4 ms·
The title carries sarcasm as soon as you finish the article half-way. I totally agree that usability is damn important. One reason I stopped using Ubuntu Deskt
by yeukhon 11y ago
The title carries sarcasm as soon as you finish the article half-way.
I totally agree that usability is damn important. One reason I stopped using Ubuntu Desktop version is exactly the poor usability of Unity, and I now prefer headless (and if I ever need browser I'd use X-windows).
For email client I either use Thunderbird, or Outlook 2013, simply because graphical interface is easier to work with. I code using VIM and I do a lot of work from terminal, but I can't image myself learning all the tricks like dragging image, setting up a meeting, viewing people's availability the next day all via terminal screen. Doable but I still think graphical interface has advantage. The thing I dislike about email clients like Outlook is their WYSIWYG editor as sometimes the editor is limited, or too aggressive. But since my job involves a lot of communication, I do need the convenience of WYSIWYG and COPY-PASTE. What a struggle.
- sp332 11y agoIt's pretty easy to install other desktop environments on Ubuntu. I run with xfce because I just need a taskbar to keep track of my terminal windows.
- p4bl0 11y agoWhy bother with the desktop environment at all in that case? You could just install a window manager (I like Openbox but you may prefer a tiling wm) and xfce4-panel, which works pretty well standalone. This has been my setup for years now :).
- iso8859-1 11y agoGood point. But what is a desktop environment anyway (one could argue that you made your own)? For example, Lxde already uses Openbox, yet Openbox is not just the "WM for LXDE".
- p4bl0 11y agoUsually, desktop environments come with a lot of software, like a graphical file browser, games, something to display the content of a directory on the wallpaper (the "Desktop" itself), etc. that I don't need, so I prefer to install only what I need (and concerning graphical software, that is only openbox, xfce4-panel, emacs, rxvt-unicode, inkscape, gimp, and iceweasel). But in a sens you are right, it's like I composed my own minimal desktop environment :).
- TsiCClawOfLight 11y agoHave you tried a tiling wm? I use i3, it's great :-)
- sp332 11y agoI have tried one but the learning curve was too steep for my net productivity to recover.
- thanksgiving 11y agoI'd prefer things that need formatting be an attachment such as rtf or pdf leaving the email in plain text. There is no reason why personally written email needs rich text.
- gress 11y agoIt should also be all caps. There is no reason why personally written email needs two cases.
- bigger_cheese 11y agoI use outlook at my work for email and its not uncommon to send screenshots and similar. A common workflow for me is to hit print screen paste into the message compose window, crop the image and super impose annotations onto it using the office drawing tools (circle, arrows, text box etc). I also like the integration with Communicator and calendar, Having notification about when people are online in meetings and which building they are in (my work has multiple sites) is handy. I don't usually like Microsoft products but Outlook is pretty solid in my opinion. The only alternative I've really seen is Lotus Notes.
- mappu 11y agoDoes that really crop the image, or just hide parts of it? I ask because cropping in Word can be undone by another recipient.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoDo you apply an extreme minimalist styling to other areas of your daily life - like "there's no need to clothes to be any other colour than gray"? or "there's no need for food to have a flavour as long as it's nutritious". Genuine question. Most people use some form of flourish even in handwriting - an underline, all-caps, increased letter size or spacing, a personally preferred colour; isn't it weird to not have the facility for that in email?
- thanksgiving 11y ago