Piestar

It’s funny how something as utterly basic as the position of the window decorations can cause such massive arguments.  What I really learned is that having such discussions is entirely pointless.  The advocates are going to get upset, confusing criticising parts of Linux with criticising all of Linux and realistically the people who already agreed with me agree with me and the people who don’t skim read it and then call me an idiot.  Simply put, it’s not exactly productive.

But I am sure everyone can agree that Linux usability could do with a bit of work.  Obviously so does Windows and OSX too – the idea of ‘perfection’ in a UI is ludicrous considering the constant changes in use-cases and hardware.  I can’t help but feel that Linux is getting left behind though and the people making a lot of these UI choices are perhaps not the best people to be making such decisions, but in all truthfulness I don’t really have the right to tell them what to do.  Who approved my credentials after all?

So here is my idea.  Make a non-existent Linux distro.  That is appeal to people that are interested in usability, UI design and graphic design.  Through a process of debate and discussion create a virtual ‘dream OS’ concept.  Reconsider everything.  Do not start out with Gnome/KDE and go from there.  Re-examine every assumption about the current desktop situation and then create a series of mockups with HID guidelines, behaviour guides and working prototypes (do it in Flash even).  Maybe create a few ‘best of breed’ applications also, such as a media centre, a basic word processor, that sort of thing.

My thinking is that in traditional FOSS projects there is two main motivations, the ‘fun’ of creating something new and the satisfaction at creating something good.  Since UI designers do not often make good programmers and programmers working (often for free) would not be willing to take directions from someone else, reducing them to a cog in the machine, usability often suffers.  By providing a template though the second reason ‘creating something good’ would still be valid.  After all many FOSS projects are just reimplementations of closed source software – most FOSS games are this way – but people still make them.

It would also be a good way to entirely sidestep historical inertia associated with most decisions.  Large swathes of UI decisions and placements are only there because they have always been there, and the only reason they were there in the first place is because it seemed a good idea at the time.  Projects such as Gnome are like a supertanker with years invested in the particular direction and the people working on it are so close to it, so familiar with it, that usability criticisms with it are often simply not seen.  I remember when I first got my Android phone I spotted so many usability issues with it, but now I am so used to it that I cannot see them any more.  By bringing in people that understand the subject but are not ‘tainted’ with deep knowledge a fresh perspective can be gained.

This isn’t a new idea – I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while and have the overarching structure and methods to doing it fairly well thought through and I honestly do think it is feasible.

So if you are honestly interested in getting involved in something like this please let me know at kerberos at piestar dot net.

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So, the buttons again.  It’s been a few months since this change was made and, inevitably, you’ve got the Ubuntu fanboys saying ‘I actually prefer it this way around now’.  So I thought I’d throw this fact out there:

The Left Hand Side (LHS) button position is worse.  This is not an opinion, this is cast iron, concrete, fact.  “But it’s easier for me” is not a valid statement in this debate any more than me declaring “I prefer the Hotdog Stand theme” has any weight.

The statement “It’s easy to change it” is also void as 99.9% of users are unaware that the layout is sub-optimal, let alone realise that they are able to change it.  The job as a developer is to make things out-of-the-box as easy to use as possible.  The movement of the button position to the left represents a step backwards usability wise.

In truth the position of window controls don’t really matter at all.  Ubuntu, as a desktop, got ever so slightly worse but I really don’t think anyone who uses is will stop, and I really doubt it’ll pick up any new converts.  It’s not important.  What is important though is the implications this change has.  But first, here’s why it is bad.

1. The Minefield

As you can see the close button is now on the left, not the right.  Now let me ask you this – have you ever walked along a painted line?  It’s fairly easy as long as you’re not (too) drunk.  Have you ever tried to walk across a 5″ wide beam?  Drunk?  Much harder, despite being exactly the same task.

What’s been introduced here is a button you really don’t want to press, surrounded by buttons you need to press often.  Above, below, to the side – overshoot and you’re going to be fairly unhappy.  While in theory it’s just as easy to press as it’s always been it will slow users down subconsciously (see the balance beam) as much more care and attention will be taken using any control surrounding it.

