I take it back. Unity is cool.

http://lunduke.com/?p=1985

by swah • 15 years ago

181 86 15 years ago

alperakgun2• 15 years ago

I find it the right thing that canonical focus on the user interface, so unity is a good idea for them to focus on what matters the most, the end users. as a developer I don't care much about desktops, I find them all interesting.

Rusky• 15 years ago

That's an interesting point of view- in the past, I have been annoyed with what I saw as Canonical's over-modification of everything.

However, seeing a nice desktop ui as their main product (as opposed to just another repackaging of Debian) makes that all make much more sense- you want to build your main product yourself.

gonehome• 15 years ago

Looks like it'll be interesting to play with in this version. I also thought unity in 11.04 was far too buggy to be usable as a daily environment. I guess it's time to check out this new release.

gldalmaso2• 15 years ago

Unity is going to be Ubuntu's killer app that will have people leaving Windows and Mac behind for a different desktop experience that can better blend itself with different modern devices.

Soon enough Ubuntu will be pluggable to our tablets and smarts or whatever hybrids will come forth in the next years.

alperakgun2• 15 years ago

Totally agree, i hope unity will shine, my adding more and more goodies. On my tablet i would really want to have a full linux, if that is at all possible.

SimHacker10• 15 years ago

You DO NOT want to run a desktop user interface on a tablet.

Was Unity specifically designed for a tablet? Does the window system have multitouch support? Accelerometer support? Do any of the applications themselves support multitouch and accelerometers?

nirvana3• 15 years ago

Unity is a nice ripoff of the Mac UI circa 2003 or so. That puts it way ahead of Windows which was a poor copy in 1990 and has been going the wrong way since.

But I see no reason a Mac user would find Unity more attractive than the Mac UI.

If they'd copied the Mac UI exactly then they'd have achieved parity.

If they'd done their own UI research and come up with something new, they might have been able to come up with something better than the Mac UI. Certainly there is some room for this, given Apple's need to support old paradigms. But if you've noticed, Apple isn't exactly nostalgic.

But by copying the obvious ideas, but not thinking thru why Apple made the choices they did, they miss the mark... which seems to happen with everybody who tries to copy Apple's innovations. They end up with something that on the surface looks the same, but doesn't actually work the same.

I think this is because its too easy to "improve" what Apple did based on their preferences, without understanding why what Apple did the first time was the right way.

Given that linux has a much higher cost[1] than OS X, to gain a lot of market share, it will need a much better UI. We saw how things went for Apple for many years, despite having a much better UI (and cheaper machines, actually) than Windows...it wasn't until the iPod lowered the awareness cost that people started switching to Macs in droves.

[1] Not all economic costs are measured in dollars. Lack of awareness of a product creates a barrier of entry, and while many people have heard of Linux, few are aware of it as a Desktop operating system. This lack of awareness is a cost that needs to be overcome, or reduced, to get a lot of switchers.

SimHacker10• 15 years ago

Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art.

jamesgeck0• 15 years ago

> I think this is because its too easy to "improve" what Apple did based on their preferences, without understanding why what Apple did the first time was the right way.

IIRC, the Unity team has been actively doing user testing, and there have been several changes in the UI as a result.

blntechie• 15 years ago

I'm predominantly a Windows user and I hate Mac UI. For me at least, it's hideous. The way you imply that Mac UI is the best in the game somewhat annoys me considering that UI cannot be implied as a fact and it's a personal preference. I might be down voted for this but that's my honest opinion.

BTW, I had trouble adjusting with Unity in 11.04 but I lived through it. Now, I don't find it troubling at all and this is the longest streak I've been using Linux without moving back to Windows. For me, 11.04 might not have been a game changer but it was a great foundation. 11.10 is updating on the background and I can't wait to check how Unity has turned up.

mukyu• 15 years ago

It annoys me that I cannot make the top panel (I have no idea what to call it) either go away or have windows be drawn over it.

The only way to get rid of it is when an application has an actual full-screen mode, but then half of the time it reverts back if I move the mouse to a different screen with synergy.

