

Ubuntu: Wake up and smell the Unity against you - kennjason
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106703-ubuntu-wake-up-and-smell-the-unity-against-you

======
sgentle
I don't get the Unity hate. Sure, it's nowhere near as polished as the
traditional Gnome desktop, but everything cool and new started out as
something crappy and new. If you don't like watching the sausage get made,
wait for the LTS releases. Or just turn Unity off, the option's still there.

I have a lot of time for Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu crew. Here's the rest of
the "if you don't like it, don't use it" quote mentioned in the article: "If
there is selfishness here, it's selfishness on the part of people who DEMAND
attention and offer no constructive solution. Nobody has a right to expect
someone else to devote their time to a mission in which they have no
interest."

"Devote their time to a mission" - isn't that a great description of Open
Source at it's best? Not playing with a weekend project, trying to impress
pundits, or making a super friendly don't-offend-anyone party. A mission that
people devote their time to.

Will it work? I have no idea, but I hope so. Ubuntu didn't become the most
popular distro by having the best wallpaper. They've been making hard
decisions and pissing people off since 2004. To anyone who considers Unity a
death knell, I'd ask you to estimate how many projects are killed by
innovating too much when people want stability, and compare it to how many
projects die a slow, apathetic death because they've been standing still while
the rest of the world moves on.

~~~
daenz
> it's nowhere near as polished as the traditional Gnome desktop, but
> everything cool and new started out as something crappy and new

Many cool things starting out crappy and new doesn't mean that all crappy new
things will be cool. I think most people that dislike Unity (myself included)
feel like Unity is going in the wrong direction. If pressed, I could point out
some really fundamental design issues with Unity, issues that fixing would
make Unity less "Unity-like"

Also, I think the introduction of this major change was done in a very
polarizing way. It was basically "use this new interface or F-off, maybe
there's a way to use the old one, but go figure that out yourself." Making the
new interface optional by default would have been _way_ smoother.

~~~
acabal
I agree that the way it was presented to the community was a big issue. Plus,
when people bring genuine complaints to the table, a lot of geekier open-
source advocates say, "hey, it's open source, fix it yourself instead of
complaining." (Though that's not an Ubuntu-specific problem.) Well, tearing
open the guts of something as complex as a DE just to fix, say, the launcher
position is just not something I'm going to do. If a distro's attitude is
going to be, "if you don't like our half-baked product don't use it, because
we're not going to listen to you," then yup, I'm going to go use something
else and not recommend that distro any more. All they succeed in doing with
that attitude is alienating a former advocate. That's not the way to approach
Shuttleworth's goal of X million users by 20-whatever.

~~~
freehunter
apt-get gnome-shell

Linux is built around choice. You have the choice to get rid of Unity.

------
acabal
Unity could have been something great if only Ubuntu had decided to release it
after thorough QA testing and polishing. First impressions are everything, and
Ubuntu chose to release Unity in an objectively unfinished state. They
effectively made their entire userbase their beta-testers. I for one have work
to get done, and I'm not interested in being the subject of a grand UI
experiment--especially one that's run by what seem to be a group of UX
amateurs.

Ubuntu wasted that crucial first impression and alienated a significant
portion of their core userbase--tech geeks and programmers--by pushing a half-
baked product. Who knows: if I had tried Unity in 2014 instead of in Natty,
maybe I would have liked it and recommended it.

Unity is just a symptom of the deeper problem, though, which is that Ubuntu is
never in a finished, polished state. I tell anyone who asks what OS I'm using
that I use Ubuntu, but that they should stick with Windows because Ubuntu
invariably breaks every 6 months and everything is half-baked.

I just can't recommend an OS where the most important part, the DE, is buggy
and unfinished, and where every distro upgrade reliably introduces random and
serious regressions. (Though to be fair it's often upstream's fault on those.)
I know that if I install Ubuntu for my mom, she'll click 'Upgrade to Ubuntu
xx.yy' without thinking, then she'll call me because her computer won't
hibernate any more, or because all of a sudden her window buttons are on the
left. If a hard-core geek like me won't recommend the friendliest Linux
distro, who will?

~~~
jdpage
I used to recommend Ubuntu or Mint. These days, it's switched to Mint or
Fedora. Ubuntu's ability to "just work" has been unsatisfactory for a while,
while Mint's and Fedora's has only been getting better. I recently did a
Fedora upgrade, and the only thing that broke was my hacked-up xmonad setup,
which was to be expected. Everything else was either the same or better.

~~~
DanBC
Who are you recommending Fedora to?

Ubuntu was a good recommendation for people who could just about re-install
Windows. Fedora, not so much.

((Ubuntu is also good for many other users too!) I'm using Fedora on my other
machine.)

