

The future of Ubuntu revealed - johnr8201
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/the-future-of-ubuntu-revealed-1114487

======
pajju
I love Ubuntu 12.04. Remarkable well thought user experience.

6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and is my primary machine
now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies and love every small part
of the web-integration + the Ubuntu software market.

Ubuntu Desktop is strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight
integration with web-services. Many Developers have started writing apps for
ubuntu software market.

The concept of HUD to search inside webapps and navigate complex menu's is
revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop
apps, recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can
search inside that app. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any
webapp). The Ubuntu Software center has tons of good apps and they also give
Free 5GB cloud storage.

I'm blown away with all the features, and its worth being part of this big
change.

One feature I wished to have - a seamless OS upgrade like iOS.

~~~
StavrosK
> One feature I wished to have - a seamless OS upgrade like iOS.

What's wrong with the current OS upgrade process?

~~~
Adrock
It has seams for a lot of people.

Personally, every upgrade I've done has resulted in a broken system. I'm not
doing anything out of the ordinary. Half the time I'm left with a system that
won't even boot and I have to do a fresh install.

~~~
StavrosK
Wow, that's odd. My desktop has been running the same installation since 10.04
or so and all the upgrades worked fine (apart from minor gnome-shell toolbar
breakage).

------
unimpressive
"We're very comfortable with where we are. Our revenue is growing at a healthy
pace."

I have to ask myself if that's true, or if they're just saying that.

~~~
meaty
Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's
true.

~~~
ekianjo
I am more pissed of by the regressions in compatibility in 12.10 than the
Amazon thingy that could be turned off in 3 seconds.

~~~
w1ntermute
Come to Xubuntu, 12.10 works perfectly.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah, that is what I heard. Which makes me wonder what went wrong in the main
distribution.

~~~
zem
possibly trying to move in too many directions at once. xubuntu used a
relatively stabler and better-shaken-out desktop, which meant one fewer moving
piece to introduce incompatibilities.

------
ComputerGuru
I was an Ubuntu fan for a long time, but now I've gone back to Debian. Ubuntu
has become far too dumbed down for me.

I've ranted about the dumbing down of UIs previously on HN (re: Windows 8
Metro/WinRT, OS X Launchpad), but none are as terrible as Unity. It's
impossible to find what you're looking for with it, it's terribly unintuitive,
it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings, makes it
impossible to find out what applications you have (since software store apps
and normal apps are held separate), and once Gnome fallback is disabled/no
longer ships, will be shoved down users' throats more than WinRT or Launchpad
are.

This and a number of other missteps on Canonical's side ( _cough_ Amazon
_cough_ ) have made me a disbeliever.

I've actually spoken at length with some Canonical business representatives
out of London on this issue, and when I laid out some of the limitations of
Unity to them over the phone, I was surprised to hear them readily agree that
it's nowhere near perfect, and in many ways a step back from the tried and
tested UX. I can't remember the specific complaints that I voiced at the time
(this was a while ago), but they promised to be in touch when the issues have
been addressed, but I'm not holding my breath on that happening.

~~~
vidarh
> It's impossible to find what you're looking for with it

Huh? You press the windows key, and start typing in the name of what you want
to look for. I find it far easier to find things with Unity than before.

> it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings

I was planning on installing a tiling window manager when I first installed
Ubuntu 12.04, as I really want the desktop environment to not get in my way. I
stuck with Ubuntu because contrary to your experience,to me it's the most
productive UI I've used in the last 20 years+.

> makes it impossible to find out what applications you have (since software
> store apps and normal apps are held separate)

"dpkg -l" like in any Debian based system. I find this a ridiculous complaint
from someone who has gone back to Debian, though - any way you can find this
info in Debian is available to you in Ubuntu.

> once Gnome fallback is disabled/no longer ships, will be shoved down users'
> throats more than WinRT or Launchpad are.

As long as _Debian_ ships alternatives, going back is fairly easy. But as it
stands, there are plenty other alternatives for Ubuntu too, shipped by the
community.

Personally, 12.04 with Unity was what truly sold me on Ubuntu, and I suspect
the same will be true for far more users than they lose over it.

~~~
Surio
Good addressing of concerns raised.

>> Personally, 12.04 with Unity was what truly sold me on Ubuntu, and I
suspect the same will be true for far more users than they lose over it.

This is a correct observation (at least my own anecdata verifies it too).

------
crsilk
On a slightly related note. I would really like to see this fixed in Ubuntu
for me to really enjoy it as a developer:

[http://askubuntu.com/questions/220357/improve-eclipse-
user-i...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/220357/improve-eclipse-user-
interface)

