5 ms·

Am I the only one who thinks that at the GUI level Ubuntu is better than OS X? (I use Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 8.04 extensively)

grandalf 17y ago
It is for usability. Ubuntu's only weakness is that at the pixel level it's a bit uglier than OSX in some areas... and that by default it doesn't come with quite the same level of fonts...
- nearestneighbor 17y ago
  Fonts are in the eye (or rather, visual cortex) of the beholder. I got used to the Mac fonts, but at first I thought it was some kind of bad joke or misconfiguration. They seemed annoyingly blurry. My theory is that one's brain gets used to the particular fonts and may not like change very much.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    You are right that OSX uses different subpixel rendering than Windows, but I think that at present the free fonts on Ubuntu are not quite at the level of OSX's fonts and some of Adobe's. This could just be my own aesthetic taste, but I think it could also be due to those companies having highly paid font designers working on those details.
    - nailer 17y ago
      Agfa (who do the Ubuntu / Fedora fonts) developers are paid just like anyone else.
      - grandalf 17y ago
        Hmm... Well I admit some of the free fonts are awesome... but I have not found them to be quite as pleasing... Maybe it's just my own taste... not worth arguing about since Ubuntu is awesome and the free fonts are certainly good enough for most purposes...
nailer 17y ago
In some respects - I switched from GNOME to OS X and I found that Nautilus respected the tree a lot more than OS X did, NetworkManager also showed signal strength before OS X's top bar network thingy did. Only reason I quit is that after speccing hardware that had OSS drivers (and was fairly underpowered to boot), drivers in Ubuntu still didn't work 100% (eg, connecting to external displays broke X render support) and this got worse over time (Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements). I still develop for Ubuntu, but inside a VM.
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  (Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements). Ugh, I had this same problem. Every time I upgraded Ubuntu, hardware rendering got another 10x performance decrease and more bugs. Eventually I couldn't even enable vsync, so I got horrible tearing while watching videos. I partially blame Ubuntu for this, since they could have held back Intel's driver updates. Ultimately though, it was Intel's fault for releasing ever-buggier drivers. A lot of the bugs you're talking about were fixed in updates to 9.10, but I gave up and got a Mac way before that.
  - ori_b 17y ago
    The problem is that X had a massive amount of crap in it. Getting rid of the crap is hard, and things really had to get worse before they got better. Switching acceleration architectures to something that's not from the '80s, allowing modern hardware to effectively accelerate the UI, allowing video to interact with OpenGL and so on needed to be done, and there was really no good way to do it painlessly.
    - AngryParsley 17y ago
      I can think of one way: don't put new drivers in your distro until they're at least as good as old drivers.
      - nailer 17y ago
barrkel 17y ago
Ubuntu's default control layout looks ridiculous to me - everything is too far apart, the margins are too big, the buttons are too big, the fonts are too big, acres of space are wasted by toolbars in the File Browser in the screenshot, etc. It looks like a toy for people with poor eyesight.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Or big screens. Unix machines have traditionally been used with big monitors. It's not surprising at all Gnome uses lots of pixels. And there is nothing forcing you to use Ubuntu's default layout. You have literally hundreds of options to choose from. I tend to change look and feel more or less on a monthly basis.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    The more you change it, though, the less likely you are ever to get it back to a previous set of settings. :( Switch to KDE and back to Gnome in Ubuntu 9.10, and you'll find yourself, bizarrely, with a KDEesque mouse theme, even after you uninstall all the kubuntu-desktop stuff (which should not be necessary, I would expect). I use Ubuntu because I have the free time to screw around with my home computer, but I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't have the time and knowledge to do that, unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box.
    - pyre 17y ago
      > unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box. Most people don't. At the very least, most (non-geek) people don't switch desktop environments often. The people that are 'too busy' will just settle on a desktop environment and stick with it.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    I live with Windows 7 on two monitors, combined pixel area approximately 3600x1200, and it's still not enough even with Windows's more condensed by default tree views, list views, menu bars, toolbars etc. I have e.g. my desktop icons dialed down to 32x32px. I like my toolbar buttons 16x16px. I like my buttons approximately 75x25px. Information density. When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the total vertical space wastage at the top of Windows Explorer is 65 pixels, including title bar, toolbar, menu bar and location textbox. This is possible because on XP the toolbars and menu bars have customizable locations, unlike Vista and above - I have screenshots in my blog here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html Unless you are talking about a pixel area somewhere in the region of 8000x3000 on high dpi screens, the Ubuntu proportions are nowhere near acceptable.
carbon8 17y ago
Gnome's biggest downside is the same core problem of the Windows interface: having a menu bolted on to each window is incredibly inelegant, redundant and wasteful of screen space.
- antigua 17y ago
  OS X's biggest downside is the same core problem of the Windows interface: having icons, menus and windows bolted on to a desktop is incredibly inelegant, redundant and wasteful of screen space.
  - danieldon 17y ago
    How does that make any sense whatsoever as a response to the OP?
    - antigua 17y ago
      Linux distributions can get all the face lifts in the world, but at the end of the day they were not designed to be cute and accessible.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  OSX's biggest downside is having a fixed region of the screen that changes according to the context of the selected window on the desktop. That makes it impossible to check what two windows can do or even what program is responsible for them until they are selected. That's terribly inelegant solution that separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data (the menu). Admit it. That's a draw.
  - carbon8 17y ago
    "what program is responsible for them" This is handled by title bars in Gnome, OS X and Windows, not window menu bars. "separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data" The menus don't just act on what's in the window. At least some menu items act on the application itself. In a multiple document interface with a system that ties menus to windows, the menu of one window acts on multiple other windows. The other windows are either sub windows shoved inside the main window or they are windows floating independently from the window with the menu, which means you need to return focus to the main window to use the menu. In a single document interfaces, the same menu, application controls and all, is repeated on each individual window. Furthermore, in both of those cases, once you close the window with the menu bar, you no longer have access to any controls for the application, which is why most applications in these windowing systems can't run without at least one window open.
jsz0 17y ago
GNOME itself has evolved nicely but the wheels fall off the Ubuntu UI when you start installing applications. If you're careful and only install GTK apps it's bearable but once you mix in QT apps and other non-GTK stuff you have a horrible mix of UIs that lack consistency.
- cma 17y ago
  You can just as easily substitute "Ubuntu" with "OS X" above since QT runs on OS X.

