Ubuntu: Wake up and smell the Unity against you | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu: Wake up and smell the Unity against you

extremetech.com

48 pointskennjason70 comments

I don't get the Unity hate. Sure, it's nowhere near as polished as the traditional Gnome desktop, but everything cool and new started out as something crappy and new. If you don't like watching the sausage get made, wait for the LTS releases. Or just turn Unity off, the option's still there.

I have a lot of time for Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu crew. Here's the rest of the "if you don't like it, don't use it" quote mentioned in the article: "If there is selfishness here, it's selfishness on the part of people who DEMAND attention and offer no constructive solution. Nobody has a right to expect someone else to devote their time to a mission in which they have no interest."

"Devote their time to a mission" - isn't that a great description of Open Source at it's best? Not playing with a weekend project, trying to impress pundits, or making a super friendly don't-offend-anyone party. A mission that people devote their time to.

Will it work? I have no idea, but I hope so. Ubuntu didn't become the most popular distro by having the best wallpaper. They've been making hard decisions and pissing people off since 2004. To anyone who considers Unity a death knell, I'd ask you to estimate how many projects are killed by innovating too much when people want stability, and compare it to how many projects die a slow, apathetic death because they've been standing still while the rest of the world moves on.

> it's nowhere near as polished as the traditional Gnome desktop, but everything cool and new started out as something crappy and new

Many cool things starting out crappy and new doesn't mean that all crappy new things will be cool. I think most people that dislike Unity (myself included) feel like Unity is going in the wrong direction. If pressed, I could point out some really fundamental design issues with Unity, issues that fixing would make Unity less "Unity-like"

Also, I think the introduction of this major change was done in a very polarizing way. It was basically "use this new interface or F-off, maybe there's a way to use the old one, but go figure that out yourself." Making the new interface optional by default would have been way smoother.

I agree that the way it was presented to the community was a big issue. Plus, when people bring genuine complaints to the table, a lot of geekier open-source advocates say, "hey, it's open source, fix it yourself instead of complaining." (Though that's not an Ubuntu-specific problem.) Well, tearing open the guts of something as complex as a DE just to fix, say, the launcher position is just not something I'm going to do. If a distro's attitude is going to be, "if you don't like our half-baked product don't use it, because we're not going to listen to you," then yup, I'm going to go use something else and not recommend that distro any more. All they succeed in doing with that attitude is alienating a former advocate. That's not the way to approach Shuttleworth's goal of X million users by 20-whatever.

apt-get gnome-shell

Linux is built around choice. You have the choice to get rid of Unity.

The traditional Gnome desktop wasn't that polished. Panel was a disaster, because everything was positioned absolutely, instead of "this is to the left/right of this, here's the large space separating the left and right halves" all of your little "applets" would end up rearranged if you changed resolution.

So a good way to do it would be:

    [Menu][Launcher]========(horizontal fill)=======[Tray thingy][Clock]

Or for the default bottom bar:

     [Taskbar =========== (fill horizontally checked)][Workspaces]

So everything can reflow regardless of resolution. This is basically how toolbars in Cocoa work, for what it's worth. Both shell and Unity fix this problem in different ways, but it's definitely an improvement for everyone that uses a projector occasionally.

What's funny is that the panel essentially had the functionality you describe, but no one could agree on a UI to expose that. If you noticed, the default gnome had the "relative positiong" you describe until you manually moved or added a widget.

That's interesting, I always immediately removed the Firefox/Evolution/Help(?) launchers so I guess I would have voided it right away.

I don't know if it affects everyone, but for me Unity has regressions like: compiling something big in a gnome-terminal makes xorg use 100% of one core and everything gets extremely sluggish. (doesn't happen with gnome-shell)

Unity also swallows the F10 key (there is a hack workaround that doesn't work in Unity 2D).

I need a terminal and a browser; if you can't get those right there is no need working on the rest.

Unity is a horrendous backwards step in usability and stability. Menu bars are unceremoniously ripped out of windows and placed at the top of the screen. Applications are not complicit in this, so you end up with silly situations where, say, Pidgin is the foreground application, but when you go to the menu bar you can't add a new contact because conversation window is focused instead of the contact list window.

