Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ubuntu-desktop-moving-application-menus-back-into-application-windows/

by pedrocr • 12 years ago

116 119 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

sethammons• 12 years ago

Unlike many others, I really liked most of Unity. However, I never liked the menu bar always being at the top of the screen. I think that changing the menues to being attached again is a good thing, and I like how they integrated it to hide in the title bar.

d05• 12 years ago

Looking at that screenshot, one question:

What do we drag stuff with now without setting off a menu?

dave809• 12 years ago

I think the assumption is that the menu won't take up the entire bar

d05• 12 years ago

That's a pretty poor assumption then.

AhtiK• 12 years ago

Not sure about Unity but in quite a few Linux desktops you can press Alt and move window by clicking anywhere in the region. That's how I've always moved windows and been surprised when Windows or OS X have behaved differently.

But the question is great! For a regular user dragging window without setting off a menu can become a serious usability issue. Yes, menu won't take the whole bar but still the size of the movable area becomes substantially smaller.

One solution to detect dragging could be to use mouse release event for menu, instead of press and filter out shaky hand who actually wanted menu, not drag. But then again it's still bad because user expects menu system to react ASAP/mouse press, not release.

krakensden• 12 years ago

Unity and Gnome have that disabled by default :(

CyberShadow• 12 years ago

Watch the video in the article. At 0:48, they drag the titlebar as usual, even though there are menu entries directly under the mouse cursor. I guess they have replaced the "pull down" mouse gesture with initiating a window drag, so the only way to open a menu with the mouse is to click it.

d05• 12 years ago

There goes 20 years of muscle memory...again.

dagurp• 12 years ago

I'm used to maximising and resizing windows by double clicking on the title bar. I wonder if it will be possible now.

vinkelhake• 12 years ago

Holding the button down for longer than some threshold or moving the mouse more than some distance starts a drag.

hrkristian• 12 years ago

Relevant image: http://i.imgur.com/Ppp12vB.png

GNOME leaves a small portion of the top bar free for dragging purposes (about an inch on my 17'' monitor)... more than ample space to suit anyone's dragging needs.

d05• 12 years ago

Thanks for posting this - your efforts are appreciated :)

yxhuvud• 12 years ago

Hold alt. Drag anywhere. In general, these kinds of questions are best answered by holding down the windows-button until the help shows up.

RyanZAG2• 12 years ago

Great move, the single menu bar thing is just terrible design. It just moves common application actions further away from their context in order to give more room for.. more application actions? Whoever designed the single menu bar was clearly not thinking in terms of functional design principals.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

One of the nice thing about menus being at the top of the screen is an adherence to Fitt's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitt%27s_law

Edges and corners of the computer monitor (...) are particularly easy to acquire with a mouse, touchpad or trackball. Because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, they can be considered as having infinite width. This doesn't apply to touchscreens, though.

But there's an argument to be made for the spatial-locality as well, as you say. I think it's an interesting trade-off / difference of design philosophy.

RyanZAG2• 12 years ago

This tradeoff is best left to the user's specific task and is handled in a very intuitive and usable fashion: maximizable windows.

Avshalom2• 12 years ago

Well there's two things:

-A UI can't/can't-not adhere to Fitt's Law; Fitt's law tells you where to put things to make them easy to hit* it says nothing about what you should put there.

-The entire edge is infinite but if your mouse has any horizontal velocity (which is extremely common now with wide screen monitors) a top menu item is only as deep as it is long. It's still easier for being 2D but it isn't infinite.

*more accurately it's a mathematical model that tells you how long it takes to acquire a target with a mouse. I have no actual proof that speedy = easy.

mistercow4• 12 years ago

The problem with that is that Unity hides the menu items until you mouse over the menu bar (at least in 12.04; maybe that's changed since). Mystery meat is the ultimate anti-Fitts.

Of course, it looks like that behavior will be the same in this new mode, which is sort of the worst of both worlds from a Fitts' law perspective.

