Unity 8 Continues To Improve, But Still Has Rough Edges

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Did Canonical bite off more than they could chow when they forked Wayland?

[Delgarde]

Don't try to justify this stupidity. The point of having multiple windows is so that you can see the content side-by-side which you really can't do in a tabbed interface unless there is some kind of split window option, which is just a dumb way of simulating multiple windows. And if you have multiple monitors it's even more useful.

Pay closer attention to what I said. Again, no question, it's bad design, and there are myriad reasons not to touch it. It's just that this particular limitation won't affect everyone, because an awful lot of apps already run in a single maximised window, and already have features like tabs and split-window functionality - losing the ability to open a second window would certainly be annoying, but it wouldn't make it that much harder to get my work done...

[Delgarde]

Did Canonical bite off more than they could chow when they forked Wayland?

Hell, yes. Though in this case, I think it's less the Mir vs Wayland part, and more the design of Unity 8... that's a *very* big project, more ambitious than Gnome 3 or KDE 5 were, and both of those projects took a lot of time for a lot of people.

This has always been a problem for Canonical... the urge to do everything themselves, while lacking the resources to complete even one of the large projects they started.

[jacob]

No question, it's poor design to not support multi-window from the start, but given the number of existing apps that do an awful lot from a single-window interface, it may be more usable than you're imagining.

That's a poor excuse to justify a gigantic regression in usability and user friendliness. Of course, it's theoretically possible to put up with it (with considerable pain). By the same token it is also possible to get some work done with a single tasking OS. The Unity8 developers though apparently don't think that it's a major problem. Perhaps someone should inform them that some people expect more from a DESKTOP COMPUTER that to run a single window instagram app.

[jacob]

Hell, yes. Though in this case, I think it's less the Mir vs Wayland part, and more the design of Unity 8... that's a *very* big project, more ambitious than Gnome 3 or KDE 5 were, and both of those projects took a lot of time for a lot of people.

This has always been a problem for Canonical... the urge to do everything themselves, while lacking the resources to complete even one of the large projects they started.

I don't know if the problem is MIR/Wayland or the development of Unity8 itself. Of course, building a brand new desktop from scratch on top of an unfinished and unproven windowing server was never going to be easy, but the problem seems to me more of a case of Canonical not knowing for sure where they are going.

[boxie]

"one window per app [...] and other minor annoyances"

One window per app and he calls that a "minor annoyance"?!? I call it a dramatic WTF that immediately relegates an UI to the hopelessly unusable category. IMHO nothing could better illustrate just how asinine this whole "convergence" idea is. Apps with one window per document and detachable panels, or just being able to, you know, open as many as TWO folders at the same time and being able to copy files by dragging them from one window to another (imagine that!) is such a fundamental concept of the desktop metaphor that I can't even imagine designing an UI without putting that right, left and center (literally!). So now not having it is a "minor annoyance" but not to worry, it might be implemented in the future as an afterthought?!? Geez....

Ever consider the vague possibility that "It just has not been implemented yet". You are essentially complaining about an Alpha product not doing all the things that your polished desktop is doing.

[Charlie68]

and 'so difficult to understand that it comes to a shell in development? It was first implemented as for phones this function is not needed, but for the desktop and will be implemented.

[Delgarde]

Ever consider the vague possibility that "It just has not been implemented yet". You are essentially complaining about an Alpha product not doing all the things that your polished desktop is doing.

Support for multiple windows per-application isn't one of those things that gets added easily - if it's not working from day 1, it's probably because the design makes it difficult.

For example, it may be using a model in which the application gets given a window to use, rather than the application opening a window itself. The former works well for mobile where apps are full-screen or maybe tiled, but not so well for a desktop. I don't think the usability problem is as serious as Jacob is complaining, but I do think he's spot-on about the design aspects.

[jokeyrhyme]

I wonder if at any point we'll see Canonical re-evaluate Wayland and switch back from Mir? Or even for the Wayland folks to evaluate Mir?

[Delgarde]

I wonder if at any point we'll see Canonical re-evaluate Wayland and switch back from Mir? Or even for the Wayland folks to evaluate Mir?

No chance on the latter... nobody outside Canonical cares about Mir. The politics of the early days of Mir pretty much guaranteed that the desktop community would be permanently split, between Canonical and everyone else - Gnome and KDE may not agree on much, but their developers (if not their fans) generally respect each other. The same is not always true of both groups with regard to Canonical and Ubuntu....

As to the former, maybe? We've seen them pull a u-turn before, when they found that systemd had a momentum they couldn't just ignore. But they've invested a lot in making Mir and Unity 8 a success, and even if pulling the plug and rebuilding Unity on Wayland were the sensible thing to do, I'm not sure they could make themselves do it. It would put them in a position of being dependent on a Wayland project that only a few years ago, they were doing their best to discredit... they burned a lot of goodwill back then, and have done nothing to rebuild it.