To make it worse, the menu bar only appears when you hover over it, so you can't go directly to the menu you want -- you have to make a rough guess based on memory and then correct once you get there. And if you don't know about it in the first place, there's no affordance to indicate that the menus will be there -- tough luck for new users.

The new launcher (dock) seemed to be very unstable in 11.04, often disappearing permanently or becoming empty, but that doesn't seem to be so much of a problem in 11.10.

I think the problem alot of people have is that Cannonical isn't listening to user input on Unity. They have their design brief that they've come up with, and their target (OS X). Meanwhile, traditional Ubuntu users are being displaced by the lack of community input and feedback.

In this way, Unity could end up hurting Ubuntu's growth much more than it helps it. Judging from comments online, many people are recommending Linux Mint to family members where they would have once recommended Ubuntu. There's no real evidence of this happening yet (distrowatch isn't a definitive source), but I think Canonical is playing a dangerous game in how it is interacting with it's community on unity and the issues around it. Some of the uglier public conversations/posts by Mark Shuttleworth and others only highlight the danger.

Listening to user input is how Windows got to be what it is now (and is the reason of jokes like the explorer riboon thing of a couple months back).

Of course you need user input, but you also need strong guidance to avoid design-by-committee syndrome.

Disclaimer: I like Unity. It's not perfect but it's good enough and better than Gnome 3.

Well said.

I'm cool with moving forward, but here it seems they just tried to hard to be somebody else (Mac). In the process it stripped a lot of customization that is the heart of Linux users.

I'm not saying it won't be a massive success, and it might be flippin awesome on a mobile device or tablet. As for me, I tried it, and would probably still be using it (only out of laziness to switch back), except upgrading to 11.10 wrecked havoc with my display settings, and me being lazy, just switched over to KDE which still plays nicely with me.

Although I'll give you the fact that they've borrowed some from Apple, I'd also argue that they've really exceeded the Mac in terms of user friendliness and usability.

> If you don't like watching the sausage get made, wait for the LTS releases. Or just turn Unity off, the option's still there.

The next release (12.04) will be an LTS. I'm still on 10.04 and I really hope many of the quirks in Unity will be worked out by April.

Unity could have been something great if only Ubuntu had decided to release it after thorough QA testing and polishing. First impressions are everything, and Ubuntu chose to release Unity in an objectively unfinished state. They effectively made their entire userbase their beta-testers. I for one have work to get done, and I'm not interested in being the subject of a grand UI experiment--especially one that's run by what seem to be a group of UX amateurs.

Ubuntu wasted that crucial first impression and alienated a significant portion of their core userbase--tech geeks and programmers--by pushing a half-baked product. Who knows: if I had tried Unity in 2014 instead of in Natty, maybe I would have liked it and recommended it.

Unity is just a symptom of the deeper problem, though, which is that Ubuntu is never in a finished, polished state. I tell anyone who asks what OS I'm using that I use Ubuntu, but that they should stick with Windows because Ubuntu invariably breaks every 6 months and everything is half-baked.

I just can't recommend an OS where the most important part, the DE, is buggy and unfinished, and where every distro upgrade reliably introduces random and serious regressions. (Though to be fair it's often upstream's fault on those.) I know that if I install Ubuntu for my mom, she'll click 'Upgrade to Ubuntu xx.yy' without thinking, then she'll call me because her computer won't hibernate any more, or because all of a sudden her window buttons are on the left. If a hard-core geek like me won't recommend the friendliest Linux distro, who will?

I used to recommend Ubuntu or Mint. These days, it's switched to Mint or Fedora. Ubuntu's ability to "just work" has been unsatisfactory for a while, while Mint's and Fedora's has only been getting better. I recently did a Fedora upgrade, and the only thing that broke was my hacked-up xmonad setup, which was to be expected. Everything else was either the same or better.

If Ubuntu can get unity very responsive and polished I'll give it another go. Ever since unity came out i've overheard a disturbing number of people complaining about stability and just the user experience in general.

Who are you recommending Fedora to?