It also discriminates against those with poor motor control of poor vision.  Before the destructive close button was safely off in a corner, now it’s grouped up with commonly used controls.

2. Convention

It doesn’t fit the convention people are used to, either on Linux or Windows.  And here’s the kicker – it doesn’t even fit the Ubuntu convention.  Top right is ‘get me out of here’ in Ubuntu – the top right button on the screen is shut down.  The top right controls on windows were close.  There was a pattern there.  Destructive buttons away from the main buttons and at the top right.  Menus on the left.  No more.

The thing is this change is far from universal.  Any programs not using the default Ubuntu theme is going to have close on the top right, tabbed interfaces will also commonly have it on the top right.  Remote desktop or virtual machines?  Top right.  You can no longer rely on muscle memory.  Speaking as a Mac user this does get irritating but OSX has always been this way.  What Ubuntu has done is introduced inconsistencies for no reason*.

3. Visually

Lets face it – it looks unbalanced.  You have this big clutter of stuff on the left side of the window – even the title is left justified.  On the right you have … nothing.  It just looks ‘off’.  Visual balance is important.  Composition is important.  Things are much easier to identify and digest if they are separate from their surroundings.  It’s why you have new paragraphs, it’s why you have headings, bulletpoints and those little dotted separator things on menu icons.  Packing everything together fundamentally makes it harder to see and use.

4. Change for it’s own sake.

People say there is nothing wrong with change for it’s own sake – I say there is.  Window controls on the right is the de-facto standard in Linux.  Close buttons on the windows outer corner is the de-facto standard just about everywhere.  If I built a house and installed the light switches upside down you can bet whoever bought it would be pissed.  “It’s not wrong, it’s just different” and “You can fix it in 60 seconds with a screwdriver” simply wouldn’t fly.  People expect things to look and act in a certain way based on what they are dealing with.  Doing it a different way simply for the sake of it makes things harder for no gain – it’s a net loss no matter how you argue it.

5. Usability

As a general rule people seem to drag windows out the left side of the screen to make space as it still leaves the scrollbars exposed.  The clumping of all the window controls on the left means this is no longer really possible as you can no longer close the program without dragging it back in again.  On Windows you can close a window with the Right side buttons, or File->Exit on the left side file menu of the same window.  On OSX although it has the buttons on the left the file menu is always at the top so you can just go File->Quit.  Ubuntu, not so much.

So What’s My Point?

To understand this you have to understand the Dunning Kruger effect.  Essentially nobody thinks they are stupid, incompetent or mistaken.  If you hope to actually be good at anything (and improve) humility and debate are essential.  Failing to recognise this will doom you to a life of being marginalized by your peers.  Even now you still see the ‘Tables or Death’ web developers who refuse to move beyond 1998, convinced in their own methods and superiority.  And they are convinced they are right.

Usability and UI design is a science and is no more part of programming or design than programming is a part of maths.  Being an amazing mathematician will not make you qualified to make programming decisions.  Being an amazing designer (or programmer) also does not qualify you to make UI decisions.  Being a builder does not make you an architect.  Yet it’s all too easy to marginalize what you don’t understand.  The less you understand something the easier you think it is, as evidenced by the multiplication rule of quoting in programming – you make an estimate, multiply by three and give that to the client, because things are always more complicated than you think.  Same goes with usability – if you don’t understand the subject you wont see why moving things about is important ‘it’s a button, you click on it’, yet it is important.  Moving something 2px to the left is a big deal.  Just about every developer has seen a Visual-Basic-and-Access monstrosity yet everyone involved – from the management to the users – never really see the issue with it “hey, it works”, sure, but it should never have been allowed to occur in the first place.  Which is my point on Linux’ usability – we shouldn’t even be having this discussion – it should have been fixed a decade ago!

