8 ms·

The future of Ubuntu revealed

38 points by johnr8201 14y ago

unimpressive 14y ago
"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.
- ohwp 14y ago
  As Ubuntu gets more popular I'm sure they are selling more support to schools, governments and others. In 2009 they had a revenue of $30m which was enough to keep things running. So why not?
- meaty 14y ago
  Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      Come to Xubuntu, 12.10 works perfectly.
      - ekianjo 14y ago
        Yeah, that is what I heard. Which makes me wonder what went wrong in the main distribution.
        zem 14y ago
        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.
        w1ntermute 14y ago
        They decided to copy Apple and have an "innovative GUI". Surprise, surprise, it turned out shitty, just like OS X.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      If you want to avoid regressions, don't upgrade until they've had a few cycles of fixes. Especially for .10 releases. Ubuntu ships early and breaks fast, and then slowly fixes the breakage - if you don't like that you'l want to let others be the guinea pigs first.
  - adrianhoward 14y ago
    Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true. Is that really true? Sure - it annoyed a heck of a lot of folk in the Hn community - and similar tech-focused arenas. Non techie folk I've seen using 12.10 either a) Don't notice, b) don't care or c) like it.
    - shrikant 14y ago
      Or a significant portion of the annoyed techie folk did a sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping and moved on with their lives...
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        Wait, you mean it's easier to remove a package than knee-jerk leave distros? Sometimes I wonder if the /r/linux-types realize that they're no better than the kids in the Halo forums screaming that they and their friends are going to quit if someone doesn't fix their issue.
        aaronbrethorst 14y ago
        13 year old Halo players eventually grow up to be 21 year old Ubuntu users. ;) As for me, I'm a 30 year old Ubuntu user (on the server) who finished the Halo 4 campaign yesterday.
        meaty 14y ago
        And indeed in my case grow up to be 40 year old Debian users when they get fed up with Canonical's dubious decision making.
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        The Amazon thing set a bad precedent. One of the reasons people like Linux is because it doesn't come bundled with that sort of crap in the same way Windows PCs and Android phones often do.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    I'd expect the number of pissed off users to be more in the 0.1% range if we're going to throw around unsubstantiated numbers.
  - breakyerself 14y ago
    It doesn't bother me at all. People do actual work to make the os. They need to pay those people. Since I'm not paying them and they're a for profit company I'm not the least bit surprised or bothered.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Hard to know, but at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects, so either they have good financials or strong investors believing in them (on top of Shuttleworth). We know Google is using a custom-made distribution of Ubuntu in their offices, and they are probably a big commercial partner for them, among others.
  - laumars 14y ago
    "at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects" You mean aside their Qt / KDE developer when they dropped Kubuntu as an official 'remix'? Personally I've never liked Ubuntu, not even in the early days. I think it's one of the worst distributions for consistency. They bring in largely untested components prematurely (Pulse Audio), change the GUI every 6 to 12 months and even propose breaking established standards within the Linux world (eg 'Windicators' : http://www.osnews.com/story/23243/Shuttleworth_Unveils_Windicators_ http://www.osnews.com/story/23243/Shuttleworth_Unveils_Windi... ). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a dumbed down distro for new users, but I really don't think Ubuntu is the best out there. In fact I think it's probably one of the most over hyped. However what Ubuntu has brought us is a common base (be that via vanilla Ubuntu, one of it's many 'remixes' or even the spin offs / forks like Mint) and better exposure to the Linux platform. Had it not been for Canonical -or more specifically, Mark Shuttleworth- then I'm not convinced that we'd be seeing Steam on Linux. The beauty of Linux is Ubuntu can co-exist with Gentoo, Slackware, Arch and all the other extremes of the Linux ecosystem. So I can run my 'hands on' distro of choice, and my wife can run her 'hands free' *buntu fork.
- thejosh 14y ago
  Don't they also earn money from landscape etc?
- bkor 14y ago
  He only talked about revenue. Nothing if they're making money (profits).
- cfn 14y ago
  This is only part of the picture but they sure are growing: http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134 http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134
ComputerGuru 14y ago
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.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Well, I agree with you about Amazon. Your info on Gnome is a month or two inaccurate though. As for Unity, have you used it recently? It's a wildly different thing than it was a year and a half ago.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  I am currently using Ubuntu 12.10 with Cinnamon and it's much better than the Unity experience. You should give it a try, it feels refreshing.
- clark-kent 14y ago
  Unity has finally caught up. Have you tried Unity in Ubuntu 12.10? I was a big Gnome 2 fan for years and couldn't stand unity until 12.10, Unity has become productive and more than usable for a programmer.
  - pekk 14y ago
RyanZAG 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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...
pajju 14y ago
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.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I have to say I haven't found myself using the HUD very much. When I am learning an app I usually want to have discoverability so I will search the menus looking for the stuff I need. Once I am more versed in using it I just memorize the keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that for some apps (mainly Java etc) HUD doesn't really work at all. Not seeing much in the software centre either.
  - pajju 14y ago
    HUD is perfect for the power users, adds a lot to productivity. Here is the HUD demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c HUD for power users - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK2lMCMsios http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK2lMCMsios
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      All of this stuff is faster with keyboard shortcuts, unless it's stuff that you only use very occasionally in which case there would be only a negligible benefit. The algorithm is also based only on text matching (presumably levenshtein distance) so typing "exit" isn't helpful if the application happens to use the word "quit". HUD would be incredible if it was as clever as Siri at NLP and could search every app installed on my system at once. So I could say stuff like "Set an alarm for 10 minutes time" or "email richard"
crsilk 14y ago
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-interface http://askubuntu.com/questions/220357/improve-eclipse-user-i...
- lepacheco 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- eccp 14y ago
  I just replied to this on Ask Ubuntu (including screenshots). You can reduce the padding a bit with a .gtkrc file and/or custom GTK themes. This and some font-tweaking on the same file should be good enough.
microwise 14y ago
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.
chmike 14y ago
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.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Another niggle. If you have 2 monitors and want to run a fullscreen video on one (using Totem or VLC) and do work on the other one. As soon as you focus on one of the windows on your work monitors it will bring the launcher + dock to the front on both monitors obscuring the video.
- chmike 14y ago
  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 https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/157817 One widget is not working, but it is not critical.
sciurus 14y ago
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."