Ubuntu was a good recommendation for people who could just about re-install Windows. Fedora, not so much.

((Ubuntu is also good for many other users too!) I'm using Fedora on my other machine.)

Generally, I'm recommending Fedora KDE (what I use) to somewhat tech-savvy people who are seriously looking into Linux and asking me for recommendations. If I'm just trying to get someone off of Windows, I recommend Mint. It's the first Linux distro I genuinely enjoyed using, since if I wanted to tweak I had room to tweak, and if I wanted to get work done it tended to Just Work. (I used Fedora 11 directly beforehand, and it was horrible. When Fedora 13 came out, I hopped on that and it was great.) While I haven't used it for any significant length of time since then, what I've seen of it has been great. A friend recently started using it when I suggested it - quite a tech-savvy guy, actually - and he loves it, so I'd say it's still good.

Do you know what else happened with the release of 11.10? They switched from Python 2.7.1 to python 2.7.2. And it shows the exact same correlation to this sag in downloads as the Unity UI.

Clearly, Canonical can't do anything right.

Oh, and also, Mint has had a huge rise in popularity at the same time, and, by the way, the graph shown in the article, in addition to any methodological flaws it may have, only shows relative numbers; Ubuntu drops from 11% down to something like 4%, but of what total? We have no idea from this graph whether there is an absolute drop or rise in the number of Ubuntu installs; only that Mint has taken off, relative to other distributions.

There's nothing in the data shown that ties this to Unity specifically, or even anything about Ubuntu itself. There have been hundreds of changes between 11.04 and 11.10, and the Linux landscape itself is changing at the same time. I don't see any firm data presented to blame the UI.

Given that the point of Ubuntu is to try to expand the appeal of desktop Linux, no matter what the absolute number of installs it's hard to argue that their current approach is working if they've been so comprehensively overtaken by a more traditional distro. If the absolute number of Ubuntu installs has remained the same and Mint's growth happens to be entirely new users, why did those new users not pick Ubuntu?

Distrowatch's audience is not a useful metric.

Maybe a better question for them to ask is "Why are Ubuntu users staying away from DistroWatch.com in droves?"

Why would I visit Distrowatch?

I've been using ubuntu for about 5 years now, and using it as basically my only OS for the last 3. I was very satisfied with it. The reason I'm not a fan of Unity is that not only did it break my workflow, but there appears to be no way to customize it to get back to what I have been doing for the past 5 years.

I understand the developers don't owe anyone anything, and everyone's free to leave (and I may, once staying on 10.10 gets to be a problem). I'm just unhappy that they decided to break what I was doing after 5 good years.

For those curious, the features I'm referring to are alt-tab to switch between windows (not applications) and proper virtual desktop support. Doesn't seem like much, and indeed, these features have worked flawlessly for me for years. Once I'm too far behind the upgrade curve, I'll probably have to try another distro or window manager, since from what I've read, Unity has no intention of un-breaking these. It was fun while it lasted though.

I've been using GNU/Linux of various flavours at home since around 2006 (and whatever locked down Windows PC they give me at work, I'm not a programmer).

I use Unity 2d as the graphics card in this three year old desktop is blacklisted so I can't use compiz. In Unity2d, alt-tab shows a row of windows in the current virtual desktop.

I open half a dozen Firefox windows and a few LibreOffice windows (middle click on launcher icon for new instance/window) and when I alt-tab I can see each window represented on a small horizontal panel in Unity2d by the application icon. As you alt-tab through the icons, the title of the window appears in type below the row of icons.

Unity isn't hard to customize. It's generally customized the same way that window managers in Ubuntu have been customized for the last few years, through CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm). For alt-tab just choose another switcher under "Window Management" -- there are 4 to choose from. To remove the menu-on-top silliness, `sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk indicator-applet-appmenu indicator-appmenu` And I don't understand your comment about virtual desktops. They work fine in Unity.

I'll give this a try. I did some research a month or so ago when I upgraded one of my machines to 11.10 (which I now really regret doing). At the time, everywhere I looked said alt+tab for switching applications, and alt+~ for switching windows within applications. If there's a way to get alt+tab back to just switching windows, I'll gladly give it a try.

