03.23
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.
I remain curious about why Linux window decorations are the way they are. The dark theme brought up clearly demonstrates the fact that the window decorations are a seperate entity from the window theme. I really think it would do immeasurable benefit if the whole “policy-free” X server garbage was done away with and applications became responsible for drawing their own borders. Not only would it simplify a whole bunch of stuff when trying to get shaped windows but it wouldn’t be possible to have abrupt jarring transitions between the windeco and the actual application drawing space.
Ubuntu trying to look like a Mac has been apparent for a long time. Take a look at a screenshot of Karmic: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ubuntu_9.10.png/800px-Ubuntu_9.10.png and OSX: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Snow_Leopard_Desktop.png – The icons, bars and even the folder names resemble OSX to a large degree. Hell, Ubuntu looks almost like a Sepia version of OSX.
Judging from the new screenshots on Bacon’s page, the new Ubuntu titlebars seem to orientate everything on the left: buttons and title. What does it produce? A weird empty space on the right-hand side of every window. I’m sorry but that seems like a mighty waste of pixels and just a little redundant. Just like having two bars on each vertical extreme of the screen.
As I noted on TMR, Canonical is a company in denial. They want to destroy Microsoft’s majority share, but they don’t want to hear from their customers how to do it. They want to make a better desktop OS, but rather than address the major concerns like hardware support, breakage with updates and application compatibility, they want to rebrand it.
And it’s not a recent thing, either. Check out this shot of MacOS 9: http://www.shufflegazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/mac_os_9_screenshot.png and KDE2: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/KDE-2.0-es-es.png – I’ll give KDE credit for better shading and more colourful icons, but the similarities are pretty undeniable; the icons, the titlebars, even the fonts look similar.
Will someone please explain to me why ripping off the Mac GUI is okay if Linux does it but is a capital sin if Microsoft does it?
You’re right. Linux needs to really do something creative so that people will see how superior it is.
I don’t like the way Apple puts the menu at the top of the screen, but Ubuntu users apparently do:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3136/
Yet, interestingly, they hate the new button position:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23899/
The one thing the GNOME dual-menus have going for them is that it puts some things in the corners so you can hit them with Fitt’s law. The Recycle Bin and Shutdown menu, of course, are not used nearly often enough to justify their positions here.
Anyway, this is all pretty irrelevant if users can just choose a different theme after installing. Canonical is always changing the theme. http://www.sizlopedia.com/2008/10/18/history-of-ubuntu-from-warthog-to-ibex/
What do they think? We’re going to forget all of Ubuntu’s bugs and usability problems overnight because they made it prettier?
You can put lipstick on a pig…
Also, I like how the most-downloaded themes on Gnome-Look are copycats of other OSes:
http://gnome-look.org/index.php?xsortmode=down
Linux is a “me too” OS. It exists for no other reason than to be an ideological alternative to other OSes, not to be a competitor or innovator in its own right.
@>:(
Yeah, and then they squeal about how evil “m$” is for copying ideas.
If you look at distro reviews, you’ll see almost all of them merely talk about the installation, the look of the desktop and the apps installed by default. Linux is geared towards a desktop which looks nice in screenshots but doesn’t have long-lasting usability. It’s as if they’re still in the novelty phase of, “see? It’s Unix-like! WITH A GUI! TAKE THAT EVIL MS!” And I believe it’s this same “desktop with new icons and colours” novelty which attracts many Windows to try out Linux, and maybe even fool them for a bit that it’s just as good a desktop OS.
@Delano – I don’t really get that either. In my mind there has always been a differentiation between OS and apps, I mean surely since you can (in theory) get any app for that platform on any variation of the platform such items are pointless, yet there it is, Ubuntu reviewed, and they just talk about OpenOffice and Gaim or whatever.
In my mind the ideal Linux distro would embody the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well (that is being an OS) rather than the current approach of throwing as much ancillary cruft at as can be found in the hope they’ll not notice that no real progress has been made on the window manager in over half a decade.