I think the Fitts' law issue is a bit irrelevant though. If you want to use menu items quickly, you use the keyboard.

wvenable• 12 years ago

Exactly how relevant is Fitt's law? Perhaps it made sense when nobody knew how to use a mouse. My screen is littered with click-able elements (hello Hypertext) and I have no problem hitting any of them. The menu in this window isn't even the most important or used element on my screen right now.

nilkn• 12 years ago

On OS X at least, I rarely use those menus and essentially always have my windows tiled (so that having every menu bar show up on every window would actually take up a lot of space). The only time my windows aren't tiled is the rare case when I have one maximized, in which case the top is already the correct location.

lucian1900• 12 years ago

I find it works great on OS X together with the dock. Unity's problem is that it sometimes hid the global menu and it moved the window chrome in the same place on maximisation.

emehrkay• 12 years ago

Ubuntu's implementation of it is a terrible design. Especially with the way the menu items would fade away if you weren't hovering over them. The approach works very well in OS X

selmnoo• 12 years ago

Very slightly-off topic:

So, I have this theory. The theory is that Microsoft and/or Apple somehow infiltrated the Ubuntu organization and got their men in as developers and made big changes to sabotage and undermine the Ubuntu project. And they've done great.

Let me tell you about the Unity Launcher: http://www.bomski.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/screenshot....

The awesome thing about it is the microscale indicator that is supposed to tell you what window is open. Yeah, that small little triangle on right/left side of icons. It gets even better when you have many windows open (the icon menu folds) or have more than one window open of a certain application (the triangle becomes an elongated thin icon which is now twice as difficult to make out in full-view): http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-36ZlfS5qyI0/TZREYHuo56I/AAAAAAAAAr.... Basically, the most perfect applications panel design to get my mom to stop using Ubuntu (it worked, too!) When on a high resolution screen, I can't quite make them out either (so it got me to stop using Ubuntu as well)! Also, changing windows (e.g., if you have two or three document processing files open), how do you quickly and efficiently switch to the right one? I don't know! Give Ubuntu a chance yourself to see more gems like this. Man, I really have to give kudos to whoever is behind this, to have convinced their 'dedicated UI team' that this shit is anything less than a joke. Bravo Apple/Microsoft/whoever you are, I'm impressed!

d05• 12 years ago

It's probably like our dedicated UI team: cheap.

Our head UI designer sent SPAM for a living before working for us.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

Also, it's open source and design related. I imagine that means that as the project grows, the bike shedding scales O(n^2).

streptomycin• 12 years ago

My conspiracy theory is that it was all a practical joke by Shuttleworth, bringing us so close to the ideal of a usable Linux desktop that everyone could get behind, and then randomly moving shit around and creating division within the Linux community. We went from Ubuntu clearly being the market leader and providing a consistent UI, to a clusterfuck of different distributions and DEs.

balladeer• 12 years ago

Yes. When I left Ubuntu 2 years ago, never to go back, even I thought it was merely a sadist joke. But I would say it had the desired effect.

keithpeter2• 12 years ago

Shuttleworth needs to make Canonical financially self-sustaining. The strategic focus moves to mobile. Hence Ubuntu phone &c.

What I can't get my head around is why Canonical and so it appears Microsoft think you need one common interface for all the devices so 3 inch screens to 30 inch screens. Apple seem to have worked that one out as have KDE with their various desktop styles.

AlexanderDhoore• 12 years ago

Or the fact that the current global menu HIDES when not hovered. Will kill any new adoption, for sure. Discoverability: 0.

techwizrd3• 12 years ago

I actually prefer this behaviour. I need the active window/application title more than I need the menu. As for discoverability, I haven't seen much impact. Even my non-technical mother and father do not have issues with it. I'd chalk this up to personal preference.

Spittie4• 12 years ago

I have a different theory: the Ubuntu "core" and "design" teams have their vision of what Ubuntu will be, and just don't listen for feedback from the community.

It's fine to just push changes, otherwise we would be stuck in the 80s and the 90s (everyone hates changes), but it's not fine to not listen to any kind of feedback from the community, even after years.

The unity sidebar is the biggest example. They refused to let users change the size of the icons for years. Even now, you're still limited by a small range they've decided on. They removed used, small features because it would make the codebase "harder to mantain".

