
(Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward - Garbage
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/671
======
hristov
I am a longtime Ubuntu user and I turned off Unity as soon as I figured out
how to do it. It is really really wrong IMO.

Shuttleworth should realize that a desktop computer with a mouse is very
different from an iPad and things that are all the rage for tablets are not
necessarily good for desktops.

For example on a desktop you have a mouse which has very high precision and
accuracy, whereas on an iPad you have your fingers which are not very accurate
at all. Thus, tablets make sure they have few and large buttons, while this is
not necessary for desktops. In desktops you are allowed to have more and
smaller buttons.

Also, tablets usually have limited real estate so that they make sure any
program you use can take up the entire screen. Desktops on the other hand can
have huge screens and thus should allow people to have several windows open
and visible at the same time.

Unity is cute for the first time but it is almost unusable if you have
multiple windows open. I want to see which windows are open so that i can
switch between them easily. Unity requires several button pushes to find a
minimized window.

~~~
makmanalp
Actually, unity has that feature where if you drag a window towards the side
of the monitor, it'll tile to one half instead of the full monitor.

What really bugs me is the dumb launch menu. I think it's pretty much the same
idea as the one on macs. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to group
applications together? Why is everyone (win7 also) following suit? It's dumb
to extrapolate that just because two windows are from the same application
that I'm using them for the same task and want them grouped together. It's
also dumb that when I give one look at the bar I can't immediately tell what
is open. I have to consciously scan all the way down. Finally, I hate the
additional click it brings when I have to pick between two windows of the same
app. Does anyone really know how anyone decided on this? I'll stop complaining
when they let me disable it.

~~~
AlisdairO
When I first started using macs, I hated the group-by-application idea too,
but I've come to prefer it. Combined with application-specific expose, I find
it scales so much better for when I have over 10 windows open on a non-huge
screen - which I do most of the time. When I go back to a WM with a list of
lots of windows open, I find myself hunting and pecking amongst all these
tiny, almost indistinguishable icons, and it feels like it takes forever.

edit: What I'd quite like is another expose mode which shows, say, the last 6
windows you've worked on. While I often have a lot of stuff i want to keep
open, I often have a relatively smaller immediate working set.

~~~
lloeki
I Cmd+M the ones I want to keep around but don't plan to use right now. They
go in a smaller mode below a divide line on Exposé. Also I tell the Dock to
"minimize into the application icon".

Document window + Application icon + Exposé can really scale up, to the point
I rarely ever use Spaces (when I was an avid user of virtual desktops under
Linux).

~~~
AlisdairO
That seems like a god way of working - I might try modifying my UI-driving in
line with that :-)

------
mkelly
One of the great things about Linux in general is that this is non-news plenty
of users who don't use the default window manager anyway. Prefer something
else? Just switch. You're not married to the window manager like you are on OS
X and Windows. I'm very happy for that.

(Edit: I should clarify that I'm writing this in anticipations that the
general sentiment will be that Unity is terrible. If you don't think it's
terrible, then it's also not an issue.)

~~~
jamesbritt
Indeed. I just installed 10.10 on a Thinkpad W500 using the Trinity KDE3
dstro.

I ever cared for Gnome; lack of easy menu hacking and navigation and not being
able to set different backgrounds for each desktop were among my peeves.

KDE4 didn't work for me, either. Too much slickness for stuff I had no use
for.

Lucky for me some smart, motivated people decided to keep KDE3 alive. My
eternal thanks to them.

A downside is that most often when I search for help on something it ends up
being how-to in Gnome or maybe KDE4, but with a bi of digging I find what
command line invocation to run or what config file needs editing.

Truly a great thing to be able to have such a range of UI options (and every
so often I try xmonad) while under the hood it's same hackable OS.

~~~
pers3us
I think you should give Openbox or Fluxbox or LXDE a try. A lot many features
to customize, and initially it will be pain in the ass, but eventually you
will be satisfied.

~~~
jamesbritt
Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried a few others, and have decided that
KDE3.5 works quite well enough for most things, and I've gotten accustomed to
the annoyances, so I'm good.

But the really nice thing is I _can_ always toss on a new WM or whatever and
try it out with very little trouble.

------
cypherpunks
I would call this a huge leap backwards. It is the first version of Debian or
Ubuntu in 15 years that doesn't work. Wireless broke. Wired broke. Unity
caused windows to randomly turn white. No obvious way to turn off visual
effects. The UI feels like a clone of the Mac without a real understanding of
what works and doesn't work on the Mac. A lot of the Mac paradigms come from a
world of much lower resolution than modern desktops. The Mac-style top menu
bar doesn't work well for modalless, Unix-style applications where you have
several open at the same time. Focus-follows-the-mouse is slow and broken.
Most of my favorite configuration options are gone. Clicking a second time on
the terminal button brings up the first terminal, not a second one.

I'm waiting for 11.10 on the rest of my machines, but considering switching
from Ubuntu.

------
spiffworks
I have to say, as an Awesome WM user, I was sceptical of Unity. But after a
day of using it, I think I might never go back to Awesome. It is just
ridiculously well thought out, in a way that I have never experienced on Linux
before. It really is a leap, if only for the methodology they used. I hope
other distros start doing this kind of deep analysis.