Do any of the people involved in this decision, which was made behind closed doors, which was submitted 1 day before the interface freeze, which is imposed unilaterally without discussion on the whole community,  actually have any experience or credentials in UI design?  Judging by the fact they did it in the first place – and have yet to provide any actual reason for it I seriously doubt it.  It’s like watching someone who has just discovered the font controls in their email client – everything is now 16pt dark blue, centred and in Comic Sans.  Sure they think it looks wonderful.  I am almost reluctant to joke about them making the default font Comic Sans because they may just do it.  And anyone who says ‘what’s wrong with Comic Sans’ simply proves my point – there is such a thing as not being qualified to make decisions about things you don’t understand.

Quite a few people were surprised by this behaviour, and especially Mark Shuttleworths condescending:

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it’s more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making any given decision, and (b) it’s worth investing your time to become the best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

It’s been made painfully clear that the people who are making these decisions are not the best people to make them** – or this decision would never have been made.  It is also clear that he thinks he shouldn’t have to put up with plebians moaning about it.  As I said many people who felt like they were contributors to the one big happy Ubuntu family were taken aback when they were essentially told to shut up.  And as I pointed out nobody is really going to say that they, personally, are not the best person for the job.

But this is Linux all over, and what several people are now realizing.  It’s not some happy ‘everyone helps out’ commune, it’s a game of politics, infighting and power.  Decisions are not being made by those that are most competent to make them, and things are not being discussed in an open and forthright manner.  Decisions are instead made by those that have managed to get in to positions of power and as has been proven people only get in power based on their desire for it – it has very little to do with any actual abilities.  If your talent is in UI design then the chances of you ever getting in a position where you can affect change is astronomically low – after all it’s a meritocracy and if you haven’t coded anything you have no right to demand changes to the UI.

I have tried for literally years to get involved, but the necessary discussions simply don’t happen.  If Canonical (and other distro’s) actually gave a crap about usability they would pose decisions like this to the community and get feedback.  If they felt there was an UI issue they would be open discussions about what it is and how to fix it.  Yet we get this random change dropped on us out of nowhere.  Same with Gnome Shell and virtually everything else.  Developed by a small clique of people who are only willing to listen to ‘bug reports’.  If you are not into playing the politics game, or don’t have a lot of time (which is just about everybody) then you are essentially forbidden from contributing – you ain’t paid your dues.

If you don’t believe me check out the official Gnome usability mailing list.  This blog gets more comments than it does and the reason for this is because they don’t use it.  Sure I may be mistaken but I regularly challenge people to provide where these honest and open discussions on usability are taking place and nobody has ever furnished me with a decent answer.  If this was a community contributed project there would be vibrant debate and hundreds of posts a day, instead it is a doomed backwater where people occasionally discuss minor things that will never be changed.

Essentially, my point Linux, and Ubuntu especially is no more ‘Community Developed’ than Windows or OSX is – the only difference is that if you do want to sink your time into improving Windows then Microsoft will at least pay you a decent wage for your efforts.

* The whole ‘Windicator’ thing is nothing but vapourware.  If you are going to move them for UI reasons do it.  Doing it because you may, in the future, move them for UI reasons is stupid.

** I fail to believe that Mark Shuttleworth is the best person to be making UI decisions and that the fact that he is the billionaire owner of Ubuntu is just coincidental.

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So I’ve decided to try to post more often so from now on, every Tuesday, I’ll make a new post or at least have an interesting link or something just so you don’t have to visit every day for a month only to realise I am a lazy git.

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First they had proprietary drivers, bioses and hardware, then proprietary browser plugins (Flash etc) and now celebrations that Steam looks like it might, maybe, possibly, sometime in the future be available on Linux.  Add on the fact that you constantly get calls for Photoshop to be made available for Linux and it leaves me wondering what the point in even running Linux is?

You get the Linux zealots ranting about freedom constantly but if your freedom is becoming a more and more narrow slice out of a stack then, really, why bother?  If you put down more money in a weekend on Steam than the cost of a Windows license then all the claims of ‘freedom’ (both kinds) simply evaporate.

Also once you remove the ‘ethical’ and ‘freedom’ arguments from the table that form the main thrust of the pro-Linux argument it leaves virtually no compelling reasons to actually use it.  An unstable system with constant breakages and regressions in it’s aim to stay ‘free’, yet running proprietary, locked down, drm infested apps.  The worst of both worlds!