~~~
lepacheco
going on preferences->appearance and changing the theme from GTK to classic
made it much better for me (will look just like previous version). Also, in
classic mode, the UI fonts are integrated with the window manager so you can
change them, make them smaller, etc...

~~~
crsilk
The classic look suffers from the same issues. The padding is far too heavy on
most of the UI elements.

If you use Eclipse on OSX or Windows with a lot of project folders loaded at
once, you will see how much better it is than on Linux.

Maybe this is the issue I'm having when trying to explain the problem I'm
facing. A lot of people seem to think that I'm complaining about the new Juno
interface when this issue has been around much longer than Juno.

------
sciurus
The work they're doing for the new hardware and software enablement on the LTS
is interesting.

"LXF: Looking towards the server, I know recently that you increased your
support life cycle to five years…

JS: Our LTS releases used to be three years on the desktop and five on the
server, and we made two changes. One was bringing the desktop up to five
years, and that was in response to enterprise demand.

And the second change we made was to make a stronger commitment around making
those LTS versions available on new hardware as it comes out, so that people
can get hardware refreshes and still maintain a stable software platform
across the enterprise.

So we'll make the 12.10 kernel work with 12.04 and the 13.04 kernel work with
12.04. So if you need that kernel for hardware support, it will be available.

LXF: Red Hat recently announced it was increasing its server support cycle
from, I think it was, seven years to 10 years; does Ubuntu feel any pressure
to match that?

JS: We're not seeing that right now. I think the reason is the different use
cases in terms of people who use Red Hat and people who use Ubuntu. And,
interestingly, we're seeing pressure almost in the opposite direction.

One of the things that's happening in the server world is that everything
cloud-related is so fast moving, it's not realistic to think you're going to
do something now and want the same tools and software in 10 years. What we see
is people wanting the stability of the base OS, but wanting new hardware
support for one, and newer software for cloud-related activities.

So, they want the new OpenStack, for example, on a 12.04 LTS base, so that's
another thing we've committed to do with 12.04. In six months' time, you'll be
able to get the newest OpenStack. 12.04 shipped with OpenStack Essex; but when
Folsom comes out, the next version, people are going to want that not just on
Ubuntu 12.10, but also on 12.04, which is for stable production."

------
chmike
I see so many praises of Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop that I have to limit my comment
to negative critics to add value to the discussion. Though I want to stress
that I'm mostly very happy about it.

One problem I have is that applications tend to change the location of their
windows, especially Thunderbird. This has two nasty consequences. The first
one is that the window (editing mail) might be moved to another virtual
desktop when switching to another app temporarily. The second one is that the
moved window may have its top bar covered by the desktop top menu. So it is
not possible to grab the window and move it.

Another nasty UX is that the app menu move to the deskto top bar is sometime
covered by the program name or other data and becomes inaccessible.

And finally the worst of all is that NoMachine doesn't work any more because
of compiz using the 3D accelerator. The fall back to 2D is only partially
working. I would like to be able to use Ubuntu desktop remotely with a secure
connection through high latency and slow connections as NoMachine makes it
possible. This makes me want to move away from Ubuntu.

~~~
chmike
I'm replying to my own message to provide some solutions I found to the
problems I reported.

First, regarding inaccessible window header bar, one must use the alt-right
click magic action to display the window manager menu and select the move
window. This works wherever we click in the window. The other menu commands
might also be useful. However, my opinion is that it is bad UX and
inefficient.

Second, regarding NoMachine, I tested Xubuntu which doesn't depend on 3D
accelerator and with some trick it can be used as an ersatz of Ubuntu. For the
trick that works see here:
<https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/157817> One widget is not
working, but it is not critical.

------
RyanZAG
Canonical (and Microsoft) seem to be pushing heavily for 'design by user
testing' which equates pretty closely to 'design by committee'. Interestingly,
both iOS and Android Holo are the very opposite of this - 'design by fiat'
where one or two people are generally setting the tone for the entire OS
design based on their own preferences.

IMHO, iOS and Android are both easier to use and nicer to look at than Windows
8 and Unity - seems like a very clear indicator to me that 'design by user
testing' is a very bad approach.

Any way to actually research this? Some kind of simple test of putting 'design
by committee' against 'design by fiat' and having a 3rd party group grade the
two in a blind side-by-side test of different UI? Seems like research worth
pursuing considering how much money MS and Canonical and throwing away on this
- and destroying their businesses in the process.

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't understand how doing user testing is necessarily "design by
committee". Regardless of how you come up with your ideas you need to test
them on actual users in order to benchmark what works and what doesn't.

~~~
RyanZAG
That sounds correct - but has it actually been proven that you should design
around simple indicators from user testing?

The general usage patterns of iOS were never developed with user testing at
the core. Same for Android Holo. These designs were created directly from a
designers intuition and have since been improved slightly with user feedback
and testing. If you read up on publicly available information about the
process though, it is clear that user testing was not the central issue.

Meanwhile whenever you read anything regarding Windows 8 or Unity design, the
use of user testing was always core to the design process - often toted as the
most important part. Just read this article and the main theme of their design
discussion is on user testing.

Basically, I think this area needs more research rather than an off the cuff
"you need to test them on actual users in order to benchmark what works and
what doesn't". Sounds correct, but has anybody actually tested that? Often
your test users don't see the big picture and don't really know themselves
what they want. They're just answering 'big blocks were easier to click on'.
That doesn't mean you must use big blocks - you need to consider the interface
and usage as a whole, not simple data points from testing and consider your
design done...

~~~
jiggy2011
I think it depends on what you mean by "user testing". Rather than focus
groups and asking users to design to app for you (which would be bad) I assume
what is being done would be to provide a few sample interfaces and record
users doing various tasks. You can also track eye movements and see which
parts of the interface they concentrate on most.

If they take 10 minutes to figure out one interface and 10 seconds to figure
out another one for example it's quite obvious which one is more intuitive.

------
microwise
Unlike Windows(as some of you are complaining about), Ubuntu is highly
customizable, so ranting about Unity or Amazon is useless for techie guys like
us, unless you are talking about the non-techie user who doesn't care that
lots of his/her info in Windows/Mac is shared with third parties.