~~~
kleiba
Could you give examples for the features your find well thought out? Does
Unity solve problems you had with Awesome?

~~~
spiffworks
The built-in search and launcher are killer features for me, and the
multitasking with super+num is great. It also has the 'run-or-raise'
capability that I've failed to get to work in Awesome. As such, the window
management capabilities of Unity pale in comparison with Awesome, but the fact
that I can run Matlab and get the speed and multitasking is pure win for
Unity. Java apps in Awesome are a source of unlimited pain for me.

------
nephics
Ubuntu 11.04 (and in particularly Unity) made me realize that the best thing
about free software is freedom of choice, so I installed Debian.

------
kamechan
i like natty...except for unity.

i'm sure unity is great on a smaller screen, but on a 2560x1440 panel having a
window take over the entire desktop when one maximizes it is a deal-breaker.
tried to turn off this setting via compizconfig and the old way of doing it
through the appearance > windows > maximize vertically setting (which i really
loved) but the narwhal disobeys me and impales me with its unpleasant horn
unless i go back to classic mode with no effects.

after getting all excited about 11.04, downloading it, reloading, and then
being disappointed, i'm now back on 10.10. not crazy about mint's layout
either, nor am i a huge fan of gnome3. i guess if i were going to make a major
change at this point, it would be to xmonad (which i currently play with once
in a while) and not to unity. at least xmonad is fast and intelligent.

~~~
clark-kent
Its going to get better. I agree unity is still too buggy for prime time. But
I think the designers nailed the fundamentals. I look forward to see what they
have by 11.10.

------
yason
I liked Unity the UI itself but the fact that it was a Compiz plugin turned me
off for my main desktop. My WM history goes FVWM2→Sawfish→Metacity. This means
I've developed usage habits over the last 15 years that I expect the window
manager to oblige with. Compiz is not... very coherent in that.

Compiz has tons of options but not all of them work yet there is only _nearly_
everything that FVWM2 and Sawfish had. The transition to Metacity was a bit
grumpy since it certainly didn't allow for all the things that Sawfish did,
but eventually it was tolerable as I could configure the essentials right and
it was much better integrated with Gnome than Sawfish.

Compiz, however, seems to be more concerned about cool effects than real
adjustability and coherent configuration! I use the keyboard for most things,
rarely the mouse, and thus I have a number of keyboard shortcuts to launch
programs, do window operations, flip around virtual desktops etc. That means I
need to carefully configure the keys to work with me, as well as take care of
unbinding anything that I might need in an application. So here's an example.

I expect to be able to configure those in the Keyboard Shortcuts window but
Compiz apparently pays not much attention to what's set up there. I then
googled and tried the ``ccsm`` utility but using the Commands plugin to bind
actions into keys didn't work either. For some reason, in Unity/Compiz the
<Super>t brings up the fucking trashcan can no matter what I do while I think
the same keyboard combination is just perfect for my terminal. I don't want to
use Ctrl-Alt-t instead because control and alt are valid application
modifiers, and it especially in Emacs translated to transpose-sexps. The super
key is great for any of these meta or desktop-level bindings.

So here we are: the program insists on something and thinks it should win. It
was after I realized Unity is based on Compiz that I had ditched Compiz
before, pretty much for the same reasons. Enabling the desktop effects in
earlier Ubuntus was tempting but I never got my keyboard bindings and desktop
behaviour quite right wrt that.

A non-compiz Unity would probably be a killer: I like the dock and the Super
key menu where you can just type the name of an application and find it in
real-time.

~~~
one-man-bucket
If you can run gnome apps, you should definitely try gnome-do. It's like the
launcher, but more polished.

Gnome-DO is the main reason I'm staying with "ubuntu classic".

------
chanks
The sticking point for me with Unity was switching between multiple open
windows. I typically have a dozen or so terminals and gedit and Chrome windows
open across a half-dozen workspaces, but if I want to bring (let's say) a
specific terminal on my current workspace to the foreground, I couldn't figure
out a better way to do it than to open up Unity's display of all the many
terminals I have running and try to pick out which one I mean.

I'm open to trying it again once it's had a bit more polish, but I'm sticking
with Gnome classic for now.

~~~
hasenj
All my terminals are tabbed in one window.

But I hear yea; switching between several windows for the same application is
not very keyboard-friendly.

~~~
spenrose
I map Ctrl-Fx for F1 to F8 to each of my 8 virtual desktops, and have specific
tasks (and window sets) open on each of them -- mostly xterms and emacs
buffers. A couple of keystrokes always finds what I need. The key is
establishing a task-to-desktop mapping, such as: current big programming
effort on 1, email and issue tracker on 2, source code main trunk on 3,
smaller jobs on 4 and 5, release terminals on 6, web browser on 7, SQL
terminal on 8.

------
CrazedGeek
I have an earnest question for certain people who dislike Unity: Why are you
switching distros entirely? I'd understand if Unity was the only available
option, but GNOME2 still works fine, GNOME3's in a PPA, and there's other DEs
that are more-or-less officially supported (KDE, XFCE, LXDE).

