“bugzilla (which will never yield anything innovative by its very nature)”

What about Ubuntu Brainstorm? http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

It needs some tweaking to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and help the good ideas rise to the top, but I think it’s a great way to foster innovation and not get locked into old copycat ways of thinking, with multiple users being able to suggest multiple solutions to a given issue. There’s a bit of freetard bias in the voting, but overall it seems good.

The only problem with Brainstorm is that Canonical seems to completely ignore everything proposed on it. The best is when an idea with huge amounts of support sits on the site stagnant, and then you hear about it getting implemented in Snow Leopard or Windows 7.

Your points basically boil down to “It’s hard to determine what’s right for most. Apple came up with the GUI (they didn’t, Xerox did… but how in God’s name is that relevant anymore?).”

What I care about is not having to read manuals to learn how to use some CLI tool to take a screenshot because for whatever reason the window manager got confused about launching the GUI one… which, thanks to X, has a delay for capping the screen… but that’s a whole different subject…

Guess what, Jack! Windows 7 offers me a platform, and that platform is supported by more companies than Linux could ever DREAM of. So have fun constantly reinstalling (at least every year, if not every couple of months when some random package update breaks your system), I’ll be over here getting work done easily, quickly, for whatever usability reasons and design decisions Microsoft made. Like LH said, you pay for the privilege of using a product that’s built on lots of research, that’s gone through extensive tests and reports by various groups of people from different fields — including usability. It wasn’t just some jerkoff on a bug tracker saying, “Durrrrr this button should go there!”

Please go back to the Ubuntu Forums and stop wasting our time with your mindlessly long posts.

The design of user interfaces is not just an application of the latest ergonomic study results. In the 90s, MS devoted time and money to work on ergonomics, and they did use these results. But the application of these results to UI design was not the only affecting factor. For example, the need to achieve monopoly in the browser market led MS into altering their UI into using the IE and slowly making the UI a continuation of the web experience. Was it the right thing to do? Well, a lot can be said about that, but anyone can add Bill’s dedication to a (now extinct) MSN service, to show that even this choice was a result of listening to the market, more than the ergonomic studies.

Nothing is so clear-cut as it is portrayed in your article. The most important issue you raise is about the need to innovate and/or improve. If there is one company who once did it right, it was Apple, and MS et al (FOSS wm included) followed. But in their various incarnations, UIs (as any software product) have to solve the fundamental question: build upon what is already there and familiar OR build something from scratch?

Thus we have all the issues you mention about Gnome, KDE, Linux but also Vista, XP, ME, 98, MacOSX, Intel Macs… you name it!

I believe the issue about backward compatibility and the need to build upon already established user experience has been discussed so much that it needs no further comments here.

Another problem in your argumentation is the mixup of your presentation between UI elements, desktop arrangement and helper tools. A deskbar, toolbar, button, or window border is a UI element. The desktop arrangement is the positioning of these elements on the screen. The helper tools refer to apps such as the Vista search app, used also to launch applications.

If we seperate these 3 elements we will see that:

a) As far as the UI elements MS is not consistent, does not allow a lot of customization by locking features. See the various toolbars of the MS software to see what I am saying. They managed to do a lot of things right with .NET, when they actually got it into their thick skulls that the Java paradigm was the way to go (please note, I am talking about the Java paradigm, no the Java product itself). The Linux world is plagued by the multitude of options which creates similar problems of consistency. Distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse try to provide consistent appearance by following a middle ground between complete freedom and MS proprietary lockdowns. But their inherent facilities for UI translation (ultra important), accessibility options, customization for groups with specific needs etc is far superior to MS. MS can do all that, it just wants to sell them, so it locks them. MUIs are seperate, multi language workstations are difficult to have, specific tweaking of the elements of the UI are almost impossible to have etc.

b) The desktop arrangement is a matter of familiarity and choice. The current windows desktop is a result of many years of changes, an evolution with both breakthroughs and errors. The Ubuntu desktop for that matter faces the same evolutionary process as well. What you think is more intuitive is a product of both logic and familiarity. I have no arguments for or against your point of view. I will only present one assumption I have constructed through my experience with OSes which may work for you or not. For me, the defining factor of the maturity in the choice of a desktop arrangement is the amount of customizations I need to perform after a clean installation to bring the desktop to a state which satisfies my needs. Do windows satisfy your needs out of the box? Then you are a happy user! Same goes for anyone liking Ubuntu choices. Are the windows choices more intuitive? Well, after such a deep immersion of the PC users in the windows paradigm, it is not easy to separate what is intuition from what is just familiarity. For that reason we use windows functionality as a benchmark for all other WMs, even if these WMs are completely different. People are just more familiar with windows. Ubuntu mimics windows in many ways, sometimes with intuition, sometimes by just copying ideas, sometimes by ill application of irrelevant things. It is judged by that. But I believe that MS did not do a much better job when it cleanly stole the Apple paradigm to create Windows in the first place… did it evolve based on the merit of improvement all these years? I believe that you will agree that MS did not do that.

c) Helper apps. This is funny as it is one of the main reasons I started using Linux distros for workstation use (I was using them as servers since 1995). Windows just has a big sign that says: “IF YOU WANT TO DO **X** GO BUY **Z**”. It is an axiom built in the OS. The search app you talk about is something good. But if we add up all the things that are there to make our lives easier in the two worlds… well… are you sure that windows really has anything to offer?

Currently I have the pleasure of using XP, MacOSX, Ubuntu and Gentoo for my workstations. I have decided some time ago, not to follow the Vista wagon, and I believe that I will not follow the Windows 7 wagon as well. There are just so many things that I need to learn from scratch, things that can be easily learned by newcomers but not by me. I can see some of your comments hitting the mark, but it is so much easier to direct these comments to a generic linux distro developer than MS. MS will just do it their way. Having read another article in this site I can appreciate what you are saying about development, though I do not develop software professionally these days. But for every comment you make, a linux fanboy will have one to counter it. This is not constructive. The linux culture is elitist but the windows culture is too much entrenched into the same arguments.

And in this I want to conclude with some constructive points:

1) Choice is something a power-user likes. This is offered much more in the linux paradigm than the windows one. The “john doe” user needs a system that just works and if we compare vista and ubuntu to XP you will see that there are so many points we can raise about how this user cannot work that we will end up in a flame war. Every point you make about how a new feature is more intuitive in windows vista or 7 can be used two ways.

2) In some talk I recently watched over the net about a new technology, someone said that “the browser is not the issue”. This means that whatever browser we use, and, for that matter, whatever OS we use, the new paradigm of software services for the “john doe” user is OS agnostic. The OS which can get to the most usable, but simple state, in the less time is the best candidate for the pervasive and ubiquitous new age of the information technology. Is this what W7 offers?

Mark: You want a GUI that doesn’t get in the way of the CLI? Could that be because practically every Linux GUI out there is incomplete, badly-designed, and reliant on the CLI as a crutch? It really doesn’t have to be this way. Oh, and why the hell would I need to check the time without using the GUI’s primary way of letting me check the time? That there is intellectual elitism. Doing things the hard way isn’t big or clever. It just takes longer.