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Comment by Ocho-Bits | Hacker News Reader

On it's current state it's pretty slow and bloated. Let's hope that on six months they can fix the suck. Kudos for trying something new and not copying OSX or Windows 7.

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As well as being slow and bloated, it also seems rather rough around the edges. It doesn't feel like a particularly polished product somehow.

I doubt everything will fixed in six months, but Canonical tend toward the Google model of development; release something rough first, then refine it on the whetstone of user feedback.

They claim the slowness is due to Mutter. They say the are moving (back?) to Compiz, and that it improves performance a lot. http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/25/ubuntu-11-04-to-ship-uni...

Did you look at their Dock drawing and menu titles? Straight ripoff of the Mac OS X Dock and Dashboard dock.

Yes, they have a Mac envy, which is a good thing, I think.

In fairness, pretty much every user interface feature that isn't a command line has been copied from the mac at some point in the last 26 years.

The ribbon?

To be even more fair, Steve Jobs was so impressed by the innovative graphical user interface he had seen at Xerox PARC that he copied many of its features in the original Macintosh.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

But if they invent something completely new, and Apple copies it Apple isn't 'ripping it off,' they are 'making it better' (e.g. 'Time Machine', 'Spotlight', etc).

Please leave these useless, 'OMG! They copied X!' comments off of HN. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants,' is how the tech world moves along.

While we're at it let's leave the drama alone too. I wasn't crying ripoff, I was using it in a design context. And from that POV, the drawing code is almost a per-pixel copy of the Dock's. Which, wouldn't happen by accident.

I wish they would copy Windows 7 a bit... a lot of the features in Win 7 that don't conflict with GNOME are really nice.

Unrelated: GNOME still doesn't understand the concept of "chunking": You only want 5-7 items in a group for people to comprehend it best. When Ubuntu's System > Preferences drop-down has 25 items in it, you have a bad UI.

The flip side of chunking is the equally-bad UI known as "wading through menu trees". I personally prefer not having to deal with finding my way through half a dozen menu levels trying to remember where I found that admin tool that I don't use often enough to build muscle memory. If you want a friendlier UI, install the Control Panel app or whatever it's called that replaces those menus with a categorized list of big, pretty icons.

I absolutely agree that a control panel window is the solution, not drop down menus. Drop downs should only be used for a small number of objects and trees, lest someone move their mouse 2px north of a path and lose ten seconds of careful navigations.

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