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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 U
by acabal 15y ago
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 15y agoI 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.
- SWengineer 15y agoIf Ubuntu can get unity very responsive and polished I'll give it another go. Ever since unity came out i've overheard a disturbing number of people complaining about stability and just the user experience in general.
- DanBC 15y agoWho 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 15y agoGenerally, 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.