grandalf 17y ago

It is for usability. Ubuntu's only weakness is that at the pixel level it's a bit uglier than OSX in some areas... and that by default it doesn't come with quite the same level of fonts...

nearestneighbor 17y ago
Fonts are in the eye (or rather, visual cortex) of the beholder. I got used to the Mac fonts, but at first I thought it was some kind of bad joke or misconfiguration. They seemed annoyingly blurry. My theory is that one's brain gets used to the particular fonts and may not like change very much.
- grandalf 17y ago
  You are right that OSX uses different subpixel rendering than Windows, but I think that at present the free fonts on Ubuntu are not quite at the level of OSX's fonts and some of Adobe's. This could just be my own aesthetic taste, but I think it could also be due to those companies having highly paid font designers working on those details.
  - nailer 17y ago
    Agfa (who do the Ubuntu / Fedora fonts) developers are paid just like anyone else.
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Hmm... Well I admit some of the free fonts are awesome... but I have not found them to be quite as pleasing... Maybe it's just my own taste... not worth arguing about since Ubuntu is awesome and the free fonts are certainly good enough for most purposes...

nailer 17y ago

In some respects - I switched from GNOME to OS X and I found that Nautilus respected the tree a lot more than OS X did, NetworkManager also showed signal strength before OS X's top bar network thingy did. Only reason I quit is that after speccing hardware that had OSS drivers (and was fairly underpowered to boot), drivers in Ubuntu still didn't work 100% (eg, connecting to external displays broke X render support) and this got worse over time (Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements). I still develop for Ubuntu, but inside a VM.

