Mark Shuttleworth: Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat | Hacker News Reader

Mark Shuttleworth: Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat

markshuttleworth.com

47 pointsalonswartz21 comments

I, and I believe many others, have long used and admired Ubuntu for its unrelenting pragmatism. It's long been the distro of getting stuff done. It's had an agressive release cycle, and its had a great focus on usability.

However, this is going to be the release that's going to force everyone showing Ubuntu off to friends/coworkers to say "oh yeah, the buttons are on the left, yeah that's stupid, I agree but I can fix that" clickity command line clack.

What's most disappointing is the utter failure of the UI team to communicate why they've done this, which is insulting. Yes, they've said "we've had meetings and thought about it!", but no reasons other than 'we like it', have been disclosed to my knowledge. Ubuntu's made decisions like this before, but never one so fundamental.

All in all, I've been left with a bitter taste in my mouth from both the stupidness of the decision, and the stupidness of not handling the PR crisis that this is (and this is a PR crisis).

I understand it's Shuttleworth's baby, and he can do what he wants, but if decisions like this keep up I'll be looking for greener pastures.

I couldn't agree more. I haven't tried the new button scheme, but even if I like it, the way that it's been implemented in such a heavy handed dictatorial way leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not too concerned about it though. If it keeps up, somebody is going to pull an Ubuntu on Ubuntu and steal the popular mindshare. Mint?

I thought the reason for them being on the left is that they're reserving the top-right of the screen for notifications, the "social" menu and other things that may overlap with the window buttons.

I hadn't heard that, got a link? I guess that points to that PR failure I was speaking of though, I have been following this and I haven't heard that once.

I will say though, having heard that, it doesn't sound like a very good reason for the switch.

It just seemed so plausible!

In 9.04 every time there was a notification you had to wait for it to disappear before you could click on the buttons. In 9.10 they moved the notifications down a bit as a hack around that.

Now in 10.04 the notifications are where they were but they've introduced a social menu & moved the lock screen / switch user / shutdown menu to the top-right.

If they hadn't moved the buttons it would be very easy to accidentally close a window when you meant to use those new menus.

That does make sense (though I still think its strange that Shuttleworth hasn't mentioned this), as a 9.04 user I've found the notifications problematic for that reason.

Wouldn't the obvious answer be to move the notifications down to the bottom right, like windows does it? I mean you'd probably have to move the system tray down there as well, but really, it makes more sense.

You don't have to wait to interact with anything underneath the notifications. When you move the mouse over the bubble, it blurs or goes invisible, and you can click avay at things underneath it without worry.

Unless they for some reason disabled it, you can move the buttons (via gconf editor, granted, but I suspect someone will make a better way to do it).

Though last time I looked at this was around 2006...

Of course you can.

But isn't the entire point of Ubuntu supposed to be that things "just work"? Most people don't go searching through settings to fix annoyances--they just get annoyed.

True.

In my mind I was imagining a person who shows off Ubuntu would know how to do such a thing, but these days that's probably not (necessarily) true, even if it were, it still doesn't matter if the person they're showing it off to wouldn't be able to easily do it too.

> the buttons are on the left

I am saddened by this. Ubuntu announces Maverick, and the highest-rated comment about Maverick on HN by a wide margin is a rehash of arguments about Lucid.

upvoted.. There are so many important things that dont work -

* out of the box webcam support,

* remote desktop to manage Windows Server machines,

* IPV6 support that doesnt slow down my browsing (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/eglibc/+bug/...),

* something like Scrivener for linux and a bit more decent Office format support.

Along with decent H.264 support, the above are some of the things that I am willing to pay for - yet what Shuttleworth does with Ubuntu is left side buttons.

i don't know what release you're using, but my 10.10 beta has rdesktop installed by default and it still works as well as it ever did for connecting to windows servers.

my 10.10 beta

I assume you mean 10.04 beta. If not, send me a copy!

rdesktop works only for RDP v5.1 - that means Windows Server 2003 onwards (if they have RDP TLS enabled) cannot be accessed using rdesktop

Both root comments so far complain about the UI changes - I really don't get it. I've switched between OSX, Win, Linux, and the button issue is trivial (OSX has top left buttons). I couldn't give two shits about whether to yank the mouse to the top right or top left to close a window. Mostly I use alt-space or ctrl-w/q for window control anyway. Foreign languages have slightly different keyboard layouts and it takes about 30 seconds to adjust (motor memory ftw).

What I care about are the fundamentals - hardware (sound, brightness, video driver support, battery life). The availability of quality software and ease of installing/removing it (cleanly) - mostly great.

The same people who learn arcane vi/emacs/cli syntax complain about moving their mouse to the opposite corner - please!

I've been running Ubuntu 9.10 exclusively for a while now, and besides hardware support issues (nvidia driver crashing X), shitty sound (midi, and the kde vs. gnome way of handling sound), and Adobe Flash/Air suckage I haven't had any complaints.

Win7 feels far worse. In fact, just install kubuntu and be done with it. UI-wise: KDE => like Window, Gnome => like OS X - pick your poison.

The same people who learn arcane vi/emacs/cli syntax complain about moving their mouse to the opposite corner - please!

I use vim, but the arcane syntax makes using it significantly faster. Moving buttons doesn't do this.

I'm glad you always use keyboard shortcuts for window control, given that can you see perhaps see that your point of view on this feature as being inconsequential is not very relevant due to the fact that you do not use it much at all?

Good luck with that after unilaterally borking the UI design in the latest LTS release.

I think I may have accidently downvoted you, sorry. Either that or by the time I returned to the tab you were at -1 but still being displayed as 1 to me as I hadn't refreshed. I think you are correct as GNU/Linux has largely followed Microsoft button placement for so long it seems to be too much of a break with what people are used to for such an unproven gain (can anyone actually point to any evidence for these buttons? I'd gladly change my mind if there is some).

The window buttons on the left side work out well for me - my monitor has a high resolution and most of the time my focus is on the top left of a window. Now there's no need for me to get my focus the top right.

I read the other day that they've come to a compromise with the positions of the buttons. They're staying on the left, but the close button will be in the corner of the window - it'll go close, minimise, maximise.

I'm happy with that personally; it wasn't the position of the buttons as a whole that was a little annoying but the fact that "close" wasn't in the corner.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/04/ubuntu-window-buttons-sta...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com