It does not make sense to make hard and fast UI decisions based upon some idealistic vision of how people will use things (such as not being able to move the top bar or whatever) that get in the way of how people actually want to do things.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

I hope Unity will attract that kind of app designers to Linux, like the ones that use Macs. I've tried using Linux several times in the past, and one of the reasons I didn't like using it, is that the apps (programs) looked so ugly and rough compared even with the ones on XP. For me, at least, that's kind of a deal breaker.

SimHacker10• 15 years ago

Most user interface designers and programmers gave up on the Linux desktop and moved over to Macs years ago. The Linux desktop is like Perl 6. Don't hold your breath. And if it finally arrives, hold your breath and don't breath in, because it stinks.

Even if good user interface designers attempted to contribute to projects like Gimp, they would quickly be driven away because of politics and NIH.

darreld• 15 years ago

True and I have no idea why you were downvoted.

jlyke• 15 years ago

1) Open Firefox, browse to http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/ 2) Open another Firefox. Isn't happy about browsing to http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/ :(

Looking forward to installing and checking out the improvements!

otaku888• 15 years ago

If you google "ubuntu tour" with the fake firefox, you can get there, and then go deeper and deeper within each instance.

Well I thought it was fun anyway.

taken11• 15 years ago

Sadly, it still does not work with 2 monitors. i.e. attaching a projector for a presentation, all your windows get moved to the projector. can be quite a problem if you are in a meeting. in addition external monitor can only be to the right, since the dash is fixed on the left.

If you want to drag something inside an application to the left side, the dash shows up and blocks the left side of the application. no way to move the dash.

Just two major bugs in terms of usability. ignored for a long time.

nevinera2• 15 years ago

>Sadly, it still does not work with 2 monitors.

I've been using it with two monitors both at home and at work since launch, with zero configuration.

The second issue is certainly annoying, but 'it does not work with two monitors' is a pretty strong claim.

va_coder• 15 years ago

What kind of graphics card do you have?

mrinterweb• 15 years ago

I also have been using two monitors since 11.04 came out. It works great.

eric-hu• 15 years ago

I switched to using just my monitor when using my laptop at work for this reason. It worked all right in 10.10 for me, but switching to 11.04 caused some issues when having 2 screens at a different res.

As I understood with my googling, it has something to with my laptop's integrated i815 graphics chip (and possibly with the chip itself). I do plan to upgrade to 11.10, but not until after my Monday deadline

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

To rehash a tired argument:

Removing the menu from the window to a common location is still a big usability fail. Not because it's worse than having the functionality bound to the window itself (personally I believe it is, but I could get used to it) but because it's the only major Linux desktop that does this, and as such most of the apps anyone is going to run, are going to be built with that in mind. It's usually not such a big deal to overload the menus with Gnome and KDE, but with Unity it is.

And having it double as a title bar is just stupid. Screen real estate isn't at the premium they think it is.

I tried Unity with 11.04 and hated it. The bugs didn't bother me but the design did. I'll be sticking with KDE.

barrkel• 15 years ago

I disagree; on most Linux UIs I've seen, screen real estate is at a premium because of over-generous borders, oversized icons, oversized buttons, oversized listbox item sizes, all generally looking like a 96dpi UI rendered on a 75dpi device (I've often wondered if X Window historical baggage and ancient bitmap font sizes had something to do with it). Everything is about 33% oversized.

(I'm a fan of the relative information density on Windows. It's really noticeable in file explorer views in details mode; Windows Explorer packs in a lot of information with very thin borders so the text on each line stays large (though the icon for the file is only 16x16), while the nearest equivalent on pretty much any Linux shell file explorer I've used has large inter-item borders that force the detail text to be tiny; and it still doesn't get in as many items as Windows.)

jeltz• 15 years ago

At least in GNOME and XFCE you can decrease the default font size, which is what I did right after installing Debian with XFCE. XFCE also has really slim buttons and borders. Sadly the file manager, Thunar, is not slim at all.

So if you have not already given XFCE a try I recommend you do. Personally I wont use Unity until the skin i as slim as XFCE.

rdtsc2• 15 years ago

> Screen real estate isn't at the premium they think it is.

It is on netbooks and tablets perhaps...

