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> I think Canonical had a chance to make a real impact here but they essentially blew it. I keep seeing claims being made, and mostly by (former?) Linux superu

by mekoka 14y ago

> I think Canonical had a chance to make a real impact here but they essentially blew it. I keep seeing claims being made, and mostly by (former?) Linux superusers, that Canonical and Ubuntu are "doomed". Could someone point me to some numbers that show signs of this? I know when the Unity desktop came out, a lot of people were flaming. I didn't install it on my laptop (I'm still on 10.04 LTS), but I did on a colleague's desktop. From time to time, I have to assist him with code he's writing. During those sessions I have to interact with it and to be honest I'm not pleased, but each time I ask him if he wouldn't be interested in switching to Gnome or maybe installing Mint or something, he keeps saying it's not that bad. I'm sitting next to him and frustrated because I can't find where everything is and how to bring stuff up, but when I ask, he just presses a few keys and whatever we need shows up on screen. When Miguel de Icaza's post came out last week and I saw claims on the doom of Ubuntu, I started looking for evidence. I couldn't find anything that in fact confirmed this. I found a lot of people who complained about Unity last year when it first came out, but fast forward in 2012 and there are also more and more posts of people going I use to hate it with a passion, but I have to admit, it's now growing on me. Not everything is perfect, but with a bit of work I think they're on to something. Also interesting to me was that I had a sense that the most positive reviews came from people with no prior Linux experience. So much so that I'm getting more and more curious about it and I'm slowly mentally preparing to make a switch to it. Is it possible that Canonical is actually moving away from Gnome and taking things in-house to avoid exactly the problems that Miguel de Icaza is underlining?

