Ubuntu 13.04: Getting Excited About Ubuntu Again
penguinwebdevelopment.com
penguinwebdevelopment.com
Namely, removing the "dodge" option for the launcher and disabling the scroll on it[1][2]. It now allows you to switch between windows of the same application on the same desktop which has to be in the running for the most useless UI function ever devised.
I haven't really noticed HUD for quite a while but a few days ago I tried it frustrated with GIMP's cleverly hidden sub-menus and was blown away by how easy it is to jump straight to the desired function if you know (or can guess) the name. Invoking "Arbitrary Rotation..." doesn't even take a second. I was like a magician, I wasn't using the system, it was an extension of my being.
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1173623
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1149092
I followed some solutions that didn't work or turned the windows manager very unstable. I really liked Unity.
With chrome running about 40 tabs, pgadmin open, and the WM up I'm using about 2gb ram.
Chrome closes and I drop to about 300M. This is a single core althon 64, 3gb ddr1 ram, 70gb ATA HD, AGP Radeon 9600 that I built around 8 years ago.
Last I checked Xming worked reasonably well from windows (with putty doing X11 forwarding) - and OS X still has an X server?
(Now if you're doing GUI-testing across systems, I guess running "everything" in the VM makes more sense...).
I moved on to Crunchbang. It's noticeably faster than even Lubuntu in a VM. I don't think even the older Ubuntu's were this fast. I dedicate 32M of video to Crunchbang and have had no problems.
I don't use Ubuntu, but I have to ask -- why did you quit it because of Unity? You can install anything else you want.
I'm really not flaimbaiting, I swear. I actually used Ubunt 4.10 a long time ago (come to think of it, hell, I can't bleieve it's been almost nine years), but I long switched on to Debian and Arch. I kindda went out of touch with the Ubuntu status quo.
I'm also not sure if it will work flawlessly, as I haven't tested it. But, for example, Ubuntu ship with also a patched Mesa, that it's missing for that project and it's supposed to contain some Unity-specific patches.
There were some projects to include Unity in OpenSUSE and Fedora[3], but it seems a dead project now and it's not available for the latest versions of those distro (last version supported: OpenSUSE 12.2 and Fedora 17).
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unity
[2] https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch (See "order to compile/install")
Simply asking... WHY on earth would you find this useless?!
Agree, you wouldn't need it if you just had the ability to select a "don't combine taskbar buttons" option (last time I checked Unity didn't have this) - the first option that I select on Windows 7/8. To me different windows of the same application are technically "different apps/task" and I want them to show separately on the taskbar or at least have an easy way of switching between them. The whole "task based interface" current is the biggest UI/X fail in recent history imho, and a misnomer on top of it - applications aren't task, if I have two different web apps in two different windows (or simply two different sets of task specific tabs), they are two completely different tasks to me, I don't want them grouped by application goddamit!
Even philosophically, in the "UNIX way" tasks emerge when one combines the use of a number of small applications to get a particular task done, while in the "Mac/Windows way" of "big feature-full applications" an application can be used to work on multiple task simultaneously in different windows. 1 to 1 mapping of apps to tasks and the "combine windows on taskbar" philosophy only apply to very naive and inexperienced users that don't understand even 10% of the potential of the "tool" sitting in front of them, and they should not be catered for, they should be pushed and stressed to learn more whether they like it or not, because they can learn more, and they will inevitably get better at whatever they do by learning more - even Microsoft gets this (they know that if you are forced to learn more about their products and by learning more about them you become more productive with them, you will grow more dependent on them, whereas if something is "very easy" but limited, you'll be able to switch to a competing product that could give you even a minor increase in productivity at any time), even if would be suicide for them to admit it and put it in any marketing material since they market themselves as "easiest to use" :)
...overall, I feel like Unity simply cherry picked the worst features from Windows 7 and Mac OS GUIs. At least the Windows GUI can be very easily customized in all relevant aspects and allows me to be very productive with it, while the Mac OS one is well polished and tested and after I get used to it has a nice "flow". If you want to build an "opinionated" GUI, first make sure you are at least as competent as Apple's UI guys are, if not, just drop it make something clean and easily customizable with a Right Click -> Properties on any element so I don't have to hunt down a controll panel that, for Unity, doesn't even have the options I care about!
...thank god for KDE and XFCE!
EDIT+: added a couple paragraphs
I don't really use webapps in that way but you can integrate them with Ubuntu directly and then they get their own icon[1]. You can even use system controls to manipulate options within those apps to a certain extent.
