Edit: To get a better perspective of the goings on in the Ubuntu world at the moment have a glance at this post, which is a good summary.
The new Ubuntu is shaping up to look a bit too much like OSX isn’t it? They just need to add a dock and they are there. But just because they have aped the look of OSX doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of usability.
“Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when large amounts of manpower and materials were brought in by the Japanese and American combatants, and this was observed by the residents of these regions. When the war ended, the military bases were closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behaviour that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.” – Cargo Cults, Wikipedia
The thing is I am typing this on a Mac and I can quite categorically say that Gnome behaves nothing like OSX.
OSX has an application based system, Windows has a window based system. In OSX an application is not required to stay within its main window – it has no main window. Rather than having the file menu in the application itself it is placed at the top of the screen and changes depending on which application is active, and an application doesn’t have to have any windows open to be running, or active. It’s based around the idea that the user does one task at a time and while I am still not sure if I like it, I can respect it.
Ubuntu on the other hand, while mimicking OSX perfectly with the top menu still has a window based approach to applications. Where in OSX the top menu is the unified file menu on Ubuntu it’s simply the start button at the top. If you were to remove the cruft, put it to the bottom and place the task list in the middle you’d have the Windows 95 layout in everything but name. You couldn’t do this to OSX – it simply wouldn’t work as it is actually different, rather than cosmetically different.
Harking back to the movement of the window controls from the right side to the left side* we have yet to hear a decent reason for the change coming from anyone inside Canonical. Usability wise it’s a bad move, there is no reason for it except, along with the colours, themes and icons it mimicks OSX. Shuttleworth’s main argument against the complainers is:
“And the major argument against it appears solely to be “we’re used to it here”, which is important, but not overriding.”
Which isn’t true, as there are a deluge of reasons why it is a bad idea (namely Linux isn’t OSX) and more importantly there are no good arguments for it. It simply appears to be copying OSX as that’s what the designers he has appear to be using (so much for dogfooding).
The logic for the change seems to be ‘Apple is concerned with usability’, ‘Apple has the window decorations on the left’, ‘lets put the window decorations on the left’. The question of why never seems to come up. Has anyone actually seen anybody from Canonical actually give a decent reason for this change other than ‘OSX does it that way’?
It’s like the dual-start-bar-approach. As on OSX the file menu is removed from the main program window and placed at the top of the screen you don’t really lose any screen space on height. The controls placed on the top right of the screen are just using an already unused area. On Ubuntu you do lose height as you already have a file menu in each window already – essentially you take a full vertical bar to make a large start button. Add in the task bar at the bottom and you waste 3x the space of OSX while looking the same. This is also the reason the window decorations don’t make a real difference** on OSX, but with the new Ubuntu layout the chances of missing the Edit dropdown and hitting close are pretty high.
It’s abundantly clear to anyone who even has a basic grasp of the subject that the Ubuntu team have no real vision for the desktop. They don’t appear to have an idea of how it should work, or how they want it to work. They just appear to be copying random elements from other OS’s with no real appreciation of the ‘big picture’. Essentially they are missing out on the context of others decisions in the hope that they ape in a cargo-cult-esque way aspects from successful operating systems that they themselves will be successful.
But like the cargo cults of the pacific making a replica landing strip and control tower will not magically make planes appear.
Ubuntu is not a Democracy
I’ve seen Ubuntu (And Linux in general) referred to as a Meritocracy many times, that is those that do things can make the decisions. Which is fine, scratch your own itch and all that – you are working for free, ignore who you want. The fun side effect of this though is everyone who isn’t a programmer – that is, the artists, UI designers, normal users – are effectively ignored.
Can you imagine the ‘meritocracy’ argument applied to anything else? Architecture? War? Film? ‘I, the builder, the tank driver, the fighter pilot, will do what I want as I have the tools and I do the work’. The whole FOSS movement essentially marginalizes the skills of anyone who isn’t a programmer (or rich).
Basic lip-service is paid to the non-developer but there are pretty much no actual procedures or mechanisms in place to actually listen to people. Even things like bug reporting is outside the scope of most users. Common businesses adopt the three tier tech support approach – normal users talk to tier 1 staff who decide if it’s a bug, recurring problem, suggestion etc who either file it (bugzilla), log it (user has problems doing x), or if it’s a serious issue or a good idea kick it up to tier 2 who then gather more data and submit it as a proposal to tier 3 (who actually do the work). Even though the bulk of complaints to tier 1 will be nonsense they will provide valuable data by aggregate – 14% of all complaints were to do with x, thus redesigning x will reduce complaints by about 14%. You could glance at the support summary to find out what you need to work on. There may be very little on what is actually wrong, but you know for sure there is a problem.
What methods are in place in Ubuntu to listen to the public? How are they getting a feel for how their users like the OS? The problems they are having? The features that they want? They say they don’t need to actually listen to the community as the developers are the community, then they say it’s a meritocracy and if you want something you need to code it yourself. I have never worked for a company that cares as little about the opinions of users as your standard Linux distro – in the ‘real world’ if a customer complains you have no choice but to listen***. Whatever way you cut it the claims of ‘community developed’ are a load of crap, no software company has less respect for their users than ‘free software’.
The issue is it is a democracy, just as Windows is a democracy. If people don’t like Windows (Vista, ME) they’ll say so, vote with their wallets and Microsoft will have no choice but to address their concerns or risk going out of business. Obviously Ubuntu is free and funded by a multi-millionaire at a loss, but the principle is the same.
Do what you want, piss off your customer base, after all it’s your ball and you can go home if you want to but you simply cannot present the “it’s not a democracy/it’s a meritocracy” argument if you ever hope to have a significant (and increasing) market share. The two things are simply mutually exclusive – so make your mind up. Do you want marketshare, or a personal plaything?
As many people pointed out, you are free to fork Ubuntu and make the changes you’d want. But you are also free to use Windows or OSX where the companies producing them actually have a financial interest (thus motivation) in keeping you happy. And I know for a fact that Windows and Apple actually care about and take note of the issues that their users have.
* Another apparent problem is the position of the ‘close’ button moves depending on if the window has minimize or maximize buttons, since it is to the right of them
** People generally drag windows out the left side of the screen if they need more space to expose the scrollbars, the downside is they lose the window controls – not a problem if they are on the RHS.
*** Company quality varies, but you can bet that when a commercial company is busy banning people and deleting posts (and denying the problem) in the background it is furiously working on a resolution.