~~~
jdpage
Generally, I'm recommending Fedora KDE (what I use) to somewhat tech-savvy
people who are seriously looking into Linux and asking me for recommendations.
If I'm just trying to get someone off of Windows, I recommend Mint. It's the
first Linux distro I genuinely enjoyed using, since if I wanted to tweak I had
room to tweak, and if I wanted to get work done it tended to Just Work. (I
used Fedora 11 directly beforehand, and it was horrible. When Fedora 13 came
out, I hopped on that and it was great.) While I haven't used it for any
significant length of time since then, what I've seen of it has been great. A
friend recently started using it when I suggested it - quite a tech-savvy guy,
actually - and he loves it, so I'd say it's still good.

------
iclelland
Do you know what else happened with the release of 11.10? _They switched from
Python 2.7.1 to python 2.7.2_. And it shows the _exact_ same correlation to
this sag in downloads as the Unity UI.

Clearly, Canonical can't do anything right.

Oh, and also, Mint has had a huge rise in popularity at the same time, and, by
the way, the graph shown in the article, in addition to any methodological
flaws it may have, only shows relative numbers; Ubuntu drops from 11% down to
something like 4%, but of what total? We have no idea from this graph whether
there is an absolute drop or rise in the number of Ubuntu installs; only that
Mint has taken off, relative to other distributions.

There's nothing in the data shown that ties this to Unity specifically, or
even anything about Ubuntu itself. There have been hundreds of changes between
11.04 and 11.10, and the Linux landscape itself is changing at the same time.
I don't see any firm data presented to blame the UI.

~~~
regularfry
Given that the point of Ubuntu is to try to expand the appeal of desktop
Linux, no matter what the absolute number of installs it's hard to argue that
their current approach is working if they've been so comprehensively overtaken
by a more traditional distro. If the absolute number of Ubuntu installs has
remained the same and Mint's growth happens to be entirely new users, _why did
those new users not pick Ubuntu_?

~~~
rbanffy
Distrowatch's audience is not a useful metric.

~~~
iclelland
Maybe a better question for them to ask is "Why are Ubuntu users staying away
from DistroWatch.com in droves?"

~~~
rbanffy
Why would I visit Distrowatch?

------
gsoltis
I've been using ubuntu for about 5 years now, and using it as basically my
only OS for the last 3. I was very satisfied with it. The reason I'm not a fan
of Unity is that not only did it break my workflow, but there appears to be no
way to customize it to get back to what I have been doing for the past 5
years.

I understand the developers don't owe anyone anything, and everyone's free to
leave (and I may, once staying on 10.10 gets to be a problem). I'm just
unhappy that they decided to break what I was doing after 5 good years.

For those curious, the features I'm referring to are alt-tab to switch between
windows (not applications) and proper virtual desktop support. Doesn't seem
like much, and indeed, these features have worked flawlessly for me for years.
Once I'm too far behind the upgrade curve, I'll probably have to try another
distro or window manager, since from what I've read, Unity has no intention of
un-breaking these. It was fun while it lasted though.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Unity isn't hard to customize. It's generally customized the same way that
window managers in Ubuntu have been customized for the last few years, through
CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm). For alt-tab just choose another switcher
under "Window Management" -- there are 4 to choose from. To remove the menu-
on-top silliness, `sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk indicator-applet-appmenu
indicator-appmenu` And I don't understand your comment about virtual desktops.
They work fine in Unity.

~~~
gsoltis
I'll give this a try. I did some research a month or so ago when I upgraded
one of my machines to 11.10 (which I now really regret doing). At the time,
everywhere I looked said alt+tab for switching applications, and alt+~ for
switching windows within applications. If there's a way to get alt+tab back to
just switching windows, I'll gladly give it a try.

The issue I had with virtual workspaces was that alt+tab still showed every
app on every workspace. The menu on top thing is annoying, but not a deal-
breaker I guess.

Anyways, I know this is not the ubuntu forums, I just thought I would chime in
with the regressions in my workflow. I spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make it
work. I am aware of ccsm, and I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not a
complete n00b either. I gave up and went back to the GNOME fallback. My other
machines I won't be upgrading. Backwards compatibility is important, even with
new fancy window managers.

------
kingkilr

       Data source:  DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking
    

Well there's your problem. What a terrible metric. That's a good way of
finding out what one type of linux user is using, but not a good way to sample
the population of computer users, and the changing face of linux users.

~~~
madmaze
I agree, DistroWatch is not a good metric of measuring which distros are in
use. Page hit ranking is more about which distros are currently being
discussed more and talked about. Ive looked into mint and a few others on
distrowatch, but I have never until today visited the Ubuntu.. Yet most all of
my machines run Ubuntu or some version of Debian.