Mind you if you were to review a distro and ignore pointless stuff (installers) stuff that shouldn’t be an issue in the first place (who has ever reviewed windows and talked about hardware support?) and software, there is really nothing to say.
Yea I never understood where the house of cards shared library system fit into the Unix philosophy. It made sense in the 70′s but these days it is just a point of failure. It’s also a security risk since it takes longer for Linux users to get application patches.
@Thomas B,
What the hell are you rambling about here:
“It’s like a code. You can keep adding new, cool things to it. But when you start to add things to old parts of the code, it gets bloated.”
What is “a code”? A LongPHPCode(TM)?
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sarah-mcintire-introduction cult-like brainwhashed ramblings of an F$F intern.
@Kerberos
In the mind of Freedomites, ancillary is a feature, not a bug!
P
Case in point: I’ve heard from Linux fans many times how their desktop environments are superior to Windows and Mac. For example, they’ll tell us about multiple desktops; a feature in Mac and available in Windows with 3rd-party software, but so what? The majority of the world has been functioning just fine with a single desktop for decades. I myself don’t use multiple desktops even though I was a Linux user for 7 years and used desktop shells in Windows. Maybe multiple desktops made more sense in the mid-90s when the average resolution was 640×480, but these days it’s little more than a curious redundancy.
As for default software, there’s an even bigger enigma. I want to laugh at distro reviews that say things like, “The new version of DistroX is pretty awesome because they included Gimp, OpenOffice and Firefox!”. The same software was not only included in the previous version of the distro, but virtually every other major distro has them, AND they’re available for Windows and Mac! Praising mediocre software is one thing, but praising the inclusion of mediocre software that’s widely available is even more perplexing.
Of course, this all just underlines one of the inherent problems with Linux: software availability. Users and distro reviews *know* that Linux software is lacking, both in terms of availability and quality, so they try to compensate by overemphasizing default software and its usefulness.
Haha, I remember saying it needs a dock. I just kicked the “tyres” on the beta 1 on their upcoming LTS. I’m not so impressed by it, especially since I been testing it since its pre-alpha days. What amazes me is the alpha 1 worked better than the beta. Nvidia drivers will not activate because Xorg crashes constantly.
However, on topic, Mark has always had a thing for Mac OS X all along. Although I admire the new visual “changes”, Ubuntu is a tad bit late, and not so original. 9.04 was suppose to get a new theme…then 9.10, finally 10.04 gets a real new theme. So now they are, in their own eyes, in the same league as Microsoft, ‘copied’ off another ‘competitor’. Yet, the system still has the same flaws as it had 5 years ago (I’m a 5 year Linux user), audio is crap, and the graphic stack is still sub par.
Ashley, their cardboard “solutions” are obvious if you take a tour through the screenshots. Let’s see, they have:
1) A folder showing the user’s files, to invoke that “oooh! Like a Mac!” response.
2) Rhythmbox running, so folks think the sound is NotAnIssue(TM).
3) Alien Arena (or some other crappy, lame Quake 3 clone) so folks will think the graphics are NotAnIssueAnymore(TM).
4) The Software Center, to show folks “yes, Linux has software! Yes, really! SEE?!”
5) Obligatory reference to Cloud Computing.
Add the notifications area to the list of things they ripped off. The more I use OSX the more I see the source of their ‘inspiration’, lol.
@Kerberos
The sad part is, the know-nothing, OS-bashing Ubuntu fanboys (who probably have never owned a legal copy of Windows and have never used a Mac) will look at it and say, “lol, Apple n00bz, totally ripping off Linux!!”
Hmmm, it’s about time for a new recursive acronym, I think.
Gnu is Not Unlike … Other Interfaces! (Gnu-OI!)
I quite like that. It has a pleasing, quasi-fasccistic, 1980s feel to it.
On a sideways topic, “In my mind the ideal Linux distro would embody the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well (that is being an OS)” is an indication that you, too, have had your mind polluted by incessant Loon FUD.
