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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Posted Oct 26, 2010 7:25 UTC (Tue) by loevborg (guest, #51779)In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) by MattPerry Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)
Quite unnecessary to make a pet peeve (shared with all other Gnome-based distributions, I suppose) sound like a terrible mistake.
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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:42 UTC (Tue) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]
Maybe it's not a big deal for you, but it's a big deal for me. This bug has caused me a lot of grief. It's a simple UI bug that seems like it might be easy to fix (I have no idea how hard it would be to do so). Its existence, along with many other little annoyances, add up over time to create an overall frustrating desktop experience. Canonical puts a lot of emphasis on user experience and polish. I wish that attention to little details such as this would be a higher priority for them. Shuttleworth seems obsessed with Netbooks these days so I'm not surprised that he's pushing Unity rather than sticking with something known and that works (the current GNOME desktop). Desktop Linux usability seems to have been rudderless since Sun completed their GNOME usability studies years ago.
The Linux desktop environment is nothing but pet peeves because the large problems have mostly been corrected over the last 10 years. But that doesn't mean these small issues should be ignored. The terrible mistake is not the pet peeve, but what it represents. It is a symptom of a larger problem within the Linux desktop community. There is a fascination with eye-candy and new technology that takes precedence over productivity.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 27, 2010 9:24 UTC (Wed) by loevborg (guest, #51779) [Link]
I agree that something should be done about all those "paper cuts", some of which have existed for years. Some of these problems have actually been fixed, and not just trivial usability bugs, either. Printing seems to me more or less working these days, though not as well as on OSX naturally. Still annoyance at pet peeves is understandable. What I'm not sure of is whether this implies conservatism with regard to further changes to the UI. I'm not sure that flashier improvements, like a new interface, take away too much focus from work on UI bugs. After all, the Ubuntu desktop has changed in very small increments over the past few years, say from 6.06 to 10.04. It's at a point where I seriously consider skipping releases because I don't expect many perceptible changes. A bit of movement, on the UI front as well in kernel space, is necessary for us enthusiasts not to feel stagnation.
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