Ubuntu Touch Has Many Plans For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

/sigh
The concentration of mindless pro-Canonical drivel ITT is so high it makes me sick. I thought moving from Ubuntuforums to Phoronix would at least let me get away from the most rabid of Ubuntu fanboys. Gosh, I was so wrong.

Wow, I make one post. Surely you know that Phoronix involves ALL Linux distributions, correct?

[johnc]

So who's going to carry the banner of desktop Linux now that Canonical have lost their minds?

The Linux desktop has been quite stagnant for years now as Windows and OS X keep pushing forward.

[prodigy_]

the work for Ubuntu Touch (Mir/Unity 8/Core Apps in QML) will be the future desktop stack after the next LTS

And? Is this this supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread? Are we supposed to care? When I work with a desktop I use keyboard and mouse. And so does everyone I know. And touch-based DE is about the last thing we, desktop owners, need.

[dee.]

So who's going to carry the banner of desktop Linux now that Canonical have lost their minds?

Probably Mint. Sure they base on Ubuntu, but they fix all the stupid and do some extra smart things instead, and the DE is completely different. Mint has always had a strong focus for the desktop, tablets and such don't even enter their consideration, which enables them to create a DE that's designed for the desktop, works great on the desktop, and doesn't have to compromise on usability just to be usable on touchscreens. They aggregate the best ideas, and only use what works, not what is trendy at the moment.

The Linux desktop has been quite stagnant for years now as Windows and OS X keep pushing forward.

Really? What great innovations have Windows and OSX brought to the table in the last few years, that weren't copied from a Linux-based OS? Seems to me like windows is just moving backwards on usability these days, and OSX isn't doing much of anything...

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

And? Is this this supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread? Are we supposed to care? When I work with a desktop I use keyboard and mouse. And so does everyone I know. And touch-based DE is about the last thing we, desktop owners, need.

I seriously don't understand how people can say that Unity is good ONLY for touchpads. It's just as good on the desktop as it is on a tablet/touch interface. When it comes down to it, in my experience, I'm sick of the "traditional" desktop, as in, waiting for menus to pop up and you guys just praise it for being old and outdated and "familiar". Well, get the hell over yourselves and try something new, you'll be disappointed to know that double clicking on the desktop is not as fast as single clicking the Dash for your favorite programs and whatnot.

So far, from what I know, you guys are just too into the Windows-based types of desktop metaphors. Such a shame how closed-minded people are when it comes to Open Source. The same applies to Gnome 3. The sheer fact that we're still going backwards in the wake of Windows 7-type interfaces is just baffling to me. Yes, I get it, you like your traditional menus, context, applications, whatever. Times need to change and I'm so sick of people not even giving anything a chance and complaining that "oh god, if we want to do work it should be easy to use and it needs to be the way Microsoft designed it". Learning something new is something that I'd expect old people to not familiarize themselves with. How old are you people? Like, in your 20s or 30s?

[Pajn]

And? Is this this supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread? Are we supposed to care? When I work with a desktop I use keyboard and mouse. And so does everyone I know. And touch-based DE is about the last thing we, desktop owners, need.

And Unity handles mouse and keyboard very nice.
For keyboards:
It were one of the first DEs with a quick
search that searched everything, it have loads of short cut keys (it even have a short cut
key to bring up all other short cuts in case you forget some). And it's still the only DE I
know about that have textual commands for graphical programs (as in the HUD).

And for mouse:
Everything important that you does often is moved up to the top left corner that is
the dash, the app menu, the launchers and the window buttons. Having them in the top
left corner is a very wise decision as many programs have their main control buttons there
like browsers, file managers, GIMP ad more.

[johnc]

I seriously don't understand how people can say that Unity is good ONLY for touchpads. It's just as good on the desktop as it is on a tablet/touch interface. When it comes down to it, in my experience, I'm sick of the "traditional" desktop, as in, waiting for menus to pop up and you guys just praise it for being old and outdated and "familiar". Well, get the hell over yourselves and try something new, you'll be disappointed to know that double clicking on the desktop is not as fast as single clicking the Dash for your favorite programs and whatnot.

So far, from what I know, you guys are just too into the Windows-based types of desktop metaphors. Such a shame how closed-minded people are when it comes to Open Source. The same applies to Gnome 3. The sheer fact that we're still going backwards in the wake of Windows 7-type interfaces is just baffling to me. Yes, I get it, you like your traditional menus, context, applications, whatever. Times need to change and I'm so sick of people not even giving anything a chance and complaining that "oh god, if we want to do work it should be easy to use and it needs to be the way Microsoft designed it". Learning something new is something that I'd expect old people to not familiarize themselves with. How old are you people? Like, in your 20s or 30s?

I've been using Unity for a year.

It's awful.

[Vim_User]

I seriously don't understand how people can say that Unity is good ONLY for touchpads. It's just as good on the desktop as it is on a tablet/touch interface.