Check out the Unix Haters’ Handbook for details (and laughs). ESR has, relatively recently, come up with a spurious argument that UHH is no longer relevant, but I disagree. I’m still in the middle of a detailed ESR refutation for LHB.
However.
This “doing one thing, and doing it well” was originally a description of the tool-chain. The tools were part of the shell (and we all know what a wonderful job the C-Shell, for example, did); not of the OS.
The idea was that you wrote a small CLI program with a minimalist interface, such as:
foo -f -x -l
and it would interact with:
bar -f -l
using spiffy shell facilities like pipes, named pipes, redirection, tee, back-quotes, forward-quotes, double-quotes, and in extreme circumstances, that well-known mathematical operator, “xargs.”
Naturally, this is laughable. Naturally, the concept of chaining tools together via a stream’o'bytes with no lexical or syntactic context whatsoever is plainly absurd. It’s rather sad that the world’s most popular comms protocol, TCP/IP, uses the same paradigm. Well, it would be sad, but then again I make a lot of money off it.
But, if you ever get in an argument with someone who expounds this dreary theory, here’s the killer answer:
“Have you ever tried ‘man ls’?”
Bloody hell, I thought you guys were just joking about the Ubuntu screen-shot diddling.
As linked above, http://www.sizlopedia.com/2008/10/18/history-of-ubuntu-from-warthog-to-ibex/ demonstrates the intellectual vapidity of the entire project.
When I was a kid, I used to have more fun playing with conkers. They were small, brown, and otherwise worthless; but I had FUN.
Is this what the youth of today has come to? Quasi-sexual excitement over a paler shade of brown?
I really need to re-read the Unix Haters Handbook. It’s funny how it’s still as relevant and amusing now as it ever was.
Dr. Loser,
HAHA! Still looks somewhat the same as today minus new icons and Gnome is a little more, 3D like. I wonder does it operate the same as today’s distros?
Kerberos,
I’m going to have to find a copy of that book. I wonder how can someone hate Unix, although I’m sure its not perfect but rather good.
Steve Jobs uses his time machine to steal ideas from the Linux community.
This retarded comment was proudly posted from a Linux desktop.
Unix Hater’s Handbook is best downloaded from http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf, btw. It’s as relevant now as it ever was. I’m sure the Linux kernel still has support for bicycles (as in “this is not a bicycle”).
All in all, an excellent demonstration of Unix (which, like the Second World War, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing) being reinvented as a Cargo Cult.
This post deserves some sort of nomination for “Best Technical Demolition Post Of The Year,” btw…
To Quote:
I swear that is one of the most brain-damaged things I have ever read. Who in their right mind would ever think this is a good idea?
Well, you know how ESR claims that none of this is relevant any more. Try the following in Cygwin (or Ubuntu, if you have time to waste):
cd /tmp
mkdir bar
cd bar
cat >-r ^d
cat >foo ^d
mkdir bar2
cd bar2
cat >foo2 ^d
cd ..
ls (outputs “-r bar2 foo”)
rm *
… and, yes, the brain damage has been inherited.
I also tried it with a -i file, and guess what? Brain damage. Brain damage. Brain damage.
Sticking a GUI on top of this sort of behaviour is like putting habanero sauce on the lips of a pig…
PS. Now that all major *nix systems “support” spaces in file names — much less useful than unprintable characters, but hey, ya gotta address market concerns — I suspect this situation has become even more irretrievably stupid.
Reminds me of the old C:\con\con Windows bug.
I missed you clone
, that windows bug was awesome, but obviously, it only works (or worked) in windows 95/98.
Don’t let the freetards know about it, they still think we use those…
Or at least that’s the only way I can make sense of all the “Ubuntu is better than windows” comments around the web, and even then it’s a stretch.
So, let’s see here.
It’s easy to fix the C:\con\con bug. I’m no expert on OS development, but I’d think a simple token-based filter would cure this sort of thing.