I would continue the argument and say that having "tabs" be a concept related to grouping together behaviors of specific applications into self-contained task units was an anti-pattern that we got used to only because window managers failed to innovate and application-specific tab containers was then a simple fix that could evolve from multiple-document interfaces: there is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to take a Terminal tab and a Chrome tab and have them be part of the same window.
The best features of ion3 are in my opinion: - dynamic tiling with vertical/horizontal splits and tabs - easily extensible using lua including information panel (I used it to display useful info e.g. bitcoin prices) - query module allowing to very quickly switch to other windows/workspace or bring any window to currently focused region - query module can be extended to query different sources e.g. bookmarks or locate. I can even imagine adding hood like abilities to the system - query module also supports vim input mode - very good commands support, one can easily configure keyboard and mouse behaviour, including emacs like combos, and moving, dragging windows actions - can be effectively used using both keyboard and mouse - this model of dynamic tiling makes it very easy to move/resize windows using mouse. One can press some key and resize window using mouse without trying to hit few pixels of the edge of the window. Window can be resized instantly and precisely without any mental effort - both tiling and floating modes supported - scrapbook support - there can be panels shown using single key combination with many application tabs in it - accessible from everywhere - session support - one can start wm with already running applications on preconfigured workspaces
There are probably other features I have forgotten. I am really sad that Tuomo Valkonen (the wm creator) left the project. There are some other programs that in my opinion didn't get the credit they deserve (like ecco pro) and then other projects have to painfully reinvent them.
Personally, I find the HUD useful in those situation where there is no keyboard shortcut associated with a particular menu item and one can't be configured either.
Plus I find it easier to just write a few characters than having my finger perform a meaningless dance involving multiple modifier keys..
In most applications, I don't use the HUD very often, but for editor applications with complex menus - like GIMP or Scribus, it's very useful, and it works well.
You don't use file managers much, do you?
Or work with more than one spreadsheet or written document at a time.
Or have remote sessions into different machines.
Or...
http://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1ek0u0/moving_from_u...
When I have to use a desktop without this functionality I am now painfully aware of how cumbersome and slow the old behaviour was when I have plenty of windows open.
I'm using a ISO/Spanish layout and the day I discovered that Cmd+` hotkey I just couldn't figure out why the hell that key would be mapped to "switch between windows of the same app". After googling for a while, I found out what the ANSI/US keyboard layout is, and only then the hotkey made sense. Just for reference the backtick key is right next to the "P" letter in the ISO/ES layout.
Now the first thing I do when sitting in front of an OSX computer is to remap that hotkey to Cmd+º, which is the same physical key in ISO/ES than ` in ANSI/US. I seriously doubt that most international OSX users know about this hotkey though. I have a few (non-techie) friends using OSX now, and none of them knew about it...
Incidentally, I've several times considered modifying that when writing shell scripts ... on the other hand, it does make one try to use the $(...) over `...` as much as possible, which when it makes sense, makes for easier/safer handling of backspaces etc ... so not every inconvenience is a disadvantage...
In short, for the way I use my computer, the Alt-`/Alt-Tab dichotomy doesn't make sense. It turns what used to be a zero-effort action — switch back to the previous window — into an error-prone action that is likely to take me to something unrelated to what I'm trying to do. And now it's a zero-effort action again, since I stopped trying to use GNOME or Unity.
How do you use your computer that this makes sense to you? I don't mean to imply that you're insane, since I recognize that people do not all use their computers the same way, but I can't imagine how you're using your computer that enforcing this dichotomy is actually helpful to you.
(Note: I do use tabbed browsing, because, sad to say, Firefox still takes five seconds to open a new window. That's seven billion clock cycles, one clock cycle for every man, woman, and child alive today.)
Fixing alt-tab is one of the first things I do.
It correctly switches and changes order based on your alt+tab history, and it splits alternate workspaces up into an end section which switches workspace for you, so 'shift + alt + tab' becomes 'go to the last app on another workspace i used'. Very nice.
So that's one desktop pane, then one for chrome, one for emacs, and one for pgadmin. I also make very liberal use of fluxbox's 'sticky' button for dragging a terminal between desktop switches.
Navigate to Applications Menu -> Settings -> Removable Drives and Media; tick checkboxes for "Mount removable drives when hot-plugged" and "Mount removable media when inserted" (and, optionally, "Browse removable media when inserted"). Problem solved?
