Many Ubuntu Users Still Hate The Unity Desktop

[royroy]

Its not a brilliant move for Ubuntu to have emphasized so much on Unity while it is in such a preliminary stage. Unity or Gnome3 should be an option for advance users to choose from. Unless it is a tailor-made version for particular device.

Unity and Gnome3 are still too new to be said as a success or a failure. Just like KDE 4, it was so buggy in the earlier versions, but now many users just love it badly. Nonetheless, they are all much better than Win7 .

Even in Gnome2, people complained about insufficient configuration options. Half of the critic is true. For advanced users, they can always change anything in Linux. Linux is basically just text files.

If you are new to linux, the easier you can change the system, the higher chance you are going to destroy it.Experienced users who need more control over the system can always go for KDE4.

Users can always find the right DE for themselves.

[wstorm]

What Do You Dislike or Hate About Ubuntu...

... nobody cares.
Canonical can do everything they want while their work is open-sourced. So sentences like "it's slower than windows 7" are inconsistent - these products are too different to compare.
If you don't like Ubuntu - try Arch, probably you will like it like many others, just dont forget that it uses Canonical's work too. Unity just expands freedom of user. More freedom can't be bad.
But if i were Apple or Microsoft Marketing Someone - i would hire some users to write those bad comments, that's for sure

[m4n1sh]

i assume you don't like AIDS either but i don't think you are doing any research on creating a vaccine for it

people will always complain but in the case of open source even if your arguments against dev choices are correct noone will bother

if you cannot code you are useless in FOSS and even if you can there is a big chance that no dev will bother specially in UI stuff

There are many other places which is short of manpower. Testing and triaging needs lots of work. You are NOT useless if you don't know how to code

[m4n1sh]

Yes and considering that new PA versions for possible bugfixes are released very infrequently, those issues are likely to persist for quite some time.

Is the situation so bad that it becomes a negative point of ubuntu. Bugs exist for every software. It has to have something really blocking to become an object of hate

Ubuntu is no community project. Even if one submits patches to Canonical, it's on Canonical?s ? and only Canonical?s ? discretion if those patches get accepted.

You seem to confuse or are ignorant about CLA. You need to sign CLA ONLY for projects maintained by Canonical. If you are sending a patch upstream, you dno't need to sign the CLA. Most of the components of Ubuntu are upstream to Debian or GNOME or smaller independent projects. Hardly any of them require Copyright assignment.

If it not on Canonical discretion that your patch gets accepted. There are two criteria:

• You should have signed the CLA (Specific to Canonical)
• Your patch should be of good quality and should actually fix the problem (Common to every project, nothing special to Canonical)

Here is a list of applications which require contributors to sign Copyright Assignment

That Canonical requires contributors to sign a CLA that allows Canonical to sue its contributors makes matters only worse.

Where did you read it? Are you unnecessarily reading between the lines? Or fear mongering?

[kayosiii]

So why don't you just use a Windows machine, since presumably you prefer that style of interface?

Assuming of course that windows and Mac are the only two possible user experiences.

[kraftman]

Sounds like it's not for everybody.

The same can be said about EVERYTHING. Michael can write about gnome or KDE as well and it would be the same.

[Otus]

The launcher can be configured to stay visible at all times. Various options are available in the Unity plugin of the Compiz configuration manager.

Thanks for the tip! It even lets me make the icons a bit smaller!

Kind of proves my point though that to edit such simple settings you have to install a program (ccsm). Might as well have installed another panel with the same effort.

[blackiwid]

why do anybody complain so much?

I mean ok, whats the problem use another distro, or is it with you like with me, you want to move away from ubuntu but the other distries have other problems that ofter are bigger than the issues with ubuntu.

I mean ok you dont have to like unity, I don't like it, too. Or lets say I like gnome 3 more and I see it a waste of resources to make a bad clone of it. If it would be the only thing maybe we could make a good ui out of it, but it is not, and ubuntu dont have the power to make good software of its own, see launchpad, see upstart, see Bazaar they all kind of suck, good upstart was not that bad, bad it stopped macking progress in beta phase.

So that said, where should I go, all rpm distries suck because they use wrong directories and rpm etc, I dont like hthat they have filebased dependencies instead of package-based dependencies I dont like that, so if you cross out that, you have debian, the release time are very long and packages are most of the time very old, so you should use testing, so testing is short before a release old and after it gets again kind of slightly unstable, so you dont have the same constant mix between new stuff and stability so not very nice to use.