Apparently, in thirty-odd years of development, it’s still impossible to eliminate weird behaviour in the Unix shell when you use non-alphanum file names. I wonder why that might be?
Could it be that the entire design methodology is abject, outdated, dangerous shit?
Mac OS apery runs deep with GNOME, with features like instant apply dialogs, default button on the right, and especially the spatial Nautilus that Ubuntu eventually disabled by default (but not before breaking it in arbitrary ways). If only someone had noticed that the spatial model worked OK in the days of floppy disks and small hard drives, but not with today’s huge storage and deep folder hierarchies.
And the thing that gets me about this Ubuntu window control thing is that they put them on the left side like Mac OS X but left the button order the same as before (which is not like Mac OS X). So now you have a default layout that is different from the 90% of users that come from Windows, the 10% that come from (like they’d leave) Mac OS X, the whatever % that use KDE-based distros, and all those that kept the default in previous versions of Ubuntu. All this for some questionable “it’s better” justifications.
You get the feeling they’d default to the Dvorak keyboard layout if they thought they could get away with it.
Has anybody ever seen a co-worker “re-wire” their quertyuiop keyboard to Dvorak?
I have. It was hugely entertaining. All they keys sloped in opposite directions to what you’d expect and want — in both the x and y co-ordinate directions. The goddamn thing looked like lego on steroids. And what was his excuse?
“It’s easier to use this way.”
Fail. They could just change the layout in Windows then teach themselves to not look at the keyboard when typing.
I use the Das Keyboard so I have no issues when swapping keyboard layouts as I don’t have any labels on the keys to trick up my mind.
Kerberos, when you get a chance, check out this Lubuntu review:
http://www.linuxcritic.com/lubuntu-linux-distribution-lxde-fans/
It covers virtually every point we’ve made in this post, comments included. It’s an even better example of cargo cult because it’s a blatant XP ripoff, right down to the quicklaunch.
And like prophecy, it follows my “distro review formula” down to the letter:
* MentionTheInstaller™
* DesktopIsPretty™
* DefaultAppsAreAwesome™
* BootsDamnFast™
Oh so because Ubuntu changes the Window controls to the left it’s copying OS X now? Give me a fucking break. Ubuntu is nothing like OS X. This entire blog post reeks of idiocy.
This man is smart. Dr Loser, TM Douche, and Kerabros aren’t. That is all.
“Ubuntu is nothing like OS X”
Which is _exactly_ what he’s saying – Ubuntu is trying to LOOK like Mac OS X, to try and attract Mac users, without actually understanding that GNOME doesn’t WORK like Mac OS X does.
They’re all guilty of it, because they’re all driven by the same innate human nature. Each rips off the other constantly, you see… Microsoft rips off Desqview and rebrands it as “Windows”; Apple rips off some GUI that Xerox developed and calls it “MacOS”; Linux rips off UNIX and thinks that GUIs are too WIMP to even bother with from the start because UNIX people have poo-pooed GUIs all along anyway. Every time something that is truly new and innovative gets hatched, everyone immediately flocks around to pick it clean to the bloody bone!
Now we’re stuck here in the 21st century and everything, so suddenly we’re supposed to be all “modern” and stuff, right? Oh, we’re ditching keyboards for tablets now! Whoop-dee-whee. And Linux finally managed to grow out of its former WIMP hangup (sort of). But hey; what about our interfaces? Yet again; it’s still the same-old same old… Gnome thinks it’s a Mac now, and KDE thinks it’s Windows 7. What do Apple and Microsoft think? They both think it was such a wise move to have already ripped off Sun! THE single most innovative thing that has happened to GUI interfaces so far in this century was Project Looking Glass, and now all that’s left of that is a decaying carcass. Apple got in there ahead of Microsoft this time, and stole the dock; Microsoft, not to be outdone, got greedy and grabbed the nice glassy tilting windows AND the cute rotating multimedia carousel effect – and Linux, picking from what was left, walked away with the 3D environment by turning the whole thing inside out and then calling it “Compiz” instead.