On a side note Steam for Mac is out now and if you register (or even sign in) you’ll get a free copy of Portal (and I think it applies to Windows users too), which is exactly the sort of game the FOSS crowd should be making (innovative, polished, clever) rather than knocking out Quake 3 clones repeatedly.  I guess being able to work full time on something rather than occasional unpaid evenings and weekends does produce better results.  Who’d a thunk it?

Edit, lol:

116 comments

Here we go again.  Another 6 months, another ‘revolution’ in Linux usability.  I am tempted to take a photo of myself now and submit it to the Wikipedia article for ‘underwhelmed’ as it would make a perfect example of the state.  It’s amazing how the FOSS community like to mock Windows 7 as ‘Vista SP2′, conveniently ignoring the fact that no less than six releases of Ubuntu were made in the same time frame it took to go from Vista to 7.

As a developer I believe in two main approaches to software development – solving problems at the correct level and keeping things as modular as possible.  If you wanted a new fuzzy dice for your car you wouldn’t replace the mirror, or the windscreen.  If you wanted a new chopping board in your kitchen you wouldn’t replace the sink.  So why, when looking at the change notes for Lucid does it appear to be almost entirely of things that have absolutely nothing to do with the OS?  You hear the FOSS brigade freak out that MS dares integrate a browser into it’s OS yet what amounts to a bunch of applications is somehow core to a whole new OS.  I can get DirectX not getting backported to XP and while a bit of a dick move it’s understandable, being a core system API.  But a music store?  A software store?  A new theme?  Is there anything here that actually warrants a new install?  And of course with every episode of the BiannualForcedDeathMarch™ they manage to break stuff that used to work.  There is a very good reason every sane developer uses a (preferrably well documented) API to communicate between modules – and is one of the reasons for the rise of OOP.  This problem has been solved long ago – can someone please tell them that?  If things randomly stop working each minor revision that is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.  It is not – and should not – be the status quo and is a waste of everyone’s time.

And lets face it it really is lipstick on a pig.  I covered this over a year ago and the substance of my argument dates back much further than that.  It’s still crappy Gnome, you still have to manually unlock, move and re-lock each and every item to move things about (global lock is for pussies apparently), it’s still Windows 95 split onto two bars.  I mean not only have you copied a UI that is nearly 15 years old you’ve actually managed to make it worse.  Amazing!  Check out the screenshot for yourself comparing Lucid to Windows 98 after spending 5 minutes rearranging things and if you still think it is somehow different or innovative then you are seriously deluding yourself.

The same crappy bugs have still not been fixed – you can’t actually access the help on any game starting with a K – you’d think since this has been an issue for two years that it would be fixed, but no (see screenshot).  Alignment issues are everywhere as usual and guess what, the new fantastic ‘left hand side’ window controls are on the left, but not entirely on the left, thus handily defeating Fitt’s Law once you have sacked off the top bar.  Genius.

So in summary it’s the same as before (and it always has been) – Windows 95 tarted up a little bit with a few more programs installed and a whole load of stuff broken.  If you think Ubuntu is fantastic, you’ll probably like 10.04.  If you don’t then there is absolutely nothing new here.

*snore*

P.S. I want to punch who came up with that tooltip thing that appears everywhere and states the obvious while covering up whatever you are looking for.  Usability is about making things intuitive, but typical to FOSS fashion they approach it by throwing documentation at it, albeit Twitter style.

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One year on, same presentation, absolutely no significant change what-so-ever. His hearts in the right place but I really don’t think that even if the community did exactly what he said it would really change a thing.

If a boat is sinking and when someone does a speech ‘hey, the boat is sinking’ it makes waves* then the issue is not that the boat is sinking, it is instead that nobody has noticed the boat was sinking.  Fixing the boat itself will do nothing.  Suggesting fixes to the boat will do even less.  Your core issue is that nobody actually sees that the boat is sinking.  “Guys, I gave this presentation a year ago and there is still water pouring in the sides, what we need is a team to set up a fund to pay for a crew to board up the holes that you guys keep making.”  Lets face it it’s not really tackling the actual issue – people keep putting holes in the boat.