I wouldn't consider Unity on any machine, regardless how good you deem it to be.

Well, get the hell over yourselves and try something new, you'll be disappointed to know that double clicking on the desktop is not as fast as single clicking the Dash for your favorite programs and whatnot.

At first, I don't think that starting an application from a quick-launch bar on an "old" desktop is any slower than using Dash for that. But what do I know, I don't use such "old-style" desktops. But I could say to you: "Well, get the hell over yourself and try something new, you'll be disappointed to know that single clicking on the desktop is not as fast as as using keyboard shortcuts for your favorite programs and whatnot." Using the mouse for anything that can be done without using the mouse is just a waste of time, you will always be faster using the keyboard.

[dee.]

I seriously don't understand how people can say that Unity is good ONLY for touchpads. It's just as good on the desktop as it is on a tablet/touch interface. When it comes down to it, in my experience, I'm sick of the "traditional" desktop, as in, waiting for menus to pop up and you guys just praise it for being old and outdated and "familiar". Well, get the hell over yourselves and try something new, you'll be disappointed to know that double clicking on the desktop is not as fast as single clicking the Dash for your favorite programs and whatnot.

So far, from what I know, you guys are just too into the Windows-based types of desktop metaphors. Such a shame how closed-minded people are when it comes to Open Source. The same applies to Gnome 3. The sheer fact that we're still going backwards in the wake of Windows 7-type interfaces is just baffling to me. Yes, I get it, you like your traditional menus, context, applications, whatever. Times need to change and I'm so sick of people not even giving anything a chance and complaining that "oh god, if we want to do work it should be easy to use and it needs to be the way Microsoft designed it". Learning something new is something that I'd expect old people to not familiarize themselves with. How old are you people? Like, in your 20s or 30s?

Change is not inherently a good or bad thing. There's little point in change for the sake of change. Because a change can be a change for the worse as well as a change for the better.

You're mistaken about quite a few things here. Firstly, the "traditional" desktop metaphor wasn't invented by Windows. It was done by many other GUIs before Windows was even a twinkle in old Bill's eye.

Secondly, there's nothing much innovative or new about the Unity interface. It's just a dock with a weird custom app launcher. You can get a dock for pretty much any DE, I have one in Cinnamon right now, it works great. And docks weren't invented by Canonical. As for the dash, it's not a really good innovation. It's fine if you don't know what you're looking for and want to search for an application to do something. But if you already know the program you want, and it's not in your dock or on your desktop, it becomes a pain in the ass to switch to the keyboard just to launch an app. It's even more a pain to search for it between all the other applications (and Amazon ads), because there's no categorization. So you basically have to keep every application you use regularly in the dock, but then the dock grows huge, and it becomes a pain even there.

I'm not even saying Unity is particularly bad or anything. It's just average, there's just nothing particularly innovative or original about it. The biggest lack of Unity is the lack of customizability, last time I tried it (12.04) you needed 3rd party apps to do even basic customizations that should be doable by default. Still, Unity is probably fine for the average user, to someone who just needs to run a web browser and edit some documents now and then, maybe play some games, watch videos etc. But anything heavier and that and it becomes inconvenient and a pain in the ass.

When it comes to launchers, I'm quite partial to the Cinnamon launcher. It has its problems, like a long-standing bug that makes it appear slowly sometimes (they're working on fixing that though). But the basic concept is brilliant. Two columns, categories on the left and launchers on the right. Select a category, or if you don't know, there's also "all", then select the application on the right. Simple, minimalistic, not overly complex, no fancy bells and whistles - just simple functionality. It works. And if you want to search with the keyboard, Unity-dash-style, that works too. And in the side there are icons for favorites.

I quite like the KDE launcher too, it takes some getting used to, and it's a bit more complex than the Cinnamon one, but it's very functional once you get to the rhythm of it.

The Windows start menu, by contrast, is just plain horrible. The latest I have experience of is the XP one, but it was basically identical to the one in 95, and I doubt they've changed it very much in Vista/7. And let's not even get into the hot mess of what the fuck that is windows 8... But speaking of the 95-XP start menu... you have the 1st level folders, like accessories, applications etc. Then you click that, you get a new list of folders, because of course every application has to install its own folder, and then you have to go to that folder to find the actual launcher. So that's 3 levels of nested context menus just to launch an application. You think the "traditional" DE's on Linux don't innovate? Hell, the discarding of this moronic shit was already a huge improvement!

That's the point though: you don't always have to reinvent the wheel to be innovative. Sometimes, the best innovations are small things that improve everyday usability. Sure, it may not be as "media sexy", it may not get you as much hype on tech sites, but for the everyday user, the small things are often much more important.

[dee.]

Using the mouse for anything that can be done without using the mouse is just a waste of time, you will always be faster using the keyboard.

Sometimes, I like to lounge on my couch and hold the mouse against my thigh, like when I read online comics or something. And it'd take me much longer to sit up straight and pull up the keyboard than it would to just click on things with the mouse.