jeremyjh 14y ago
>Is it possible that Canonical is actually moving away from Gnome and taking things in-house to avoid exactly the problems that Miguel de Icaza is underlining? I do think this is part of it though they probably wouldn't say it way. They certainly do want a consistent user experience - and they want one that rivals OS X. I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet. It all takes some getting used to for a new user, including OS X. Now I can definitely understand the frustration though of someone who just upgraded their OS only to find they don't know how to use it anymore.
- willvarfar 14y ago
  > I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet. you shouldn't have to learn how to use the desktop! I tried out Unity, I really did. I didn't like it and my apps kept getting lost when minimized and I couldn't have lots of small windows open and it just fixed something that wasn't broken for me. Like everyone else, I went to Xfce.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    But you do have to learn how to use a desktop. You even spent sometime learning how to use a mouse. I use xfce on my main machine and unity on the oops I need skype machine and I hate the switch, but that's because I have not invested time to use it well - and chances Are I probably won't, just like I won't learn the annoying parts of OSX desktops are a tool like any other - the mentality that they should be intuitive or easy leads down the path of eye candy as opposed to functionlity.
    - elviejo 14y ago
      when you learn to drive a car.... you can drive almost all cars... the biggest difference is with the manual o automatic gears.... when you learn to use a computer you should be able to use many of them whithout having to learn anything.
      - jeremyjh 14y ago
        A car does one job. A computer does many jobs. Learning to do each job a little differently, adds up to a lot of learning. I don't know what "you should" has to do with it - I'm just pointing out that for all desktops that currently exist, you have to learn how to use it.
    - willvarfar 14y ago
      (a link you may like, from my blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... )
lukeschlather 14y ago
What really bothers me about Unity is that I haven't seen it work. I've got a quad-core machine with a decent NVidia GPU and 4GB of ram, and I was seeing multiple seconds of UI lag, even on the 2D mode. I switched to Xfce and haven't looked back. Everything is snappy, and everything is configurable.
- factorialboy 14y ago
  I love Xfce myself, but Unity on 12.04 feels really snappy on my System76 laptop.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Maybe a config problem ? It works perfectly fine on my old Core2Duo laptop, with 4Gb RAM. Almost never experienced multi-seconds lag (but I do admit I see some crashes here and there) in the latest Ubuntu release.
  - VolatileVoid 14y ago
    This, IMHO, is the problem right here in a nutshell. Maybe it's a config problem. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's sunspots. Who cares? It doesn't JUST WORK and that - more than anything else - is what will doom Desktop Linux. I run Ubuntu on what essentially amounts to a media desktop. It does work, but that's because I spent hours on researching the simplest, cheapest hardware config that would work seamlessly with Ubuntu without requiring me to compile my own drivers, etc. The fact is that I, even as a power user, really don't want to spend hours messing around with that stuff... so I can't imagine the Average Joe would want to.
    - xtracto 14y ago
      Oh, but that has been an issue since the ancient times of the beginning of Linux. Being it monitors/screens, (win)modems, audio, etc. Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work.
macco 14y ago
Thanks for this comment. I personally think Unity kicks ass. It is the best out of the box experience I ever had with a desktop os. Of course my heavily customized gnome 2 were better suited for me, because every detail was tweaked by myself. Unity I can use out of the box and it is working really fine. I sell laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 and I have a return rate of 3%, normal return rates are 20 to 30 %. It can't be that bad for normal users.
- brokenparser 14y ago
  How can you live with having to search everything? Gnome-shell gives you a nice list of all your applications and you can switch between categories. The biggest bug since the introduction of Unity besides trying hard to make you remember application names is that F1 no longer opens help. The question mark symbol has also disappeared from the top panel. After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible. Here's how: Right-click the Ubuntu logo* Choose applications Click "Filter results" The buttons presented are individual toggle-buttons, not the usual switch buttons. Turn the next category on, turn the previous category off. Madness. And on top of everything that's badly designed, it's also unresponsive. A lot of clicks are missed and this is especially noticeable with the workspace switcher. For now, there's the option of installing gnome-session-fallback. It introduces a "GNOME classic (no effects)" option in LightDM which works well and has the old, functional workspace switcher. Still no F1 for help, but it sits under Applications > Accessories so it's relatively discoverable. The panels can be customised by holding down ALT+Super while right-clicking them (thank you again, Google). Sadly, Gnome is deprecating the fallback session in favor of a software rasteriser ("llvmpipe") to run Gnome-shell where a hardware rasteriser is unavailable. The next release will also see the lock screen moved into the shell so it'll look pretty, but it better be the most stable release they've ever had since the last 2.x. Sorry to be cynical, but I doubt it. *: This doesn't work in Unity 2D. Tough.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    How can you live with having to search everything? (Disclosure: satisfied Unity user here) If you interact with the machine primarily through the keyboard, "search everything" is a plus, not a minus. It means you can easily launch new applications without having to take your hand off the KB and move it over to the mouse. Launching applications is much faster for me in Unity than it was in GNOME 2.x, simply because typing ALT plus the first three characters of the application name (or a generally descriptive word: ALT + "music" finds Rhythmbox, for instance) is faster than rooting around a multi-level menu. After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible This is because "listing applications" in Unity is a failure case. Users don't want to list applications; they want to launch the one application they were looking for. The point of Unity's launcher is to make digging through a long list of apps to find the one you wanted obsolete.

by mekoka 14y ago

jeremyjh 14y ago

>Is it possible that Canonical is actually moving away from Gnome and taking things in-house to avoid exactly the problems that Miguel de Icaza is underlining? I do think this is part of it though they probably wouldn't say it way. They certainly do want a consistent user experience - and they want one that rivals OS X. I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet. It all takes some getting used to for a new user, including OS X. Now I can definitely understand the frustration though of someone who just upgraded their OS only to find they don't know how to use it anymore.

willvarfar 14y ago
> I don't understand why people complain about using software they haven't learned how to use yet. you shouldn't have to learn how to use the desktop! I tried out Unity, I really did. I didn't like it and my apps kept getting lost when minimized and I couldn't have lots of small windows open and it just fixed something that wasn't broken for me. Like everyone else, I went to Xfce.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  But you do have to learn how to use a desktop. You even spent sometime learning how to use a mouse. I use xfce on my main machine and unity on the oops I need skype machine and I hate the switch, but that's because I have not invested time to use it well - and chances Are I probably won't, just like I won't learn the annoying parts of OSX desktops are a tool like any other - the mentality that they should be intuitive or easy leads down the path of eye candy as opposed to functionlity.
  - elviejo 14y ago
    when you learn to drive a car.... you can drive almost all cars... the biggest difference is with the manual o automatic gears.... when you learn to use a computer you should be able to use many of them whithout having to learn anything.
    - jeremyjh 14y ago
      A car does one job. A computer does many jobs. Learning to do each job a little differently, adds up to a lot of learning. I don't know what "you should" has to do with it - I'm just pointing out that for all desktops that currently exist, you have to learn how to use it.
  - willvarfar 14y ago
    (a link you may like, from my blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... )