Even saying something as fundamentally obvious as ‘Choice in software is good, choice in standards is bad’ creates controversy and argument.  Essentially what has happened is Linux has become a movement, rather than a bunch of lines of code.  Tenets of that movement such as ‘choice, freedom, superior development model’ are viewed as infallible, thus anything which casts doubt on this is attacked.  Saying ‘standardize on a package format’ goes against the ‘choice’ tenet and as such you’ll get slammed for it.  Saying Gimp isn’t very good – especially compared to Photoshop – goes against ‘superior development model’ and again, you’ll get slammed for it.  Many people actually believe that Gimp is equal or better than Photoshop – which is incredible.

It seems to me that the problem is a culture of defensiveness and denial is at the heart of the issue.  Linux uptake is staggeringly slow (~1% marketshare and, what, 50% increase in the last 5 years?) yet the attitude among the supporters when faced with unhappy users is “If you don’t like it piss off, it’s free”.  The community consists entirely of people who like it more than the competition – people who don’t like it leave pretty quickly.  If the Leopard Print Couch Company wasn’t doing so well, do you think asking a cross section of the people who own Leopard Print couches would provide valuable information into why they were not selling much stock?

I suppose what I am trying to say is that the Linux community reminds me of the Leopard Print Couch Company, who want a couch in every house but can’t figure out why it’s not happening.  Someone walks into the shop and says ‘I don’t like Leopard print’ and they’ll get told ‘everyone else here likes it’ and tell the customer to leave and then continue on discussing changes to the pattern “If only we could add more spots, then we’d succeed!”

The feeling I took away from this presentation was that which I get from virtually all these ‘lets be humble’ sessions – “we are nearly there, we just need to sort out a few little issues and then it’ll really take off” – when from where I am standing there is a massive, and widening, gulf between where Linux is and where it needs to be.

The true issue is that the people responsible for the holes in the side of the boat don’t even realise that they are creating them.  Pointing at the holes is pointless, getting the people making them to stop doing it is the actual solution.  Good luck with that though, as the community largely likes the holes**.

* Sorry!

** Just as the Leopard Print Couch Company wouldn’t change pattern – everyone likes Leopard print after all, just ask our customers!

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I bet if you looked in the standard Linux advocates dictionary you’d be hard pressed to find the word ‘easy’.  It’s probably cowering somewhere among the Z’s, hoping that the the torture will stop.

What am I referring to?  Comments such as this (or Google your own) …

Maybe if it wasn’t so easy to change it would matter a little but now it’s starting to sound like a bunch of spoiled babies crying because mommy didn’t cut the crust off of their sandwich. Get over it people…

In the above example the zealot is saying how you shouldn’t complain about a usability regression because it’s so easy to change back.  Here’s what people are referring to as easy:

It is easy to change back to the traditional top RHS.
Alt +F2 to open launcher
gconf-editor
select: apps/metacity/general/button_layout
Place ‘spacer, after ‘menu:’
menu:spacer,maximize,minimize,close

It’s almost as if you say something is easy enough times it’ll suddenly be easier – such as ‘updating is easy, just type sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’ – ignoring the fact that words have actual meanings, and changing the meaning to make something seem better than it is is dishonest.  Here’s the dictionary definition of ‘easy’:

Easy: achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties : an easy way of

Of course when you actually bring up the fact that it’s not easy you’ll get this fun little qualifier added ‘It’s easy when you know how‘.  But as far as all the dictionaries I have checked none have ‘when you know how’ anywhere in the description.  And why not?  Because ‘when you know’ negates the whole meaning of ‘easy’.  Here’s a bunch of other things that are ‘easy when you know how’.

• C Pointers
• Regular Expressions
• Mod Rewrite
• Juggling
• Professional Snooker
• Tightrope Walking
• Multidimensional Arrays
• Assembly Language
• Windows Arabic Edition (it’s easy once you learn Arabic)

You see where I am going with this.  In fact I can’t think of a single thing that isn’t ‘easy once you know how’.  Even the deliberately obfuscated languages such as Brainfuck are probably fairly simple once you get to know it well enough.