The global menu is an usability nightmare on Ubuntu (the HUD instead is a pretty cool concept). I don't really like global menus, but Canonical managed to make it even worse - It's hidden by default, and get showed only on mouse hover. I've been using Linux with various DE for years, and the last time I tried Ubuntu it took me 5 minutes to remember where is the menu (I can only wonder what would my parents do). Obviously, they didn't change this at all.

I could go on and complain about Ubuntu all day (and not only about Unity - I'd like to talk about their tendency to patch everything downstream) but the message is "Canonical shot themself in the foot". I can only hope this is a "new beginning" and they'll start to listen their userbase.

pekk2• 12 years ago

You talk like "the community" all has one opinion.

In reality, whoever is unhappy screams and claims to speak for "the community" as a way of trying to get their way. And almost always someone is unhappy.

Most of the time, an equally large subset of the community is not screaming because they are happy with that decision.

You could chase one side of the community and then the other forever, without reaching a stable outcome.

brudgers• 12 years ago

I have a third theory: The theory behind Unity was a theory and not based on empirical data collected from actual users. I am not comparing the design process to focus groups etc. but to the UX design methodology described in The Story of the Ribbon.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4

massysett• 12 years ago

Listening to your userbase is a good idea if you want to keep that userbase happy.

Ubuntu's goal has always been to vastly expand its userbase to, shall we say, non-traditional Linux users. Now Ubuntu wants to expand into entirely new devices. These new users are, by definition, not in Ubuntu's userbase, so if Ubuntu wants to get them, listening to existing users is likely a detriment.

If you've been using Linux with various DE for years, and Ubuntu frustrates you, then Ubuntu is not the product for you. Ubuntu is going for people who don't even know what a "DE" is.

The instant Ubuntu becomes beholden to listening to its userbase is the instant it stops doing anything interesting and it loses whatever slim chance it ever had of being anything beyond a top ranker on DistroWatch.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Not sure he ever said it, but the point stands.

trycatch2• 12 years ago

The unity sidebar is the biggest example. They refused to let users change the size of the icons for years. Even now, you're still limited by a small range they've decided on.

That's an example of so-called bullshit. The setting was added to the standard config util in Ubuntu 12.04, the first LTS with Unity. It was a setting in compiz config since 11.04, the very first release.

I could go on and complain about Ubuntu all day (and not only about Unity - I'd like to talk about their tendency to patch everything downstream) but the message is "Canonical shot themself in the foot".

Of course, you can, but next when you'll want to complain, try to use it for more than 5 minutes. Don't speak for the whole userbase -- I'm a part of Ubuntu userbase, and I love Unity. I consider vanishing menus a great idea, because in practice it adds exactly zero problems with menu interaction, but saves space (less important) and reduces clutter on desktop (more important).

return0• 12 years ago

They don't have a vision, they just copy random crap. Thankfully there are alternative options.

polynomial• 12 years ago

I have also come up with the same theory, and was just explaining it to a friend last week, ending with, "I'm kidding of course, but it would certainly explain a lot."

sp332• 12 years ago

Click the icon twice to pick which window you want to switch to.

rquirk• 12 years ago

The workspace switcher is another strange one.

In Gnome the workspace switcher icon showed a mini-preview of the window layouts. In Unity this is just a static icon made to look like a mini preview! This seems cargo-cultish, as though the Unity developers don't understand what they are trying to recreate.

samstave• 12 years ago

FYI: you can hover over he app icon and scroll your mouse wheel to cycle through the open windows of that particular app.

However, I still find myself frustrated with many browser windows open...

I have been trying to train myself to take advantage of multiple desktops, which I have been historically poor at doing.

And since I run a win7 VM continuously, I like to have that desktop on another monitor, and then I have apps open in that VM as well... I have window/tab/app overload.

Since I never shut my machine down, I only sleep it, I find that sometimes I have to just close everything and start with a fresh desktop and zero tabs to reset my brains workflow.

wpietri4• 12 years ago

I am honestly glad that they are trying to make the Linux desktop better. But I am regularly enraged that they make me their guinea pig so that they can discover that their shit doesn't work. Please, Ubuntu people, try this stuff out in a lab and then on small groups of volunteer testers before inflicting it upon the world.