------
argarg
I've been working on a MBP for the last 5 month and like it. I recently
installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a desktop PC I had at home. I setup everything for
my needed dev environment, and unlike many other articles/posts I read, I
loved it.

The computer specs are not the same, but unity is overall MUCH faster and
smooth than my OSX MBP. The interface just works very smoothly and intuitively
for me. I do most of my work in the terminal so I don't get to do every
operations using the interface though. I'm even thinking about trading my MBP
for a system76 ubuntu machine.

Unity is also quite new and I expect it to get better with every releases. Am
I the only one in this situation?

~~~
jerrya
For the rest of us,

MBP :== MacBook Pro

and not

Maximally Bogus Product

------
forgottenpaswrd
I was the first to criticize Unity back in the day, but I believe Unity has a
bright future.

Canonical made a big big change with a lot of regressions and growing pains
but as it stabilizes it will be a great desktop to use for normal people.

The worst thing they could do is go back again to gnome at this point.

The main problem Linux have it is that it is just copy what Apple or Windows
do, look at Mint and you will see a copy of Windows(I really hate the windows
start menu design and they copied it verbatim), look at Ubuntu and you will
see a copy of MacOS but with no so many great designers and money behind(the
minimize-maximaze window buttons disappearing drives me crazy).

------
jtreminio
I'm reading conflicting reports. One place shows that people generally prefer
Unity after being exposed to it, and others (like this article) are completely
opposed to it.

Ubuntu is supposed to be Linux for the rest of us, not for hardcore
enthusiasts, isn't it? If it is, why wouldn't it make sense to appeal to the
general public?

~~~
mrsebastian
Likewise, I've seen some reports that 'the rest of us' like Unity -- and some
that despise it.

It's just a New Thing -- and like most New Things, it's probably a) not that
polished, and b) people resist change.

~~~
drivebyacct2
And for some reason, people manage to resist change so much, that a change in
the _default_ DE requires them sprinting to a new distro, with lashing words
in tail for Ubuntu. Because changing distros is easier than install xfce, or
gnome-shell, or kde, or something. Never mind that choice of distro often also
includes things such as community, packages available in repos, packages
available for smaller one-off projects, etc.

~~~
teach
Have you personally tried changing to xfce, gnome-shell or KDE in Ubuntu
11.10? I have, and it's decidedly non-trivial. Switching to a different distro
would probably be easier.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I remember `sudo apt-get install gnome-shell` and then choosing it at the next
login and being quite smitten. (I later upgraded to ricotz's ppa for faster
updates).

~~~
teach
Again, is this in 11.10? Or 11.04?

~~~
onryo
I did this in 11.10, then switched back to unity because gnome-shell had some
bugs that kept me from getting work done. I like it's interface design better,
though.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Not sure what issues you had, but 3.2 is getting some bugfixes and ricotz's
ppa has some good fixes as well.

------
geekytenny
IMHO, Unity is a work in progress. It definitely requires more resources to
run than other environments and it requires some getting used to. I miss the
good old task-bar for quick switching instead of moving the cursor to the
extreme left waiting for the tab to slide in, clicking the appropriate icon
which may then load an undesired window if the sought application is running
more than one instance. I tried 'mousing over' the topmost left corner too..
it is also slow. However, unity is clean. It just hasn't figured out how we
want to do what we want or who we are.

------
gravitronic
I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago on my AMD laptop as well as an ancient
P4 that is inside of an arcade cabinet.

In some ways this article shows the gains made by the Linux community (and
Ubuntu) in the last 5 years. It used to be the barrier to entry was lack of
driver support for any number of peripherals, a user-unfriendly install that
would render dual-booting impossible, performance so abhorrent without manual
config changes, a community that would mock your problems, and regardless of
package manager always having to break down and "untar; ./configure; make" at
least one set of dependencies before getting your needed software to run.

Ubuntu (and the latest Fedora, as I've witnessed recently at work) installs
with little more interaction than a partition selection.

That being said, I hated Unity and switched to fluxbox on both machines
immediately. I'm not sure what they've accomplished exactly.. it's less
intuitive for someone from a windows experience. I guess the dock is most
similar to a tablet menu?

Anyways.. It's interesting, not for me, but if this is the new horizon of
"linux problems" maybe <joke>this is finally the year of linux on the desktop?
</joke>

------
simonw
Off topic, but...

If you visit that site on an iPhone you will experience the absolute /worst/
kind of "enhancement" I've seen in ages - it manages to break vertical
scrolling of all things. You can still scroll the content, but it no longer
sticks to your to finger - it tries to jump to predefined scrolling points,
but with an easing animation to make it feel even weirder. Horrible.

------
keithpeter
I think readers on this forum might recognise the need Canonical has to turn a
profit, and therefore to focus resources on the tasks/developments that will
lead to an income stream.