~~~
spiffworks
Exactly. I've been using Ubuntu for the past 2 years without ever logging into
a Gnome session. The package management, the drivers, the sane defaults are
all worth it even if you disagree with all their design decisions. What
doesn't work in the repos get fixed really fast. I am typing this from a Natty
laptop running Awesome WM and I never have to see Unity if I don't want to.

------
hartror
I don't know what it is like for an everyday user but as an experienced power
user I found Unity slower than the classic interface. I use gnome-do for
launching programs, and it runs faster and supports more than Unity does.

We aren't the target for this interface.

------
tintin
A thing I don't like about Unity are the context-menus. When your application
is fullscreen they are ok, but when your window is smaller it's strange to
have the context menu still on top of your screen. I also never understood why
Apple is doing this. To me it just feels out of context.

But overall I think Unity is great. People don't like changes so there will be
a lot of boo-ing and bah-ing, but I think in the end this is a great step
forward.

~~~
jamesgeck0
The menubar is at the top of the screen because it's easier to click them.
Fitt's Law[1] says that the larger something is, the easier it is to target.
When something is against the edge of the screen, you can't move the mouse
past it, so it has infinite width or height (or both; corners are nifty). By
placing the menu at the top of the screen, you go from a clickable area with a
height of about 20px to a clickable area with infinite height.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law>

~~~
igouy
Even on my smaller than average 1280x1080 monitor, the top of the screen can
be a long way from the current mouse position - notice that Fitts Law factors
in that Distance.

(And as you've brought up Fitts Law, think about what that says about the very
much smaller target provided by those Unity overlay scroll thumbs compared to
a window size scrollbar.)

~~~
jamesgeck0
The scroll thumbs actually have about the same area as the scrollbar. Maybe
larger, because the little tab pops up under wherever the mouse is, so you
don't need to seek for it vertically like with a normal scrollbar. In theory.

In practice, they're too fiddly, sometimes appearing on the inside, sometimes
on the outside, and requiring you to move your mouse in and out of the window
frame. If they get that sorted, they'll be on par with (if not better than)
normal scrollbars, imho.

------
pers3us
I very much hope that this will become standard practice across all of free
software, because in my view the future of free software is no longer just
about inner beauty (architecture, performance, efficiency) it’s also about
usability and style. +1

------
erez
Yes, the Gospel according to Mark. I've used Unity on the netbook for the past
6 months, and when 11.04 beta was released, switched to Kubuntu. It was just
too slow, what with the 3d reliance and the idea that everytime you searched
the launcher it polled the software center for matches. As for the desktop,
I've no problem with it, just that make sure you don't try anything Gnome3
with it, as it will seriously break your system.

------
jellicle
Normally I upgrade Ubuntu on several machines immediately upon the release of
a new version. Often before it is released, which has occasionally gotten me
into trouble. This has been my cycle for, I don't know, at least since 5.04 or
5.10.

I'm not upgrading to 11.04.

11.04 is clearly a disaster. We'll see if 11.10 is the same and whether I need
to find a new distribution or not.

~~~
StavrosK
Because it's impossible to select "Gnome" in the pre-login dropdown?

~~~
igouy
I didn't see how to (with an update rather than a new install) but I
eventually figured out how to use the Login Screen Settings to make Ubuntu
Classic the default.

BUT switching back to Ubuntu Classic did not get rid of the Unity Overly
Scrollbars - so it's still a game of hunt the scroll thumb.

------
Typhon
I was reluctant to update from 10.10. Finally, I updated to Natty, to see what
everyone was talking about. I then discovered that my hardware is not
compatible with Unity. I can't even complain about what it looks like, because
I've been left behind in the "leap forward".

------
agranig
The tips at [http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/things-to-tweak-fix-after-
ins...](http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/things-to-tweak-fix-after-
installing.html) solved a lot of pain points for me.

------
handzhiev
The switch to Unity along with video card problems with the latest version
made me leave Ubuntu and start using Mandriva. Happy of the change so far.

------
mariuolo
Shuttleworth should have had the courage to postpone this release until it was
fit to use.

------
theDoug
He may be a little biased.

------
ilcavero
as usual, wait at least a month to complain about an ubuntu release, I think
with the exception of 10.04 you should wait until the next release to download
the previous one.

------
jpr
I have to say that I was very skeptical of Unity before I tried it yesterday
for the first time. It's certainly different from what most people are used
to, but it's also better in many ways. I have tried at least GNOME2, KDE3,
KDE4, XMonad, wmii, and different versions Windows, and I can't decide which
of them I like the best. Unity is not the best for everything and takes some
getting used to, but it certainly isn't bad either.