But neither would they catch genetic defects - the mutation rate would just go to 0. To be an advocate for evolution, at least to be one that I'll listen to, you need to point me to strong selection pressures in favour of a desirable outcome. How does this improve information management, how does it improve workflow? That sort of thing. What are you using to vet? And I'm not seeing that with unity.
Some hand waving about how it's 'largely ineffable' just isn't going to cut it. Let's be honest here: They stuck the launcher, which other OSes allow you to move anyway, on left hand side of the screen. I can get all my options on the same side of the screen just by dragging the launcher there. And yet... most people don't choose to keep their launcher on the side of the screen when given the option.
Talking that up as some big advantage is just... yeah. Not buying it. It seems to me like forcing a way of using the computer on people that they've elected not to use and that there are the capabilities that it ought to have naturally arisen as the way they'd use it if it was superior.
HUD's a nice idea, mind.
As far as evolution is concerned, my point is that I often notice, say, when Facebook changes their interface that users complain because they have to learn something new -- they are lazy, but if you force them into something, they may end up preferring it later. It is true that we shouldn't redesign things if they work well. But the way things are designed the first time may not be the best possible way.
The new features in Unity might not be molded by some process like natural selection. But there is some argument to made that it is. Creating one platform for all devices and levels of users would have enormous advantages, and is a response triggered by changed in the computing environment -- mainly, the widespread use of touch phones and tablets.
Aside from that, all I can say is that Ubuntu does do some user testing, and I hope they are listening to their users. They also have to take some chances and try out new things and see what users respond to. But I agree that their interface changes should respond to real needs, not imagined needs.
| which is, in our Western culture
It's also a myth that the writing system is the same across Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all the other "dialects". While all "Chinese" languages use similar characters, written Chinese does not, in contrast to what is often thought, consist of pictographs. The written Chinese of a Cantonese speaker will therefore differ greatly from the written Chinese of a Mandarin speaker. Sometimes one version will merely seem "somewhat off" to a speaker of a different variety of Chinese, at other times it will make no sense at all.
With that in mind, the number of speakers of Mandarin has to be revised way, way down, to the point that it's no longer a serious contender for global language status. English is still supreme in that regard and will be for the foreseeable future, with Spanish coming in second.
It also seems to take more effort to get what you want. It's easier to pick a program from a menu that to open a search panel, type the name, if you remember it, and find it in the search results.
I use xfce on Ubuntu. The particular dislikes I have for Unity include the shifting of window toolbars so that the buttons are nowhere near the window that they relate to, and the launcher that doesn't function well as either a launcher (it doesn't have every program I may want to use) nor a way to quickly switch between open windows (without combining mouse clicks with keyboard modifiers).
I think it takes longer to find something when one has completely forgotten its name and description, but this isn't a problem 99% of the time, at least for me.
Ubuntu makes much more sense when I'm using my laptop without a mouse available, primarily due to the super+# application switching, whereas I am usually more efficient with Xfce when there's a mouse around; I have both installed.
I remember finding out, years after I bought the original Master of Orion, that you could use the F8 key to see which planets have incoming enemy fleets.
It totally changed the game for me, and also made me decide that UI's suck if the "secrets" aren't discoverable by just moving around the UI and looking at tooltips and the like.
I'm well aware that it's infinitely customizable, but that's not a solution. When a large fraction of your userbase makes their very first action after installation to change the color scheme/theme of your OS, you should go back to the drawing board with your designers. The actual paradigm they present to the user is fantastic, but the color scheme is repugnant.
It has (thankfully) regained some sanity.
I'm also a bit surprised that the author of the article finds Mir to be a good idea. If they think a new display server is needed, they should contribute to Wayland, IMHO. Or at least fork Wayland if there would be irreconcilable differences, but as far as I can tell that's not the actual problem, they just want to do their own thing, which for a display server seems like the worst idea. Display servers are pretty fundamental low-level building blocks of a system, and for that reason one of the few that has resisted fragmentation in the Linux world. (I don't think fragmentation is bad per se, I just think it's bad for display servers.)
I originally switched because I was so sick of using the mouse to arrange my windows all the god. damn. time.
I wouldn't have lasted much either, if a friend hadn't pointed me to a neat little application called BetterTouchTool [1]. It lets you re-arrange windows using keyboard shortcuts.
or like this?
This is telling. I empathize with the author. Here is what he is saying: I really, really want to like Unity. I'm giving it a huge benefit of the doubt, and yet I simply cannot stomach it. I am compelled to go elsewhere. It seems to be getting better but I still cannot use it.
This entire blog post reads like someone trying desperately to convince themselves something of which they don't truly believe.