lukeschlather 14y ago

What really bothers me about Unity is that I haven't seen it work. I've got a quad-core machine with a decent NVidia GPU and 4GB of ram, and I was seeing multiple seconds of UI lag, even on the 2D mode. I switched to Xfce and haven't looked back. Everything is snappy, and everything is configurable.

factorialboy 14y ago
I love Xfce myself, but Unity on 12.04 feels really snappy on my System76 laptop.
ekianjo 14y ago
Maybe a config problem ? It works perfectly fine on my old Core2Duo laptop, with 4Gb RAM. Almost never experienced multi-seconds lag (but I do admit I see some crashes here and there) in the latest Ubuntu release.
- VolatileVoid 14y ago
  This, IMHO, is the problem right here in a nutshell. Maybe it's a config problem. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's sunspots. Who cares? It doesn't JUST WORK and that - more than anything else - is what will doom Desktop Linux. I run Ubuntu on what essentially amounts to a media desktop. It does work, but that's because I spent hours on researching the simplest, cheapest hardware config that would work seamlessly with Ubuntu without requiring me to compile my own drivers, etc. The fact is that I, even as a power user, really don't want to spend hours messing around with that stuff... so I can't imagine the Average Joe would want to.
  - xtracto 14y ago
    Oh, but that has been an issue since the ancient times of the beginning of Linux. Being it monitors/screens, (win)modems, audio, etc. Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work.

macco 14y ago

Thanks for this comment. I personally think Unity kicks ass. It is the best out of the box experience I ever had with a desktop os. Of course my heavily customized gnome 2 were better suited for me, because every detail was tweaked by myself. Unity I can use out of the box and it is working really fine. I sell laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 and I have a return rate of 3%, normal return rates are 20 to 30 %. It can't be that bad for normal users.

brokenparser 14y ago
How can you live with having to search everything? Gnome-shell gives you a nice list of all your applications and you can switch between categories. The biggest bug since the introduction of Unity besides trying hard to make you remember application names is that F1 no longer opens help. The question mark symbol has also disappeared from the top panel. After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible. Here's how: Right-click the Ubuntu logo* Choose applications Click "Filter results" The buttons presented are individual toggle-buttons, not the usual switch buttons. Turn the next category on, turn the previous category off. Madness. And on top of everything that's badly designed, it's also unresponsive. A lot of clicks are missed and this is especially noticeable with the workspace switcher. For now, there's the option of installing gnome-session-fallback. It introduces a "GNOME classic (no effects)" option in LightDM which works well and has the old, functional workspace switcher. Still no F1 for help, but it sits under Applications > Accessories so it's relatively discoverable. The panels can be customised by holding down ALT+Super while right-clicking them (thank you again, Google). Sadly, Gnome is deprecating the fallback session in favor of a software rasteriser ("llvmpipe") to run Gnome-shell where a hardware rasteriser is unavailable. The next release will also see the lock screen moved into the shell so it'll look pretty, but it better be the most stable release they've ever had since the last 2.x. Sorry to be cynical, but I doubt it. *: This doesn't work in Unity 2D. Tough.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  How can you live with having to search everything? (Disclosure: satisfied Unity user here) If you interact with the machine primarily through the keyboard, "search everything" is a plus, not a minus. It means you can easily launch new applications without having to take your hand off the KB and move it over to the mouse. Launching applications is much faster for me in Unity than it was in GNOME 2.x, simply because typing ALT plus the first three characters of the application name (or a generally descriptive word: ALT + "music" finds Rhythmbox, for instance) is faster than rooting around a multi-level menu. After grudgingly Googling how to use Unity, I found the steps to list applications and it's absolutely horrible This is because "listing applications" in Unity is a failure case. Users don't want to list applications; they want to launch the one application they were looking for. The point of Unity's launcher is to make digging through a long list of apps to find the one you wanted obsolete.