Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Well said.

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