I'm on Debian so Unity is far away for me...
But I recently thought about installing Steam, for which I needed to use the proprietary graphics drivers to be able to play its more demanding games.
I thought my entertainment to be just another 'apt-get install' away. I have never been so wrong. Canonical should start handing out medals to people who survived replacing their graphical drivers with those provided by AMD/ATI. It's a hellish experience, taking your heart and mind on a rollercoaster of emotions, only to see the tracks end right in front of you when the installer fails and then get catapulted into the dark void that is a system with a broken graphics driver.
Digging about in the root shell was the only option left. Adding insult to injury, their uninstall scripts usually only work halfway, breaking any further installs because it never uninstalled fully. Which then pretty much leaves no other option then to start 'forcing' installs and hoping for the best.
And lo and behold, after wrestling with some packages, purging everything that remotely looked like it knew fglrx, I had my desktop back. But what a chore it was.
So I would really love it if those hardware manufacturers provide a better and less-volatile experience when Mir launches. Perhaps the oft-rumoured SteamBox could accelerate said process even further...
Installing a graphics driver shouldn't be a fight between life and death for a system.
Ubuntu is no longer freedom respecting software.
If OS X decided to record all of your search results you'd be SOL.
Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.
Really? Wasn't Apple the one tracking iphone users wherever they went? [1]
I get the concern about Ubuntu sending data to amazon by default (i.e. can be disabled), I really do, but going out of the way to recommend something as proprietary as either Apple or Microsoft out of spite? This is what really bothers me about the OSS community. How about helping Mint/Fedora out and recommending them instead? I know some do, but even the OP here flaunted that an OSX recommendation seemed more viable than Ubuntu. As much as I would want not to be tracked, at least with Open Source SOFTWARE we can be more aware of it, or even have a say in it; not always so with proprietary stuff! So no, I do not believe either Windows or OSX are better than Ubuntu in this regard.
Not to mention that Canonical isn't a big company, so if they need help bootstrapping by doing some stuff with amazon for now, then so be it. I would hold off judgement on their actions until they're actually in a position of real financial power, cause right now it just seems they had to resort to such ad placement deals because the generous donations weren't cutting it. It's really not clear whether it's actually that big of a deal right now.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-trac...
For example there is no "OS X Mint".
With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.
And guess what. With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers.
Can you give an example?
Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.
Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy, knowing it'd be rare for it to have a negative effect on them. And I'm not saying that's bad or knocking it. I'm just trying to get a sense of why this is so distasteful. I've never seen an Amazon result when I search using the latest Ubuntu by the way. Then again, I'm only searching for applications or files on my machine. I've also never seen an ad on my desktop. I know these things exsits but don't know why I'm not seeing them.
I think you are putting the onus on the wrong party.
It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Amazon might be nefarious or incompetent with my data, or in which they may share my data with another party who is. However, I don't need to demonstrate that these scenarios are likely in order for me to desire privacy: If I am merely undecided about who I want to share my data with, then the rational thing for me to do is to not share my data.
To my mind, it seems immoral to release a product that shares search data by default and without notice.
> Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy...
Absolutely. Are "matters of philosophy" a poor way to inform actions?
Amazon might even knowingly share some of your shopping habits with some organization you don't want them to, but what's the worst that could happen? Is it worse than the effort you'd put into ensuring that doesn't happen?
You are also understating this specific issue by describing the data as "shopping habits".
Assume Amazon will lose your data. Assume everyone else (facebook, twitter, g+, flickr) will lose your data, give them up -- or that they are already public.
Assume someone will correlate all that data, and sell it as a black market service to allow anyone to track you, see if you're in or out of your house, assume your government will put you on a no fly list if you're buying books on military tactics, left/right wing political opinion, assume your government will become oppressive in 15 years and mark up all your kids for "special attention" based on your shopping habits today etc etc...
See also:
"The Right to Privacy by Louis Dembitz Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37368/37368-h/37368-h.htm
There is just no way I can stick with a distro that a) abuses my privacy by selling my search strings by default, and without informing me, and b) thinks it is okay to sell advertising real-estate on my desktop in the first place.
For now I've switched to debian on my main machine, and am gradually migrating others.
As it relates to freedom, Ubuntu is still open source and licensed under a free license. Technically it does qualify as being free software. The Amazon results may not be something a lot of us like (including myself) but anyone is free to remove that functionality from the OS.
If you choose an OS based on philosophy then I'm not sure that Ubuntu has been on your side for some years now. I don't agree that Ubuntu isn't freedom respecting but I do agree that it probably isn't for you and people like you.