My beef with it currently is that it doesn't work well with focus-follows-mouse. If menu is on the top, and you want to access it, you mouse will eventually bring other apps to the forefront before it reaches the top, so you end up with a menu of a different application than what you intended.

But, that is just me with my hand-hacked preferences that have lingered around since 4 or 5 version ago. I bet new users don't have a way to enable focus-follows-mouse...

pyre• 15 years ago

Compiz supports focus follows mouse, though it is broken in 11.04. Maybe they fixed it in 11.10.

shawndellysse• 15 years ago

http://askubuntu.com/questions/10481/does-unity-support-disa...

The setting to change focus style is somewhere in gconfeditor.

hristov• 15 years ago

"It is on netbooks and tablets perhaps..."

And there goes the entire problem with unity. It is a touchscreen tablet UI offered for mouse based computer users. I would have applauded Ubuntu if they made a separate tablet (and perhaps netbook too) distro, but why force me to use it on my desktop?

dredmorbius2• 15 years ago

Quoted for truth (viz: FFM)

haet haet haet teh top / unified menu.

It also really f*cks with rapid multitasking between multiple applications/windows, which is a mode of operation far more common on Linux systems than Windows/Macs, in my experience.

nirvana3• 15 years ago

Apple studied this back in the 1980s. This is why the menubar is at the top of the screen. What they found was, people were able to, much more quickly and accurately, pick the menu item they wanted, because they didn't have to be as precise in their targeting when the menu was at the top of the screen than on the window.

If you've grown up with poor copies of the Mac UI (like Windows) then you're used to targeting menu items on a window, and you don't realize that you're slower at it.

But you are.

It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice.

WayneDB• 15 years ago

If you've grown up using the poorly crafted Mac OS interface, you probably don't realize that almost everything else is slower, despite that one really fast menu access (by mouse only).

However, I can Alt-Tab to an app and bring up it's main menu (and hunt through the menu) with only the keyboard. You just can't do that on the Mac. There's a reason most other desktop systems copy the much more logical Windows style instead of the illogical Mac OS style.

ajross• 15 years ago

Apple studied this on a 512x342 1-bit display, on a machine architecturally incapable of multitasking more than one app at a time. It's just not relevant anymore, sorry.

The ease of aiming is a real effect, but lost on a 1920x1080 display. And the usability disaster of trying to figure out which of the three "main" windows is in the foreground (and thus owns the menu) is something that was not studied, nor accounted for by Apple in the 80's.

Androsynth2• 15 years ago

Can you explain why the one button mouse is better than the 2 button mouse? One of my pet peeves with Mac is that my magic mouse takes 2 clicks and a mouse movement to open a new tab in my browser, as opposed to 1 click of the scroll wheel on a pc. (Plus I have to waste a mental thread wondering if its going to register it as a primary or secondary click.)

Usually when I find something on the mac annoying unusable, I blame it on Industrial Design. As in, 'boy the magic mouse really hurts my hand after a while and the secondary click is difficult to use, but it really looks great (the finger scroll is really why I use it fyi)' or 'boy my macbook cuts sharply into my wrists in a just-about-but-not-quite painful way, but damn that unibody is sleek'.

I always just assumed the 1 button mouse (specifically the magic mouse) came about because it just looks so good.

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

It isn't the 80's anymore. People often have more than a single window visible on the screen. Refocusing to that window before hitting the menu is a waste of time, and especially aggravating and confusing if you forget.

But again, my main gripe is simply that, right or wrong, having the broad functionality of the window embedded in the window is what people are used to, and what a designer will have in his mind when putting it together, and old habits die hard.

I suspect that if you were to conduct that same experiment with current and prospective users of Unity, you would not get the same results

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

>It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice.

It is objectively worse. Cmd-clicking or two-finger-clicking is a pain in the ass. Many things become more annoying on osx simply because of the one button policy.

OSX is generally nicer to use than windows, but it's hardly perfect and there are some things it just plain gets wrong.

bane4• 15 years ago

Both of your examples are definitely worse on OS X than on basically every other OS in existence. And as proof, OS X is slowly but surely moving in the direction away from at least one of those, and I'd bet that within two or three revs of OS X away from both.