And this goes double for the stuff they ship in the LTS releases. I keep my servers on LTS, and so my laptop stays on that as well. That means I've had two joyous years of wacky interactions and irritating UI bugs. I just have to log out and/or reboot every couple of days. On a Linux machine.

Really, I like what they're trying to do with Unity. But if your goal is to improve the user experience, you don't ship wacky, half finished stuff to a shit-ton of users.

smithzvk3• 12 years ago

Ubuntu is a Free Software project and there is a small group of volunteer testers before every release. In fact you can be one of them, right now, for the upcoming 14.04 release: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

Really, I like what they're trying to do with Unity. But if your goal is to improve the user experience, you don't ship wacky, half finished stuff to a shit-ton of users.

Amen to this.

trycatch2• 12 years ago

Also, changing windows (e.g., if you have two or three document processing files open), how do you quickly and efficiently switch to the right one? I don't know!

There are quite a few of them:

1. Mouse scroll on the icon in the dock.

2. Click twice on the icon in the dock and select the window from spread/expose.

3. Right click and select the windows from the list.

4. Alt+Tab. Select the application, wait a second, select the window.

5. Alt+Tab. Right-click on application, select the window.

6. etc.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

The "application context" vs. "window context" UI dichotomy is certainly interesting; I think both mechanisms can be fine and implemented well or poorly. Ubuntu's was always extremely poor. Unless the toolkit and, to some extent, the applications are designed for that use-case, trying to hack their menus to appear at the top when they were expected to be part of the window is just a disaster.

It's unfortunate that we just don't have the resources to make a sane desktop-level application menu on the desktop-linux stack, even with all the might of Ubuntu. But that seems to be the case, so I'm glad they're moving to something more feasible. Even if it's a little disappointing.

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

I don't use my Ubuntu laptop nearly as often as my MacBook Air, so not a huge deal for me. That said, when I just work on a laptop's screen I like the menus on top but when I plug into a huge monitor being able to flip to the menus on window mode is excellent.

Off topic, but I need to find a nice way to do the same for OS X when I plug my Air into a huge monitor. Any suggestions?

mistercow4• 12 years ago

This actually is the thing keeping me from using Unity right now. A permanent menu bar made since on a 4:3 screen. But in 16:9, I just don't want to lose my precious vertical screen real estate to a menu bar.

mindstab3• 12 years ago

you can remove it already, and it's about the first thing I don on all my new computers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282659

mistercow4• 12 years ago

That doesn't solve the real estate problem - in fact it makes it worse in some apps. The top bar is still there after you do that. It just moves the menu items back into the window.

I don't really care where the menu items are. If the top bar would auto-hide, I'd be fine with it. I just don't want to give up the space.

Apparently there's a modified Unity called "Unity Revamped" which adds autohide as an option to CCSM, but it's a slightly older version of Unity, and for whatever reason I can't downgrade to it.

reirob• 12 years ago

Absolutely agree! I would like to know how to get rid of the horizontal bar all-together.

sampo• 12 years ago

But since the windows won't have menu bars, won't that balance your loss of vertical screen real estate?

Or if you have 2 or more windows vertically above each other, you even gain some vertical screen real estate.

nzp2• 12 years ago

Reading the title made my blood pressure start slightly rising as it gives an impression this is not configurable. Fortunately this is not the case. I like the menu bar where it is now, that space is wasted anyway. If Unity didn't have the HUD then the current solution would be problematic with focus follows mouse, but with the HUD it's a non issue.

Doesn't anyone else find it a bit weird how they pretend they invented the top bar menu and are like: "Yeah, we had this really cool and innovative idea, but, um, yeah as it was used in the real world for the past couple of years we gathered some data and we have second thoughts... You know how it is when you're the first and only product with an original feature..." Right... Because it's not like there's a certain other operating system GUI which has had this feature since the '80s.

bliti• 12 years ago

I just wished that Canonical would sell an Ubuntu laptop. Not a namebrand laptop with Ubuntu installed in it, but a machine made for them exclusively. Then they can integrate the OS to perfectly work with the machine. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

mistercow4• 12 years ago

System76 is kind of like that. Obviously it isn't Canonical choosing hardware and tweaking software to match it, but they do make good choices to make sure everything works well. In my experience, it's not quite as seamless as a Mac, but it's damned close.

willismichael• 12 years ago

Agreed (posted using a System76 laptop)

justin_vanw2• 12 years ago

Ubuntu doesn't make an OS. The put their sticker on, just like how your local dealer doesn't make cars.