A figure of $30million turnover was mentioned as a break even point by
Shuttleworth in an interview in 2009, and a three to five year plan to reach
that in 2008 (wikipedia article about Canonical Ltd).

I personally think I see a shift in strategy towards a tablet/mobile style
desktop and a 'brittleness' about community involvement perhaps caused by the
need to focus resources on the interface and user experience.

Hope they get it right before they burn through Shuttleworth's money. If it is
the case they have hardware partners lined up to launch Ubuntu loaded devices
(like the Chinese deal some weeks ago) then the 'long time user' community may
just have to bend a little to keep the income coming. If they don't it isn't
clear to me where these millions of new users are coming from...

------
mark_l_watson
First, I question the stats in the article. I have 4 Linux installs right now,
all Ubuntu, yet I have done a lot of web searches for "Mint" out of curiosity.
I skewed the stats in the article, sorry :-)

Second, I really like Gnome but Unity is just fine __if __you take the time to
learn keyboard shortcuts to switch between apps, workspaces, and windows for a
given app.

I just am wrapping up a long term project for a customer that basically
required OS X for work. I have thought about switching to Linux and Ubuntu for
my day to day work now, but I just ordered an iPad 2, and I would like easy
data exchange with my shiny new little toy.

------
fredsanford
I find that Unity wastes vertical space, which to me is a sin. I have plenty
of horizontal space, please waste that or let me configure it the way I like.

------
desireco42
Issue with Ubuntu is that 'new' is not that appealing, I don't think I would
mind if things are not polished if those were the features that make me more
productive, but they are in the way, and they are now instead of Windows,
copying OSX, how is that innovative. Other than that, I respect work put in
Ubuntu and it is solid foundation that we can enjoy. I switched to Mind on my
desktop and loving it.

------
grandalf
On unity when I move the mouse to the left side to unhide the dock, an orange
border takes up half the screen and stays there until I maximize any of the
windows.

This is extremely confusing, does anyone know if it's supposed to be a
feature? Or if there's a way to turn it off? I asked in #ubuntu and nobody
replied.

------
notatoad
the percentage of distrowatch page hits that go to the ubuntu page is down
47%, but the total distrowatch page hits per month are up 50% this month. i'm
no math genius, but doesn't that mean that distrowatch actually had _more_
hits to their ubuntu page last month than any other month?

~~~
JadeNB
No; a 50% increase followed by a 47% decrease represents a net 20.5% decrease,
since (1 + 0.50)(1 - 0.47) = 0.795. (This assumes that Ubuntu visitors were
represented in the same proportion pre- and post-decrease.)

------
papercruncher
I very much like Unity. The eye-candy makes me happy and from a productivity
perspective it allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard and off the mouse.
It does indeed use way more resources than it should, but what else am I going
to do with 4 cores?

------
forcefsck
I like Unity and I prefer it more than gnome2. Furthermore I like Gnome3 more
than Gnome2 or XFCE. And even furthermore, any "power user" can install the
desktop of his preference fairly easy.

Sure Unity and Gnome3 need some polishing, but let's face it, cutting edge
is... cutting. And many of us prefer the new unfinished than the old but
stable[0]. That's why I switched from Debian to Ubuntu in the first place, and
even then I was running Sid.

So, ubuntu on cell phones? What better news?

IMHO, in every matter, there is always big group that is more conservative and
resists a change, but fortunately the change is happening anyway.

[0][http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/articles/software-philosophy-
re...](http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/articles/software-philosophy-release-
early-release-often-vs-polished-releases/)

------
niels_olson
So, I have a buddy who wants to try Linux on a netbook that he has found no
use for. Mint or Ubuntu?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Unity is ideal for netbooks/small screens. (thus menu on top, et cetera). The
people complaining are largely those with larger screens who are either stuck
in their ways or haven't bothered to figure out how to customize it to their
liking.

~~~
keithpeter
I'd take a very minor issue with this: try xfce with dmenu (from the suckless
tools package) bound to the super key. I maximise applications within xfce
using alt-F11. All window decorations gone, no OS junk pixels visible at all.
I invoke applications using dmenu. I switch between windows with alt-tab, and
workspaces with alt-ctrl-arrows.

Perhaps I'm taking this to extremes...

~~~
bryanlarsen
I'm not sure what you're gaining (unless you're also hiding the application's
menu). A maximized application in Unity doesn't waste any more space than what
you describe. The top bar is still visible, but it's merged with the menu, so
there's no effective wastage.

~~~
keithpeter
True, but there is nothing appearing at the left if I wait too long on the
File menu, and the indicators are hidden.

Perhaps this is an extreme example. I actually rather like Unity on small
screens.