38 points by johnr8201 14y ago

"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.

ohwp 14y ago
As Ubuntu gets more popular I'm sure they are selling more support to schools, governments and others. In 2009 they had a revenue of $30m which was enough to keep things running. So why not?
meaty 14y ago
Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    Come to Xubuntu, 12.10 works perfectly.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      Yeah, that is what I heard. Which makes me wonder what went wrong in the main distribution.
      - zem 14y ago
        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.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        They decided to copy Apple and have an "innovative GUI". Surprise, surprise, it turned out shitty, just like OS X.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    If you want to avoid regressions, don't upgrade until they've had a few cycles of fixes. Especially for .10 releases. Ubuntu ships early and breaks fast, and then slowly fixes the breakage - if you don't like that you'l want to let others be the guinea pigs first.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true. Is that really true? Sure - it annoyed a heck of a lot of folk in the Hn community - and similar tech-focused arenas. Non techie folk I've seen using 12.10 either a) Don't notice, b) don't care or c) like it.
  - shrikant 14y ago
    Or a significant portion of the annoyed techie folk did a sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping and moved on with their lives...
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Wait, you mean it's easier to remove a package than knee-jerk leave distros? Sometimes I wonder if the /r/linux-types realize that they're no better than the kids in the Halo forums screaming that they and their friends are going to quit if someone doesn't fix their issue.
      - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
        13 year old Halo players eventually grow up to be 21 year old Ubuntu users. ;) As for me, I'm a 30 year old Ubuntu user (on the server) who finished the Halo 4 campaign yesterday.
        meaty 14y ago
        And indeed in my case grow up to be 40 year old Debian users when they get fed up with Canonical's dubious decision making.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        The Amazon thing set a bad precedent. One of the reasons people like Linux is because it doesn't come bundled with that sort of crap in the same way Windows PCs and Android phones often do.
- vidarh 14y ago
  I'd expect the number of pissed off users to be more in the 0.1% range if we're going to throw around unsubstantiated numbers.
- breakyerself 14y ago
  It doesn't bother me at all. People do actual work to make the os. They need to pay those people. Since I'm not paying them and they're a for profit company I'm not the least bit surprised or bothered.
ekianjo 14y ago
Hard to know, but at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects, so either they have good financials or strong investors believing in them (on top of Shuttleworth). We know Google is using a custom-made distribution of Ubuntu in their offices, and they are probably a big commercial partner for them, among others.
- laumars 14y ago
  "at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects" You mean aside their Qt / KDE developer when they dropped Kubuntu as an official 'remix'? Personally I've never liked Ubuntu, not even in the early days. I think it's one of the worst distributions for consistency. They bring in largely untested components prematurely (Pulse Audio), change the GUI every 6 to 12 months and even propose breaking established standards within the Linux world (eg 'Windicators' : http://www.osnews.com/story/23243/Shuttleworth_Unveils_Windicators_ http://www.osnews.com/story/23243/Shuttleworth_Unveils_Windi... ). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a dumbed down distro for new users, but I really don't think Ubuntu is the best out there. In fact I think it's probably one of the most over hyped. However what Ubuntu has brought us is a common base (be that via vanilla Ubuntu, one of it's many 'remixes' or even the spin offs / forks like Mint) and better exposure to the Linux platform. Had it not been for Canonical -or more specifically, Mark Shuttleworth- then I'm not convinced that we'd be seeing Steam on Linux. The beauty of Linux is Ubuntu can co-exist with Gentoo, Slackware, Arch and all the other extremes of the Linux ecosystem. So I can run my 'hands on' distro of choice, and my wife can run her 'hands free' *buntu fork.
thejosh 14y ago
Don't they also earn money from landscape etc?
bkor 14y ago
He only talked about revenue. Nothing if they're making money (profits).
cfn 14y ago
This is only part of the picture but they sure are growing: http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134 http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134