Also, what does it mean integrate it to work perfectly? Don't say "like osx", because Apple makes the hardware and they make the OS, they aren't integrating them so much as building a single product from those pieces (hardware and software)

daemonburrito• 12 years ago

I second System76; I think it's exactly what you're looking for. I don't understand why Canonical doesn't have closer ties to them. System76 even maintains an apt repo for their machines.

I've bought 3 machines from them so far; all worked perfectly out of the box.

plumeria• 12 years ago

I second this. I have a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Project Sputnik and it is very buggy, specially the wireless connections. But I think this is, in part, fault of Dell's cheap components.

wpietri4• 12 years ago

Other folks are mentioning vendors, so I thought I'd list one not to try. EmperorLinux claims to provide exactly that sort of tuning and support. At least for me, they were a nightmare.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Even when I don't like the changes, I still like the idea they're experimenting with the UI. But I really wish they had added a "just turn this nonsense off" option in the configuration too. The tweaks never play nice with software from outside of the ubuntu repos.

A few commercial products running on Linux are important to our workflow. If they have a GUI, chances are high that there is a visual bug that makes the program unusable and that the root cause is a Unity feature. For example, the thing that moves the menu to the top bar meant no menu at all. Something else meant 1 quadrant of the application window just wouldn't paint at all, still no idea why on that one.

Wasting half a day implementing a workaroud here and there isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's a low enough number of special purpose machines that I always threaten the next time I'll just migrate them to another DE.

fps2• 12 years ago

I'm an Ubuntu + Gnome 3 user, but this seems a little pointless. None of the applications I use these days even have the 90's style File/Edit/View/Tools/Help style menus. Everything is in a right click menu, a function bar, or a much smaller all purpose "more" icon. File/Edit/View always made for a frustrating treasure hunt tracking down which of the properties/preferences/settings dialog box a certain setting was buried in; I don't understand why those menus lasted as long as they did.

Avshalom2• 12 years ago

moving everything into a right click or more icon doesn't get rid of the menu it just adds one more step to the treasure hunt.

fps2• 12 years ago

Not really. Some applications I use (like Gnome terminal) only have a right click menu. Everything is there, or in the "profile preferences" dialog accessible from within right click. Other applications (like Chrome) have a very sensible hierarchy:

- If I want to do something to an object within a page (copy link, open image, translate text), I right click on that thing.

- If I want to do something to the active document/page, there's a button for it at the top.

- If I want to make a change to the application, I go to the singular settings dialog accessible through the "more functions" button.

Hierarchical menus are a mess, and I'm glad they appear to be dying.

keithpeter2• 12 years ago

LibreOffice? Accelerator keys? AKA Mnemonics?

ALT-iof is wired into my fingers like C-maj on the piano. I use ALT-iof 50 times an hour when writing handouts. I've had to stop using versions of Unity after 12.04 because of the way later menu programming breaks this. See

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/7...

I don't use the mouse much.

justin_vanw2• 12 years ago

Who even notices silly things like this?

It's gnu/Linux. Ubuntu isn't doing much, they do a string replace and change "Debian" to "Ubuntu", force everybody to use a half baked semi optimized for tablet even though nobody anywhere runs Ubuntu on a tablet UI layer, Unity is just garbage, but none of that matters. Ubuntu hasn't made any decisions, they are just setting some defaults.

Who cares what the default menu location is when it takes 5 minutes to get everything back to the way you like it? (10 seconds if you are clever enough to rsync your home directory from another machine)

antihero• 12 years ago

What an utterly worthless comment. Ubuntu has lots of developers that produce a great deal of patches. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu but you don't have to be to understand that they do indeed contribute to the FOSS ecosystem, and saying that they don't is disingenuous and frankly offensive.