They are ALL absolutely disgusting, every organization of the entire lot! They reek of ape, and that’s all there is to it. Hardly anything is truly new and innovative now, and I for one mourn the loss.
I think that some of you are forgetting what has made Linux popular. MS comes out with a new OS that needed a lot more punch just to run. That is why I, and many others tried out Linux and it is the reason that I have stayed with it. I see no reason to pay a company a couple hundred dollars for an os when another free one allows me to do anything I need to do. I have no fantasy about Linux being the highest used OS out there. I don’t care if it ever does. Is it perfect, no. It is a lot lighter and allows me to continue to use some of the old equipment I have around the house to do what I need to do. I should add that I got it all for free because it was too slow to run windows any longer.
I really don’t get all the fuss about the new GUI.
If you don’t like it, change it or switch OS, done. Don’t make a vapid rant trying to garner followers who couldn’t make up their own mind. This is just about *colors* and *button placement*, all customizable given it’s a Linux distro.
Good God.
@Mahmud – It’s amazing how in the ‘community developed’ world of FOSS if you say you don’t like something you can virtually guarantee someone will tell you to be quiet (and silence you if they can).
Guess what, THIS IS HOW IT WORKS. If a company does something that people don’t like, the people will complain. The company sees those complaints and acts accordingly. You don’t like what I say, go back to writing ‘I Love Linux’ poetry on the Ubuntuforums.
Is it ironic that only in the world of ‘Open Source’ do customers get attacked for voicing their criticisms of the product?
@Kerberos — Complaints and criticisms are fine, but what I dislike is ranting excessively without providing anything doable. I got the impression that the GUI change is unchangeable and requires a definite intervention from Canonical to fix it.
It’s not. You can change it. If you don’t know how, you can always ask and in the end learn something new about the distro you’re using.
The way I see it, that’s one benefit of the GUI change: more Ubuntu users will realize the options they didn’t know they have, besides allowing Canonical to experiment with their product. If someone dislike it so much, maybe it could even prompt them to design some new theme — a good example of creativity and independence that the FOSS community is all about, right?
So instead of ranting endlessly, why not complain a little and provide some solutions in the end? Why isn’t anyone here trying to at least mention that a simple editing through the Gnome configuration editor could fix this?
@Mahmud
Everything you just said in no way changes the fact that the theme is horrible in both usability and appearance.
It doesn’t matter that you can change it, you shouldn’t have to.
Even more so considering how big a feature the theme is for the ubuntu developers (still waiting for some semblance of stability guys).
It takes a few seconds for someone to go to gnome-look, download the best theme, and change the colors to brown.
Just how much does it say about canonical if the best they can do is an half assed mac clone with a horrible palette choice?
Oh and before you claim I’m just ranting (when it’s about windows/mac it’s criticism, about linux it’s ranting huh?), I’ll provide a very simple solution to canocial:
1 – Stop thinking you know better than your customers.
2 – Purple and Brown don’t mix.
3 – Put the window buttons in the right order (the close button should be at the edge, interface design 101)
4 – Any jackass on gnome-look can do a better job than you on a theme apparently, hire him.
5 – Stop trying to copy Apple, find your own style.
@Kommenter:
Everything you just said in no way changes the fact the theming is one of Canonical’s way to experiment with Ubuntu.
Give it a break. Canonical creating new themes like that means they like to experiment but they don’t lock users in their experiment, *unlike* Apple.
I admit I’m not a very big fan of the colours either, but having the option to change it, I don’t mind. Their decision may deserve official criticisms or a blog post or two, but not these kinds of relentless vitriol.
Honestly, I don’t think Mr. Shuttleworth is so stupid as to believe that Linux or Ubuntu can ever become a decent desktop operating system. I think he’s only saying that because he is supposed to, while slowly and silently concentrating on the enterprise and on the server space more and more.