Menus just aren't that hard to hit otherwise all clickable items in a program should be on a screen edge. In fact, according to Fitts's law, they should be jammed into the corners of the screen since that's even easier to hit than a screen edge. But they aren't because it's not that hard for anybody who's bothered to use a pointing device in the last 20 years. More important than that, trackpads are becoming the de facto pointing device on Apple sold computers and Fitts's law works differently on a pad vs. a moving device like a mouse. The edge of the touch surface is the infinite target, not the screen. Since touch devices are not 1:1 mapped to screen area, all clickable interfaces should be at the edge of the pad relative to wherever the cursor starts.

Likewise, a second mouse button turns out to have been a great idea, so great that decades later Apple guarantees that they not only support right mouse buttons, but their default mouse not only ships with support for it, but they even have managed to cram a touchpad into it and their trackpad recognizes a two finger tap as a right-click. Why? Because decades into the great GUI experiment it finally dawned on somebody that interface complexity requires more than one button -- otherwise half of your interface gets buried behind a modifier button (or two or three) or a pile of menus and your sole button.

I've watched many dozens of users move to OS X and one of the first things they ask is "why is the menu bar way the hell over there?" -- with pointing to the top of the screen (or to an entirely different monitor depending) usually preceded by a series of questions about how to do some function that is clearly on the menu bar, but since it's not coupled to the actual program window, they assume it has a decoupled function from the program and don't realize what they are looking for is there.

It's an embarrassingly repeatable user interface experiment that's left me convinced that the only reason it's still part of the OS is to differentiate OS X from Windows.

Physically decoupling software interfaces from the software is almost always a bad GUI idea if you can help it. It repeatedly confused users, particularly new users. It's like putting the steering wheel of your car in your house, and the gas pedal in your back yard shed.

Everything from MDI to full screen apps are now slowly creeping into OS X because time and time again it's shown that users find those alternatives more usable than the old Apple way standby.

Lets stop tooting this "everything Apple does in UI is best" horn. Lots of stuff Apple does in UI is great, it's even the best, these things are simply not.

wnight• 15 years ago

The mile-high toolbar thing is right - a target at the side/corner of the mouse catchment area is easier to hit than a target you have to navigate to stop inside. But this is only right because no usability metric is attached at this point.

If the mouse-button story were just that it takes some milliseconds longer to click a control when there are two, then yes. Likely it does. But you go farther to attach usability claims to it and that's where you become wrong.

For one, the one-button mouse thing was tested on people who aren't used to it. Maybe it takes a few days to get the hang of but it's not the kind of thing where someone who knows what they're doing hits the wrong button.

And even if it were more than microseconds slower for the base physical action, it gets more done in that time. You have to set down your drink and reach for the keyboard with your other hand and I've already right-clicked and am done. Without knowing out workloads you can't make blanket statements like that, and I think that almost anyone could benefit from using more complex control, and macroing, etc, but only once they have a solid understanding of the thing they're trying to do.

"Had to suffer with 2-button mice." Hilarious. Stockholm syndrome.

pnathan• 15 years ago

I really prefer a single menu location, actually. IT makes much more intuitive sense to me. Also, screen real estate is always premium for me. I need to see all my code. :)

mynameishere• 15 years ago

I used this for 5 minutes a while ago, realized you couldn't get rid of that odious sidebar and wrote it off permanently. Why on earth designers would prevent users from reconfiguring their screen is beyond me. Even if they fixed it, you still have to wonder about their overall judgement.

fingerprinter• 15 years ago

install CCSM : sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Open and search for Unity. Find options to mess with.

muuh-gnu• 15 years ago

Shuttleworth once stated that they are removing configuration options on purpose in order to decrease the total number of exsiting different configurations, to build a configuration brand. The logic is that every time 2 users make 2 different settings, it is harder for them to talk and to learn from each other, so removing options artificially levels the field and eases information exchange.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Yes, even more annoying is that the sidebar can autohide, like when you open a full-screen window. They just disable that ability otherwise and provide no way to enable it. I'm not a Mac user, but I was under the impression you could even hide the dock in OS X?

wiredfool2• 15 years ago

It's autohiding for me, and I don't think I did anything to it. Though, it might just be a bug, I've run into a handful of near showstoppers in the last few days.