Furthermore discussions about "little things like this" are what people have been pushing for - Linux on the desktop taking user experience as seriously as technical supremacy - for years, and is one of the main reasons people still cling to OSX and Windows.

japhyr• 12 years ago

The intent of moving application-specific menus into the global menu bar was to leave more room for content in applications. But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors...

This matches my experience. I usually work from a laptop, but when I've used ubuntu on a larger monitor it's been annoying to have to go all the way to the top left of the screen for a menu. I use keyboard shortcuts for most actions, but I do notice the issue when I need to access a menu.

edtechdev• 12 years ago

I know the argument about Fitt's law and having the menu up on the top (as was the custom since the first Macintosh). That was in the 1980s, with tiny monitors and usually only running one single window application at a time. When you have larger monitors and multiple windows open, a single menu bar runs into two new usability problems, one being mode errors. Is that menu for the application I am trying to use it for? What mode is the menu bar in right now? (vi/vim users know this one, too) The other issue is that with large monitors it takes more effort to reach the menu bar with your mouse. It's not a simple quick flick of the mouse up to the top like before with small screens.

This is part of a larger class of problems I see with open source in particular. They copy some feature that made perfect sense in the time, context, and constraints under which it was designed, but don't factor in how things have changed or they don't have knowledge of the original problem that feature was designed to solve (which may no longer apply). I'm thinking of common programming language features in particular.

That said, the spike in usability and stability and compatibility problems of Ubuntu (like not being able to even see the last item in a list of files because the bottom status bar was removed and replaced with a floating box) just finally pushed me off Ubuntu as my primary OS this past fall, after using it as my primary OS for 7 years. I know it's free and a lot of the compatibility problems are more the fault of Microsoft/Nvidia (dual graphics, uefi, etc.), I shouldn't complain, but to me it's not a good sign when you won't even use something that's free. But maybe this article is a sign that Ubuntu will improve in the future.

bztzt• 12 years ago

Good post (even if I'm not sure how much I agree with the mouse travel argument - I find moving to the edge still quick even on largish monitors, but it probably depends on your mouse/speed acceleration settings) but I'm not sure there's anything specific to open source here - understanding how and when to apply lessons from the past is tricky everywhere in software. I think design understanding is probably reasonably well dispersed by now and open source not at a marked disadvantage from the rest of the software world, unlike the 90s/early 00s.

modeless• 12 years ago

This is a great point. I've hated the top menu bar for years, but I never considered that it was actually a good fit for the original Macintosh, and has only become bad since screens became larger and multitasking more common.

I don't think it's fair to blame Open Source for this kind of problem, though. After all, Apple had a chance to fix this when they redid the UI for OS X and they didn't do it either. To this day they continue to copy the menu design from the original Macintosh even though it no longer makes sense. They also copied the Dock from NeXT into OS X, which I think was a bad decision too.

LarryMade2• 12 years ago

Meh

Whenever I upgrade Ubuntu, first thing I do is change the desktop manager. Unity or whatever they call it just isn't productive for me.

Just like Windows 8 (Metro) adding a button saying Start doesn't fix the problem that people have about using the thing in general. Same goes with adding menus on the top of windows for me. For me, it's the issue of just trying to locate the program I want without having to go to more effort than just selecting it from a list. Canonical thinks I want to search for it (which includes being able to remember it's name) and also be delighted at the opportunity to always download or buy something other than what's already on my computer... no thanks.

mindstab3• 12 years ago

"But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors"

Yes, this.

I think in everyone's rush for "convergence" they just forgot about the desktop. I think the final winning solution will be more the Ubuntu/Canonical approach (and that they are a bit ahead of Windows now) in that we will have both options available and with a bit more time, you can easily choose from "interface profiles"

On a big multiscreen desktop, I love and have for a long time loved, "in app menus" and Focus-Follow-Mouse. But on my 10" netbook? I'm actually pretty happy with global menu and click-focus because usually I'm just alt-tabing between full screen apps.