The issue I had with virtual workspaces was that alt+tab still showed every app on every workspace. The menu on top thing is annoying, but not a deal-breaker I guess.

Anyways, I know this is not the ubuntu forums, I just thought I would chime in with the regressions in my workflow. I spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make it work. I am aware of ccsm, and I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not a complete n00b either. I gave up and went back to the GNOME fallback. My other machines I won't be upgrading. Backwards compatibility is important, even with new fancy window managers.

   Data source:  DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking

Well there's your problem. What a terrible metric. That's a good way of finding out what one type of linux user is using, but not a good way to sample the population of computer users, and the changing face of linux users.

I agree, DistroWatch is not a good metric of measuring which distros are in use. Page hit ranking is more about which distros are currently being discussed more and talked about. Ive looked into mint and a few others on distrowatch, but I have never until today visited the Ubuntu.. Yet most all of my machines run Ubuntu or some version of Debian.

I've been working on a MBP for the last 5 month and like it. I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a desktop PC I had at home. I setup everything for my needed dev environment, and unlike many other articles/posts I read, I loved it.

The computer specs are not the same, but unity is overall MUCH faster and smooth than my OSX MBP. The interface just works very smoothly and intuitively for me. I do most of my work in the terminal so I don't get to do every operations using the interface though. I'm even thinking about trading my MBP for a system76 ubuntu machine.

Unity is also quite new and I expect it to get better with every releases. Am I the only one in this situation?

For the rest of us,

MBP :== MacBook Pro

and not

Maximally Bogus Product

I was the first to criticize Unity back in the day, but I believe Unity has a bright future.

Canonical made a big big change with a lot of regressions and growing pains but as it stabilizes it will be a great desktop to use for normal people.

The worst thing they could do is go back again to gnome at this point.

The main problem Linux have it is that it is just copy what Apple or Windows do, look at Mint and you will see a copy of Windows(I really hate the windows start menu design and they copied it verbatim), look at Ubuntu and you will see a copy of MacOS but with no so many great designers and money behind(the minimize-maximaze window buttons disappearing drives me crazy).

I'm reading conflicting reports. One place shows that people generally prefer Unity after being exposed to it, and others (like this article) are completely opposed to it.

Ubuntu is supposed to be Linux for the rest of us, not for hardcore enthusiasts, isn't it? If it is, why wouldn't it make sense to appeal to the general public?

Likewise, I've seen some reports that 'the rest of us' like Unity -- and some that despise it.

It's just a New Thing -- and like most New Things, it's probably a) not that polished, and b) people resist change.

And for some reason, people manage to resist change so much, that a change in the default DE requires them sprinting to a new distro, with lashing words in tail for Ubuntu. Because changing distros is easier than install xfce, or gnome-shell, or kde, or something. Never mind that choice of distro often also includes things such as community, packages available in repos, packages available for smaller one-off projects, etc.

Have you personally tried changing to xfce, gnome-shell or KDE in Ubuntu 11.10? I have, and it's decidedly non-trivial. Switching to a different distro would probably be easier.

I got gnome-shell up and working with no issues, but after a while I decided to just switch to Linux Mint, which I'm very happy with.

Edit: I should say that is just on my MacBook Pro. I haven't switched on my development box yet because I'm in the middle of some projects and don't feel like having to reconfigure everything right now.

By the way, has anyone tried the Ubuntu to Linux Mint upgrade?

I remember `sudo apt-get install gnome-shell` and then choosing it at the next login and being quite smitten. (I later upgraded to ricotz's ppa for faster updates).

Again, is this in 11.10? Or 11.04?

I did this in 11.10, then switched back to unity because gnome-shell had some bugs that kept me from getting work done. I like it's interface design better, though.

Not sure what issues you had, but 3.2 is getting some bugfixes and ricotz's ppa has some good fixes as well.

Seeing as gnome-shell isn't available in 11.04... (don't use the PPA in 11.04, it will wreck your system).