So go to rolling releases, then you go to the source-install-distries, like arch or gentoo, gentoo kind of sucks and is kind of slowly dieing, sooo the new good thing arch linux, I tryed it I dont know what all like about it, if you want really new stuff you get often less builds than ubuntu ppas are there. and the kind of broke your system or at least dont work often. Dependency Problems in AUR.

So I can complain much about ubuntu but the disadvantages of the other distries are in my opinion bigger. Maybe Linux Mint could become something, but therefore it have to give the option of a gnome desktop. Are there some packages availible?

The big point about ubuntu is that it is or was the most popular distribution and have some good design decitions (apt + gnome) behind it, and it had a good gnome-desktop most other distries have kind of kde-themes for it or something like that.

So I would like to change too, but because of other reasons, I dont like there flirting with proprietary or patented stuff of deals with mozilla to dance like they want to get the offiziel mozilla name, and even the decition to make that crapy browser to standard, I mean ok against epiphany I can understand that step, because for developers firefox is the better browser (better plugins) and maybe even for some users who want to customize the browser much, but I think that are not the beginners which ubuntu want to target.

But now with chromium out to use that very slow mem-eating crap browser as default sucks, but thats not a ubuntu-specific problem.

But even with that much complains I would never say that ubuntu sucks and they are totaly incompetent or something like that. I take the whole package customise it so that its ok for me, till I find something better and when I do that I silently move on. Maybe I say that unity sucks or so, but I dont say because of that ubuntu sucks thats a different point.

They do much to attract newbies, and they manage to get ubuntu usable for advanced users, too. thats a big balancing act, they sometimes fail with that, but all who tried that before did fail. (corel linux, easy linux, suse,mandrake...)

[DMJC]

1. Global menu:
Global menus have always been an absolutely terrible design, it sacrifices usability for a few vertical pixels. Simple Usability test, have two windows open side by side, or otherwise such that both windows are fully visible. Now from having the focus on one window quickly open up a menu from the other window.


On a mac: give focus to the other window and then move the mouse to the top panel
On something reasonable: move mouse over to other window and click on menu.

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.


2. Scrollbars:
OS X Lion has made scrollbars not only difficult to see but nigh impossible to actually use. Though one may argue that one should just use scrolling gestures but that brings us to...
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.


3. Scroll Gestures:
in Lion instead of staying with the standards that everybody already knows they've reversed them in order to unify the gesture with their Ipad.. but problem the interface concept between a touch screen and a touchpad are completely different, particularly when a standard has already been established and accepted.

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.

4. Window buttons are on the wrong side unless you happen to be one of those left handed people:
OS X is known for having their window buttons on the left side and on top of that instead of being icons they're colors, but that'll be point #5. There is a reason that those buttons are normally on the right, it is because most people are right handed and so it is both easier reach and more natural for people who are right handed. Now one might then point out: Why is the start button then normally on the left side then? It is simply because we are a culture that reads L-to-R, and thus naturally menus will cascade out to the right because of that, I imagine that R-to-L cultures have it on the other side, and you often see screenshots from asia with the menu bar on the right side of the screen.

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

5. Window button colors are a non-obvious explanation of use to the average person
While it's not hard to intuit the meaning or understand it after playing around with it, without a pictogram for explanation particularly in conjunction with #4 I can't just set the average user about using it and expect them to know what each one does.

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.

6. The dock bar
Some people like dock bars and others of us detest them, from the usability failure that is making the icons accordion, to the fact that if any large amount of software is pinned to the dock which is effectively a start menu replacement, then the icons become small enough as to be unusable.

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.

7. Applications do not close when you have closed all windows
To my knowledge under every other system when you tell a program to close from the window buttons it closes, on a mac it stays open until you use the global menu or the shortcut sequence to close it.

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.

8. Nonstandard shortcuts
Although each of the three main systems have their own sets of shortcuts, there have come to be standards that are expected, such as the Ctrl-{c,v,x,a} set, Standard controls are of course a usability concern and Apple has decided to continue going against those standards by continuing to only have their old Apple shortcuts based off their apple key.

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.

9. Can't reposition things in the manner that you want, It's Apple's way or it's... Apple's way. You have no choice in this regard, and thus people cannot change the environment to suit their needs best. Instead you have to conform to the software rather than the software conforming to you.

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

10. The filesystem tree is kludgy and fails to conform to the *nix standards we all know and love, while this specifically may not effect most users this is huge to me personally, and having things not where I expect them to be breaks usability for me. I mean why the hell are they not using /home for instance?[/QUOTE]

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.

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

[NomadDemon]

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