ComputerGuru 14y ago

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.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Well, I agree with you about Amazon. Your info on Gnome is a month or two inaccurate though. As for Unity, have you used it recently? It's a wildly different thing than it was a year and a half ago.
ekianjo 14y ago
I am currently using Ubuntu 12.10 with Cinnamon and it's much better than the Unity experience. You should give it a try, it feels refreshing.
clark-kent 14y ago
Unity has finally caught up. Have you tried Unity in Ubuntu 12.10? I was a big Gnome 2 fan for years and couldn't stand unity until 12.10, Unity has become productive and more than usable for a programmer.
- pekk 14y ago

RyanZAG 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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...

pajju 14y ago

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.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I have to say I haven't found myself using the HUD very much. When I am learning an app I usually want to have discoverability so I will search the menus looking for the stuff I need. Once I am more versed in using it I just memorize the keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that for some apps (mainly Java etc) HUD doesn't really work at all. Not seeing much in the software centre either.
- pajju 14y ago
  HUD is perfect for the power users, adds a lot to productivity. Here is the HUD demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c HUD for power users - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK2lMCMsios http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK2lMCMsios
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    All of this stuff is faster with keyboard shortcuts, unless it's stuff that you only use very occasionally in which case there would be only a negligible benefit. The algorithm is also based only on text matching (presumably levenshtein distance) so typing "exit" isn't helpful if the application happens to use the word "quit". HUD would be incredible if it was as clever as Siri at NLP and could search every app installed on my system at once. So I could say stuff like "Set an alarm for 10 minutes time" or "email richard"

crsilk 14y ago

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-interface http://askubuntu.com/questions/220357/improve-eclipse-user-i...

lepacheco 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
eccp 14y ago
I just replied to this on Ask Ubuntu (including screenshots). You can reduce the padding a bit with a .gtkrc file and/or custom GTK themes. This and some font-tweaking on the same file should be good enough.

microwise 14y ago

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.

chmike 14y ago

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.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Another niggle. If you have 2 monitors and want to run a fullscreen video on one (using Totem or VLC) and do work on the other one. As soon as you focus on one of the windows on your work monitors it will bring the launcher + dock to the front on both monitors obscuring the video.
chmike 14y ago
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 https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/157817 One widget is not working, but it is not critical.

sciurus 14y ago

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."