“MS comes out with a new OS that needed a lot more punch just to run. That is why I, and many others tried out Linux and it is the reason that I have stayed with it. ”
Every Linux desktop that I’ve tried runs like an absolute dog. Graphical performance under Linux is just terrible, period.
Now, if you mean that the X server and a bunch of xterms require little memory nowadays, then we agree.
What ever dude. The nature of free software is that it’s a ecosystem of interchangeable parts. It runs on a ecosystem of interchangeable hardware. It’s Frankenstein’s monster all the way down by it’s very nature. This is it’s greatest strength. The OS UI taken as a whole reflects this. If a simple changes makes the UI better, most programmers will do it, if there isn’t something more important pressing. Most humans fundamentally like to help others. However, for revolution, few will do it without help (patches) or reward (money). If Ubuntu spent as much money as Apple or MS, they could have a consistent OS UI, but they don’t have as much money, they are using the free ecosystem which is matching or beating Apple and MS on many fronts. Yet Ubuntu really isn’t that hard to use and you can still swap out what you like. I use it quite happy on hardware that other modern OSs would be unusable on.
Judging by the results, the Frankenstein monster is proving to be Linux biggest downfall. Beating Apple and MS? That’s pure delusion.
I would say that “the Frankenstein monster” is not Linux’s downfall, at least looking a the server space. There’s a reason Linux is so popular as a server; look at the competition and how heavily integrated components that might not be the best of breed/cause security concerns/are superfluous for the application are sometimes impossible to remove from the base installation. There’s a reason Microsoft is exploring more modularity with projects like MinWin. Til’s comment about how Ubuntu might concentrate more and more on the server and corporate space is an interesting one, and I think we will see more of this in the future.
The real problem is when things come down to getting “the Frankenstein monster” to play nice with hardware that might only have closed-source drivers and not requiring users to use the command line. And since there is such a lack of standards (and I’m not even talking about package managers, but instead things like version numbers, UI elements looking right across different window managers, etc), things can go wrong pretty quickly if things don’t come together correctly in a horrible cascade failure that has the potential to leave the user wondering what s/he did wrong. And things going wrong can send people back to Windows or OS X pretty quickly.
I think that another problem here is that people underestimate UI. This is desktop Linux, and I think UX is right up there with hardware compatibility and software availability. If it isn’t easy to use and transition to and doesn’t look good, people aren’t going to use it.
That said, I don’t see this GUI change in particular as that big of a deal. If things go really badly, we’ll probably see a switch back. If not, the new location of the buttons is convenient being next to the file menu and main menu. The only thing that really bothers me are how close to OS X the new icons for NetworkManager and battery on the Indicator Applet are. I think something truly original could be done with some of these UI elements.
If I’m using an old computer, putting Linux on it won’t make a difference because the computer would still be unable to do many of the required tasks due to sheer lack of resources anyways. In fact, it’ll do less because of worse software and hardware support.
On the other hand, if I buy a new computer that is powerful enough, using Linux would make no meaningful positive effect in performance because the new computer has more than enough resources compared to what the operating system needs. In fact putting Linux on it would again cripple the computer in numerous ways.
I recently installed EeeBuntu 3.0 on my netbook. It lost 1½ hours of usable battery time and became slower and the user interface is buggy with notifications doing weird things. That’s not what I call improvement.
I’m still baffled to why people use Linux other than for the curiosity.
Most of them use Linux because they want to be “free” and/or because it makes them think they’re smarter than anyone else.
In truth, they’re not that many. It’s just that they make an awful lot of noise. The bastards.
@Declination:
It is about keeping window behaviour consistent and giving users ability to customize the using experience by replaceable window managers. I, for example, use Ion3(1) and I *don’t* want strangely shaped windows or any other such crap to ruin my using experience.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)
Fortunately, those idiotic Oomboomboo fanboys and ”developers” haven’t been able to turn X11 completely into a cheapish Windows/OS X look-alike. Yet.