Different situations call for different solutions. The real winner will be the solution that provides all options and the flexibility to seamlessly move between them, and as I said, I think Ubuntu is much closer. Windows with their entire new set of "Metro" apps and bigger "classic desktop"/metro separation I think has gone down the wrong path.

orangecat• 12 years ago

I think in everyone's rush for "convergence" they just forgot about the desktop.

Exactly. "Desktops are dead" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For most users a new desktop computer wouldn't give them any significant benefits over the 5 year old one that they already have, so of course they're not going to buy one. Meanwhile, if hardware and software manufacturers had actually come up with ways to take advantage of their massive CPU and GPU power, we could have 50" displays at 8000x5000 pixels, eye tracking, gesture control, and who knows what else. Basically what this guy says: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/displays-are-the-key

mindstab3• 12 years ago

Already right now you can remove Unity's global menu, it just takes some work

$ sudo apt-get autoremove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt firefox-globalmenu

usablebytes• 12 years ago

I trust, that's a good decision. The context of a component should always be carried with the component. I myself, found the global menus a lot troublesome, although the design intention to provide more room was successful.

virtualritz• 12 years ago

The main problem I have with the menu in Ubuntu is that the items are hidden until you move the mouse.

That is just a design mistake of epic proportions because I can't acquire and aim for the target menu before the mouse has reached the bar.

I never heard any Mac user complain about the global menu bar. Even on huge screens. Perhaps that is reason.

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

It's also bad from the perspective of discoverability. Any inexperienced user will really struggle with menus that completely disappear.

walden42• 12 years ago

Would be nice to have an option to keep them permanently visible.

skywhopper• 12 years ago

I would be happy, but Ubuntu managed to drive me away from their default UI with Unity long ago. This is only one of many things I didn't care for in Unity.

realrocker• 12 years ago

O elusive menu bar, where art thee, My fingers cry for a chance unity, Though I travel edge from edge looking, No fear, My Love, the trackpad is never ending.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Now if they can only let users to switch the sidebar to the bottom, the way it is in Windows, that would be perfect. Even a change like that for a user that comes from Windows can turn him away from Ubuntu.

NateDad• 12 years ago

Monitors are almost always wider than they are tall... using horizontal space makes a ton more sense. If such a small thing turns off a user, they're not seriously considering a different OS anyway.

eklavya5• 12 years ago

Okay, I get it Ubuntu bashing is the new fad. But cmon, they are providing more choice here. For small screens global menu and close button on the system panel save a lot of vertical space. Now they are providing an option to the guys with big screens to have local menus so they don't have to keep on selecting windows to access their menus. What's wrong in it?

I have come to like unity the way it is, though I didn't in the beginning. I support Ubuntu in the spirit of open source and to be free to do things you want to do and in the way you like.

It's very strange indeed to hear complaints about making new stuff from hackers. Don't we all do it? Sometimes for nothing else but for our heart's desire?

wpietri4• 12 years ago

Making new stuff for your heart's desire is excellent. Art is a vital part of life. Inflicting something upon millions of people should, however, be about what they need. I did not volunteer to be a participant in somebody's half-assed art project, and if I did, it wouldn't be using my work laptop.

eklavya5• 12 years ago

Nothing is being inflicted, Nobody forces users to use Ubuntu, they do it because they like it. That is not to say that they should be deaf to community feedback. If it's so bad it is going to lose market share but Ubuntu really is popular and people seem to still like it. The people who dislike it are just way more vocal that's all. Why bitch about something that's free AND when you have plenty of choices?

yason• 12 years ago

I wonder if they already allow binding commands and window manager functions to super key? They didn't and that kind of put me off Unity right from the start.

Good keyboard controls are a must for any desktop environment and the super key is perfect for activating those while leaving all three of control, alt, and shift for applications (such as Emacs).

robomartin2• 12 years ago

I am surprised nobody has mentioned multi-monitor setups. This is where you really experience how bad the concept of a single unified menu bar for EVERYTHING that is running on the machine can be. Connect four 1920 x 1200 (or larger) monitors to your machine and you'll be cursing in no time at all. Even a simpler dual screen setup suffers from this concept. I don't care if it is under osx Or Ubuntu/Unity, this UI is inferior to one where the application and the relevant menu exist in a self contained window.