AngryParsley 17y ago
(Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements). Ugh, I had this same problem. Every time I upgraded Ubuntu, hardware rendering got another 10x performance decrease and more bugs. Eventually I couldn't even enable vsync, so I got horrible tearing while watching videos. I partially blame Ubuntu for this, since they could have held back Intel's driver updates. Ultimately though, it was Intel's fault for releasing ever-buggier drivers. A lot of the bugs you're talking about were fixed in updates to 9.10, but I gave up and got a Mac way before that.
- ori_b 17y ago
  The problem is that X had a massive amount of crap in it. Getting rid of the crap is hard, and things really had to get worse before they got better. Switching acceleration architectures to something that's not from the '80s, allowing modern hardware to effectively accelerate the UI, allowing video to interact with OpenGL and so on needed to be done, and there was really no good way to do it painlessly.
  - AngryParsley 17y ago
    I can think of one way: don't put new drivers in your distro until they're at least as good as old drivers.
    - nailer 17y ago

barrkel 17y ago

Ubuntu's default control layout looks ridiculous to me - everything is too far apart, the margins are too big, the buttons are too big, the fonts are too big, acres of space are wasted by toolbars in the File Browser in the screenshot, etc. It looks like a toy for people with poor eyesight.

rbanffy 17y ago
Or big screens. Unix machines have traditionally been used with big monitors. It's not surprising at all Gnome uses lots of pixels. And there is nothing forcing you to use Ubuntu's default layout. You have literally hundreds of options to choose from. I tend to change look and feel more or less on a monthly basis.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  The more you change it, though, the less likely you are ever to get it back to a previous set of settings. :( Switch to KDE and back to Gnome in Ubuntu 9.10, and you'll find yourself, bizarrely, with a KDEesque mouse theme, even after you uninstall all the kubuntu-desktop stuff (which should not be necessary, I would expect). I use Ubuntu because I have the free time to screw around with my home computer, but I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't have the time and knowledge to do that, unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box.
  - pyre 17y ago
    > unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box. Most people don't. At the very least, most (non-geek) people don't switch desktop environments often. The people that are 'too busy' will just settle on a desktop environment and stick with it.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I live with Windows 7 on two monitors, combined pixel area approximately 3600x1200, and it's still not enough even with Windows's more condensed by default tree views, list views, menu bars, toolbars etc. I have e.g. my desktop icons dialed down to 32x32px. I like my toolbar buttons 16x16px. I like my buttons approximately 75x25px. Information density. When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the total vertical space wastage at the top of Windows Explorer is 65 pixels, including title bar, toolbar, menu bar and location textbox. This is possible because on XP the toolbars and menu bars have customizable locations, unlike Vista and above - I have screenshots in my blog here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html Unless you are talking about a pixel area somewhere in the region of 8000x3000 on high dpi screens, the Ubuntu proportions are nowhere near acceptable.

carbon8 17y ago

Gnome's biggest downside is the same core problem of the Windows interface: having a menu bolted on to each window is incredibly inelegant, redundant and wasteful of screen space.

antigua 17y ago
OS X's biggest downside is the same core problem of the Windows interface: having icons, menus and windows bolted on to a desktop is incredibly inelegant, redundant and wasteful of screen space.
- danieldon 17y ago
  How does that make any sense whatsoever as a response to the OP?
  - antigua 17y ago
    Linux distributions can get all the face lifts in the world, but at the end of the day they were not designed to be cute and accessible.
rbanffy 17y ago
OSX's biggest downside is having a fixed region of the screen that changes according to the context of the selected window on the desktop. That makes it impossible to check what two windows can do or even what program is responsible for them until they are selected. That's terribly inelegant solution that separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data (the menu). Admit it. That's a draw.
- carbon8 17y ago
  "what program is responsible for them" This is handled by title bars in Gnome, OS X and Windows, not window menu bars. "separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data" The menus don't just act on what's in the window. At least some menu items act on the application itself. In a multiple document interface with a system that ties menus to windows, the menu of one window acts on multiple other windows. The other windows are either sub windows shoved inside the main window or they are windows floating independently from the window with the menu, which means you need to return focus to the main window to use the menu. In a single document interfaces, the same menu, application controls and all, is repeated on each individual window. Furthermore, in both of those cases, once you close the window with the menu bar, you no longer have access to any controls for the application, which is why most applications in these windowing systems can't run without at least one window open.

jsz0 17y ago

GNOME itself has evolved nicely but the wheels fall off the Ubuntu UI when you start installing applications. If you're careful and only install GTK apps it's bearable but once you mix in QT apps and other non-GTK stuff you have a horrible mix of UIs that lack consistency.

cma 17y ago
You can just as easily substitute "Ubuntu" with "OS X" above since QT runs on OS X.