Actually, in terms of headaches available, switching distros is easier than whacking Unity with the appropriate configs to get the shell I want.

edit: I still don't have a screensaver. :(

I guess I still don't understand. Does anyone have anything concrete they can point to?

`sudo apt-get install gnome-shell` gives a new shell, entirely separate from Unity with almost zero config overlap. A few seconds of drop down boxes gets you from Ambiance to Adwaita if you prefer the stock Gnome3 look and feel. Otherwise, it's basically stock GNOME3.

Non-default configurations are never as polished.

Ubuntu's strategy makes sense if it actually works. So far it looks like the drop in geek users has not been compensated by much increase in normal users. Also, if all volunteer developers leave, Canonical will end up footing the bill completely for Ubuntu; it's not clear they can afford that.

I'm not sure I understand the strategy of targeting the everyday mobile pad user. Linux is already killing with Android. For Ubuntu to succeed, they would either need a hardware vendor to choose Ubuntu over Android (unlikely) or expect users to buy hardware that already has an OS but can be rooted and loaded with Ubuntu. I don't doubt there are power users salivating at the chance to do that, but that's basically replicating the uphill battle Linux faces on the desktop. And after the war has already been won. (Edit: missing word).

I've been using Natty and am currently on Oneric. The problems are probably overstated. I've used a variety of systems and didn't run into problems with Unity (different laptops and pcs).

Reminds me of Vista's launch somehow. I've also tested Vista since Beta on a multitude of systems and the only problem I ran into was caused by a wonky driver for an external audio interface.

Of course it's dangerous to extrapolate these personal experiences, but as always, discussions about operating systems tend to be exaggerated and inflammatory.

If there is group pressure to resist a change, many people will suddenly find reasons as to why they dislike something new.

IMHO, Unity is a work in progress. It definitely requires more resources to run than other environments and it requires some getting used to. I miss the good old task-bar for quick switching instead of moving the cursor to the extreme left waiting for the tab to slide in, clicking the appropriate icon which may then load an undesired window if the sought application is running more than one instance. I tried 'mousing over' the topmost left corner too.. it is also slow. However, unity is clean. It just hasn't figured out how we want to do what we want or who we are.

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago on my AMD laptop as well as an ancient P4 that is inside of an arcade cabinet.

In some ways this article shows the gains made by the Linux community (and Ubuntu) in the last 5 years. It used to be the barrier to entry was lack of driver support for any number of peripherals, a user-unfriendly install that would render dual-booting impossible, performance so abhorrent without manual config changes, a community that would mock your problems, and regardless of package manager always having to break down and "untar; ./configure; make" at least one set of dependencies before getting your needed software to run.

Ubuntu (and the latest Fedora, as I've witnessed recently at work) installs with little more interaction than a partition selection.

That being said, I hated Unity and switched to fluxbox on both machines immediately. I'm not sure what they've accomplished exactly.. it's less intuitive for someone from a windows experience. I guess the dock is most similar to a tablet menu?

Anyways.. It's interesting, not for me, but if this is the new horizon of "linux problems" maybe <joke>this is finally the year of linux on the desktop? </joke>

Off topic, but...

If you visit that site on an iPhone you will experience the absolute /worst/ kind of "enhancement" I've seen in ages - it manages to break vertical scrolling of all things. You can still scroll the content, but it no longer sticks to your to finger - it tries to jump to predefined scrolling points, but with an easing animation to make it feel even weirder. Horrible.

I think readers on this forum might recognise the need Canonical has to turn a profit, and therefore to focus resources on the tasks/developments that will lead to an income stream.

A figure of $30million turnover was mentioned as a break even point by Shuttleworth in an interview in 2009, and a three to five year plan to reach that in 2008 (wikipedia article about Canonical Ltd).

I personally think I see a shift in strategy towards a tablet/mobile style desktop and a 'brittleness' about community involvement perhaps caused by the need to focus resources on the interface and user experience.

Hope they get it right before they burn through Shuttleworth's money. If it is the case they have hardware partners lined up to launch Ubuntu loaded devices (like the Chinese deal some weeks ago) then the 'long time user' community may just have to bend a little to keep the income coming. If they don't it isn't clear to me where these millions of new users are coming from...

