I have seen some criticisms of both Unity and GnomeShell ultimately come down to something like

"It's not how Gnome2 works so it's broken. Make Unity/GnomeShell into Gnome2 and I'll be happy."

But then when it's suggested they simply stick with Gnome2 they can still find reason to complain.

I even had one guy say pretty much "Sure, you can stay with the old desktop, but there's an alternative desktop that's nice and shiny and it makes me feel like I'm stuck in the past." Yet he has critisised Gnome2 for various reasons. Even though it's plainly obvious that it's impossible to change and move forward while also staying exactly the same as before, it doesn't stop people from kind of ultimately asking for just that. Weird.

[conorsulli]

Utter Crap

Im sorry, but with every redesign comes quirks and uproar from Kde, to gnome3 to Unity.

perfection takes time, but deadlines are to be met, confusion can be sorted in the next release for refinements - lets not make it a delayed and ever changing experience like that unfortunately happened the really cool gnome3 - which was plagued with controversy also - but was pushed back too.

Im just saying for the timeframe, its not as bad as what might seem - Canonical do realise it wont be for everyone this time round and will ship the classic desktop too - so its not as if people have to stick with 10.10 like what this article said or even more bizare switch , thats a pile of hopeless rubbish - it will be like any other upgrade for those not ready for unity, and many improvements have been made to the installer, software centre and more and people shouldn't spite themselves a great upgrade for some article saying that unity will prove problematic for those users.

Come on like.... 11.04 will be a great upgrade to the latest Ubuntu for early adopters and classic desktop fans alike.

Get over it, and Its great to see that Ubuntu is carrying out usability tests so these shortfalls can be cleanly rectified and made simple for the end user.