Wouldn't it make more sense to advocate for other Linux distributions?
Ubuntu has done commendable work on 13.04. Power consumption and overall experience is phenomenal. But is hard to get excited about Ubuntu anymore. I was reading a bug report on Transmission torrent client bug tracker where they were discussing if they should support Ubuntu's appindicator or Gnome's message tray or just simple system tray. This divide is only going to increase putting both developers and users in an impossible position. When we free-software-guys don't give Android a hard time, there is no reason to create noise around Ubuntu.
I'm glad I found Mint after that. Cinnamon is by far the best experience I've had with the linux desktop yet.
At any rate they're all ubuntus in the end, but the whole package of Mint+Cinnamon is what I was referring to.
To design responsive web applications, you need to see the (browser) windows content on re-size. This is not default in Ubuntu/Unity, you cannot see a windows contents when you are resizing. You can enable it, but its slow and not very useful. The content in a window needs to re-flow fluidly and quickly, especially the browser.
Its as simple as that for me. Until Ubuntu has hardware accelerated window re-sizing, i simply cannot use it as a development platform. Responsive Webdesign isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and responsive apps/websites are a chore to effectively debug on Ubuntu compared to other OS's
If this is something they've fixed in more recent version, color me excited to try Ubuntu again.
But I've definitely seen others w/ this same issue: http://askubuntu.com/questions/297146/live-window-resizing-i...
I need 100% fluid reflowing of every single pixel of width, not just where the media queries are. My designs always come out much better when I optimize this way.
Reflowing to the window, as you drag a corner, seems computationally expensive and a waste of time IMHO. It can occasionally have it's uses. I've always thought the default should be resize and reflow on resize release.
If people really care about responsive design and window resizing then they would probably happily forgo tabs and instead use windows. I'd rather this, but the window manager needs to be competent. (I'm not sure how much lighter tabs are compared with windows - system use wise ?)
In Xfce I'm happy to have the browser not draw the window as I move it. Just outline the window.
You can resize and reflow under Gnome3. (Alt+F8 is the keyboard shortcut.) Can you really not resize windows under Unity?
I'd like to try FreeBSD, but am impatient at the moment, and not sure how good wifi control and hardware support is. Would love to know if anyone's running it on their notebooks.
Going to try Gnome 3 now.
While it had lots of cosmetic issues that I'm sure could be improved and will improve, what infuriated me was that it seemed to revolve around the assumption that I would only about five, well-known GUI apps. This might be a point of, uh, Unity for Newbies and programmers who "live in the shell" but it completely excludes me and I think it excludes some portion of Linux users.
Nah, you can have as many apps pinned to the launcher as you like. I have 18, and some of them probably have dozens rather than thousands of users. Plus, you can easily search for applications from the dashboard, though that's a bit laggy.
> These are not only innovative but great ideas that are being offered from the world of Linux, not by Microsoft or Apple, in a new way never seen before the Unity experiment.
The ability to pin web-applications to the launcher was really introduced in Windows 7, with ability for the web-site to add custom-actions or shortcuts to the icon, accessible through a right-click context-menu.
Chrome allows you to create application launchers without all the browser Chrome, which to the OS looks like normal apps. Afaik this was even based on some third-party app which did the same thing (although with Webkit and Safari) on OS X.
We've also had this ability to add shortcuts to web-apps as "normal" apps on our mobile devices for quite some time.
To me his statement basically seems very uninformed. Or am I missing something crucial here?
I guess the most important issue with Ubuntu nowadays is the one of privacy. With the recent revelations of mass surveillance, exposing desktop searches to a 3rd party by default is a catastrophic decision. I can't understand how the folks at Canonical could accept such a feature. They could have made it opt-in, with flashing popups and shit, asking you to signup. But making it default is a nightmarish situation. I was able to recommend non-technical users (like my parents and relatives) to install Ubuntu by themselves, arguing there was nothing to change that would need someone with know-how. But not now with stuff like this. I don't think the major chunk of the user-base (home users), would understand the implications of this feature.
I don't like how I have to click the small window that is not near the top and then go to the top to access the File menu etc.
I don't like that unity doesn't have snap to the right and left side.
- you can disable the global menu
- Unity has aero snapping to the left and right, and can have it in every corner if you change Compiz settings
I'd rather start off with a minimal install, and build it up as I want, rather than tearing apart someone else's mess, in the quest for my preferred balance of frugality and productivity.
What? You don't like monospaced text?