CLI vs GUI

Think of a GUI as a complex network of roads and paths.  You have all the paths in front of you and can see the main highways (start button) and little hidden side-roads (control panel) but although they are sometimes twisty and poorly signposted it is possible to get from A to B without a map.  Not that a map wouldn’t help, and not that the signs can’t be better, but getting from A to B does not require one.

The CLI on the other hand is like the same network of roads, but instead of having signposts you have a blindfold.  You need to know exactly what road you need, where it is and how to get down it.  One mistake and you are lying in the ditch.  It’s the whole point of a GUI and why they have been so wildly successful – they make things easy.

I remember telling a veteran Linux user about tail -f to monitor updates on a log file.  It’s not because he was stupid, it’s because he had never ever read the particular bit of documentation that described this feature.  That is, to effectively use a CLI based interface you must have already read and remembered everything about it.

If we take the above example as a GUI then the program will often pop up a message ‘changes detected, do you want to update to the file stored on disk’, with Yes, No and Always as an option.  There’s no way you could not know about it.  Same thing with mounting volumes, I’ve used various GUI partition tools for the last 20 years and the only thing I need to know going in was what I wanted.  I used the Linux mount command for the first time and wasted the best part of an hour due to not knowing to add ‘-umask=0666′ to the command to make it user-readable.  If that was a GUI there would have been an ‘allow user access’ checkbox and the problem would not have existed.

If something requires a mass amount of prerequisite knowledge then it is not easy!  If there is no way of knowing that something is even possible, let possible to figure out yourself then it is not easy!  Just because once you have invested the months of practice into learning whatever you happen to be using (Bash, VI, Emacs, Perl, etc) you can do something in 5 seconds does not make it easy!  If you have to copy line by line from the internet into a terminal window with no idea what you are typing means, it is not easy!

Hell, I am at the bottom of this article and I simply can’t remember what the steps were that were outlined as ‘easy’ – so if something can be written and read multiple times and you still can’t remember how to do it, it’s not easy.

Update: That’s not to say you don’t get some terrible GUI apps – you do.  But the natural state of a well made GUI app is to be intuitive, obvious and easy.  A CLI apps natural state is to have a mandatory RTFM requirement.

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I swear if I had a penny for every time I saw a css file contain something like the following I would have a lot of pennies:

body {
background-image: url(/image/background.jpg);
}

I mean seriously, I swear the majority of the time the only thing in most peoples CSS folder is ‘styles.css’.  Why even bother?

The point of CSS is to seperate style from structure.  An accreditation logo, a staff photo, a company logo are content.  The 8 separate images that make up the corners of a styled box are not.

If your imagery is content, use the <img> tag and put it in /images/ – that’s what it is for.  If you want to style a box border, background or anything else that is non-essential content place it in /css/ along with styles.css and do the following:

body {
background-image: url(background.jpg);
}

It’s out of the way of the actual content images and if you want to change the design at a later point you just switch the content of /css/.  If you want to be fancy it’s trivial to do /css/day/ and /css/night/ and have seperate stylesheets for night/day.  If you decided to store everything in ../images/ then doing any of the above would be a real hassle.

*End PSA*

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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.

51 comments

It’s got to the point where it’s almost not worth the hassle of even mentioning when Ubuntu decides they are doing a new theme and/or rebrand, as every 6 months like clockwork they announce they are ‘rethinking the UI paradigm’ or some such nonsense, then trot out the same rubbish again.

Anyway here’s the desktop from this announcement, and guess what?  It’s exactly the same and still has all the problems it’s always had.  What progress!

Apparently the latest innovation is to remove any method of viewing running programs.  Check the screenshots – where did the taskbar go to?  I also like the consistancy of moving the close buttons to the left, but keeping the orientation the same as Windows, so no matter if you are a convert from OSX or Windows you will still be confused.  Nothing quite like change for changes sake.

Just the usual ‘cargo cult usability’ we’ve come to expect and love from the FOSS brigade – tries to look like a Mac, works like Windows – nothing to see here, lets wait for the announcement 6 months from now about how they are ‘rethinking the UI paradigm’.  I am sure they’ll get it right that time.

70 comments