edit: Though, now that I think about it, when I first installed, I got the sidebar not autohiding with fullscreen apps, so that it blocked the left inch of whatever was up. Annoying as hell.

sutro• 15 years ago

Totally agree. I switched to Linux Mint after that last release and have no interest in ever going back, even if they fix all of the many issues with Unity. I lost so much time on that last "upgrade" that I will never trust Canonical's judgment again.

rufugee2• 15 years ago

I can't go back to Unity until it supports three monitors (with Xinerama). I know compiz won't support this, but even Unity2d doesn't work well at the moment, and 11.10 broke basic functionality in Gnome Classic. I switched to KDE a few weeks ago and it worked across the three monitors with zero extra configuration. I've also been very impressed with the polish the environment seems to have gotten since I first tried 4 years ago. What was once riddled with bugs is now slick and very pragmatic.

When three monitor support comes along, I'll give Unity another shot, but for now, I'm on KDE.

rocha2• 15 years ago

Do you know if it works with two monitors? That is my standard setup, and haven't tried unity because so far it seems to only support one.

rufugee2• 15 years ago

Yes, it works fine with two (I use Nvidia's twinview for that). It's when you hit three that there's a problem.

wiredfool2• 15 years ago

After working with unity in beta2 over the last week, I'm not a fan. (And I realize this is beta, and things may have changed. But... We'll see tonight when I get a chance to muck with it)

My current project is to put together a little machine for the kids (2,4,7). So, I need to limit options, and generally not put in anything that's going to confuse them. For reference, I've got a 10.04 desktop and 10.04 Netbook remix, as well as various OSX and IOS devices around. Ideally, I'd like something like 10.04 NBR, but with current flash/web stuff, and works with the wifi dongle I have. (This is replacing a 1st gen ppc mini that's got hardware issues. Yay for kids flash games turning off the machine)

For a machine that's got constrained purposes, for lack of a better word, I find the netbook launcher interface is really good. There are a bunch of categories on the side, there are a handful of apps for each category, and everything launches full screen. I can cut back on most of the clutter, so that they don't accidentally click on something that's going to lead them astray.

Unfortunately, the netbook launcher is end of lifed at 10.04 with gnome 2, and unity is the way forward. In my brief time with unity I've:

* had the dock not autohide, and had firefox launch fullscreen, with the left half inch under the dock.

* gotten all the windows to launch behind dash. Only visible blurred. Had to ssh in and restart.

* completely killed the unity system, no sidebar, no top bar, only nautilus running. This persists through logout/login. Or rather, restart, since I can't figure out how to logout without finding terminal in the filesystem and rebooting.

There are also some design head scratchers:

* There are categories of apps when you look at internet apps in dashboard, but not when you look for more apps.

* How do I change the big three apps on the dash screen?

* unity keeps offering to install apps. I don't want that. Maybe it's cause I'm a sudoer, but I don't really want this for the other users. And it's really confusing to be looking for something to change a setting, but having the wrong name for which there are no hits, and have the top line be things to install, and not things that are on the drive already.

* why does the menu bar sometimes appear, and sometimes it's the name of the app?

And then, there's probably a hardware issue: for some reason, my desktop thinks that it has a laptop panel mirroring at 1024x768, so the 20" lcd starts up at that resolution. I know about xrandr, It can't do anything about the phantom panel.

Some of this can be traced to "It's not the netbook launcher", some to "It's not even as well thought out as the nbl", and some to "It looks like you have grand designs on my desktop, and you're not telling me what they are, so the decisions look really strange right about now".

Sometimes, I think I should have just spent the extra $500 for a mini. It would have been smaller, quieter, lower power, and it would have worked out of the box.

kleim• 15 years ago

"In fact every piece of hardware on this rig worked perfect without no fiddling around." Holy crap! Where is the fun now?

username_• 15 years ago

"Let’s face it, most applications don’t need to be 64bit. How much ram does a calculator really need?"

This passage shocked me. This guy seems to think that 64bits is only useful for using more ram. Who is using 4G of RAM on Linux, seriously?

I take it back. Unity is cool.

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