Now, that does not mean that an application cannot spawn multiple windows at all. For example, Altium Designer --a high-end electronics circuit design package-- can make use of one or more monitors quite effectively. You can, for example, have the schematic editor running in a window on one monitor while you design the PCB on the second and the documentation is open on the third. Each window houses the relevant menus and toolbars. This would be an absolute nightmare on OSX or Ubuntu style single menu systems.

It doesn't end there. If I am working on a web project i might have my IDE open front and center while supporting tools are open on the other monitors. I usually run several virtual machines on the monitor immediately to the left. Each machine runs a different browser for testing purposes. I found this to be far easier than other options and I can keep those virtual machines and browsers clean of extraneous stuff that might otherwise modify behavior. I then keep a terminal window or two logged into whatever remote server I might be working on. This can also be on a separate monitor if needed. I usually keep the terminal on the left with the VM's. On my right monitor I usually run Chrome and Firefox for reference (PDF's, manuals, SO, etc.) and technical debugging purposes. If needed other tools such as email and the too-important music player go on the right as well. If I need photoshop, excel or some other tool it usually goes in the center monitor. I tend to keep several open file browsers on the fourth monitor (although Only one of my systems has four large monitors).

Again, dedicated and context-appropriate menus make it easy to deal with such a setup without having to mouse all over the universe of available pixels. If I had to do this on OSX or Ubuntu I'd probably throw the computer out the window. In fact our Mac systems all have dual monitors but I still use the Windows systems for almost anything other than iOS development because OSX continues to evolve into a royal pain in the ass. I can run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server in a virtual machine on the PC with a shared drive and have the best of all worlds. BTW, running Vista and 7.

nknighthb• 12 years ago

1) You are unusual.

2) Mavericks was released with per-monitor menu bars four months ago.

robomartin2• 12 years ago

You are unusual

Of course. I hope all of us are to some extent or another. The world would be a pretty sad place if people were not "unusual" about something.

Mavericks was released with per-monitor menu bars four months ago.

To me that's replacing a bad UI/UX experience with a worst UI/UX experience.

I suspect we disagree on this. That's OK. No need to take the discussion any further.

Thanks.

mavhc• 12 years ago

Why is there a menu bar at all? Just use the menu button anywhere in the window to open the menu, ultimate Fitts law.

runn1ng• 12 years ago

I, for one, love it when the menus are on top.

What I don't like, however, is that they are on the top bar sometimes, but not always.

Java Swing applications usually have their own bar. evince, Ubuntu's default PDF reader, has just some useless "About" menu on top, and everything important is under the gear icon in the window (which took me about 15 minutes to discover). And it's a default GNOME application!

smithzvk3• 12 years ago

That is really weird. For me evince has no gear icon and has its menus in the global menu like every other GTK application.

theintern• 12 years ago

On my Ubuntu 13.10 I have what runn1ng describes, one menu item that just contains help. Everything else is in the gear.

dhughes• 12 years ago

Years ago when Ubuntu Netbook Edition remix first came out I actually liked Unity on a netbook and put it on a desktop PC but then realized I hated it on a full size desktop PC.

It's the same with Win 8 Metro I thought it looked great on mobile phones and on a desktop PC or laptop PC but looks versus using are two different things!

Mikeb85• 12 years ago

Bah, I loved the menus being in the global bar. Made so much more sense, and makes the screen feel larger.

gpvos• 12 years ago

I'm still in favour of how Acorn's RiscOS did it: the main menu is under the middle mouse button[0]. It's always nearby, because it's always at your cursor location. And it can optionally be context-sensitive, like today's "right-click" context menus.

[0] which should be a real button, not a dinky scroll wheel.

shirro• 12 years ago

Get rid of the menu bars altogether. They made sense in 1984 when people who had never seen a mouse needed to discover how to use things. How often do you use a menu in an app today? Anything commonly done has a keyboard shortcut. Anything graphical has palettes. Menus are often contextual or being hidden behind three bar buttons these days.

Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows

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