First, I question the stats in the article. I have 4 Linux installs right now, all Ubuntu, yet I have done a lot of web searches for "Mint" out of curiosity. I skewed the stats in the article, sorry :-)

Second, I really like Gnome but Unity is just fine if you take the time to learn keyboard shortcuts to switch between apps, workspaces, and windows for a given app.

I just am wrapping up a long term project for a customer that basically required OS X for work. I have thought about switching to Linux and Ubuntu for my day to day work now, but I just ordered an iPad 2, and I would like easy data exchange with my shiny new little toy.

I find that Unity wastes vertical space, which to me is a sin. I have plenty of horizontal space, please waste that or let me configure it the way I like.

Issue with Ubuntu is that 'new' is not that appealing, I don't think I would mind if things are not polished if those were the features that make me more productive, but they are in the way, and they are now instead of Windows, copying OSX, how is that innovative. Other than that, I respect work put in Ubuntu and it is solid foundation that we can enjoy. I switched to Mind on my desktop and loving it.

On unity when I move the mouse to the left side to unhide the dock, an orange border takes up half the screen and stays there until I maximize any of the windows.

This is extremely confusing, does anyone know if it's supposed to be a feature? Or if there's a way to turn it off? I asked in #ubuntu and nobody replied.

the percentage of distrowatch page hits that go to the ubuntu page is down 47%, but the total distrowatch page hits per month are up 50% this month. i'm no math genius, but doesn't that mean that distrowatch actually had more hits to their ubuntu page last month than any other month?

Thanks to articles like this, most probably.

No; a 50% increase followed by a 47% decrease represents a net 20.5% decrease, since (1 + 0.50)(1 - 0.47) = 0.795. (This assumes that Ubuntu visitors were represented in the same proportion pre- and post-decrease.)

I very much like Unity. The eye-candy makes me happy and from a productivity perspective it allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard and off the mouse. It does indeed use way more resources than it should, but what else am I going to do with 4 cores?

I like Unity and I prefer it more than gnome2. Furthermore I like Gnome3 more than Gnome2 or XFCE. And even furthermore, any "power user" can install the desktop of his preference fairly easy.

Sure Unity and Gnome3 need some polishing, but let's face it, cutting edge is... cutting. And many of us prefer the new unfinished than the old but stable[0]. That's why I switched from Debian to Ubuntu in the first place, and even then I was running Sid.

So, ubuntu on cell phones? What better news?

IMHO, in every matter, there is always big group that is more conservative and resists a change, but fortunately the change is happening anyway.

[0]http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/articles/software-philosophy-re...

So, I have a buddy who wants to try Linux on a netbook that he has found no use for. Mint or Ubuntu?

If he likes windows and wants to just do stuff, then try Mint (might be heavy for an Atom based netbook).

If he wants to try something a bit new, then have a bash at Ubuntu 11.10, but then try installing the XFCE desktop package from within Ubuntu if Unity does not 'take'.

Unity is ideal for netbooks/small screens. (thus menu on top, et cetera). The people complaining are largely those with larger screens who are either stuck in their ways or haven't bothered to figure out how to customize it to their liking.

I'd take a very minor issue with this: try xfce with dmenu (from the suckless tools package) bound to the super key. I maximise applications within xfce using alt-F11. All window decorations gone, no OS junk pixels visible at all. I invoke applications using dmenu. I switch between windows with alt-tab, and workspaces with alt-ctrl-arrows.

Perhaps I'm taking this to extremes...

I'm not sure what you're gaining (unless you're also hiding the application's menu). A maximized application in Unity doesn't waste any more space than what you describe. The top bar is still visible, but it's merged with the menu, so there's no effective wastage.

True, but there is nothing appearing at the left if I wait too long on the File menu, and the indicators are hidden.

Perhaps this is an extreme example. I actually rather like Unity on small screens.

So it's a shame that it's the default for a desktop, not mobile, OS.

Ubuntu had NBR, and dropped it, and kludged it into Ubuntu main.

Now people with netbooks (small drives) may like Unity but aren't so keen on all the other Ubuntu stuff.

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