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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:41 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by shmerl Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
Yes there was a good reason and it's the EXACT justification that Canonical and Microsoft are both ignoring with their development trends. Which is that Touchscreen hand-held computers (tablet, phone) and desktops have significantly different usage pattens, needs and expectations.
Trying to make the desktop interface operate like a tablet is frankly as stupid as making the hand-held interface require a keyboard and mouse. This is why most people hate Unity/Gnome3 and why Windows 8 is going to be a commercial disaster that makes Vista look like a raging success. These compute models are different animals and one size fits all is stupid, frankly given the trend I'm startled Google was smart enough to see this from the start, and they saw it years before both the current companies proved it doesn't work.
Don't get me wrong, there can be similarities and compatability (Canonical has been moving slowly this direction) but to throw out the usage paradigm of desktops and replace it with gestures and touchscreen paradigms is a recipe for being lynched by the users.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 3:47 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]
Shooting's too good for 'em? I'm afraid I don't think they're worth the cost of lynch - just walk away. I am. I've been installing Debian on the test boxes (Wheezy), and wish I'd noticed that Debian branch of Mint earlier. May not be too late yet, we'll see.
But seriously: thanks, Ubuntu, for all the good stuff you did before you went tablet-mad. You too, Gnome. Maybe some day again, but for now, no thanks.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:53 UTC (Sat) by kklimonda (subscriber, #60089) [Link]
> Trying to make the desktop interface operate like a tablet is frankly as stupid as making the hand-held interface require a keyboard and mouse. This is why most people hate Unity/Gnome3 and why Windows 8 is going to be a commercial disaster that makes Vista look like a raging success
What exactly about Unity/GNOME 3 screams "tablet-oriented design"? When you use Windows 8 with its Metro UI its shortcomings on a traditional desktop are plainly visible, but what makes first two unsuitable for desktops?
I'd love to hear actual arguments, not another round of "unity is designed with full screen applications in mind" or "try running multiple applications in unity". Ok, there is a global menu but what else?
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 7:01 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
I've done this argument before.
1) The overview is _painful_ to use on larger screen. Application menus have a tighter pointer locality, and when done right (which no, GNOME 2's were not at all right, they were horrible) involved less contextual overhead and wrist strain. Keyboard accessibility is great, but it can be more inconvenient to switch between mouse and keyboard than to just use the mouse, especially when using primarily mouse-driven applications.
2) The workspace management removees the utility of workspaces. Workspaces were a killer feature of the Linux desktop. GNOME 3 makes them incosistent, hard to access on multi-monitor displays (fixed somewhat in newer versions, but still not as good as an always-visible switcher), and really just trained me stop noticing that Windows 7 lacks them entirely.
3) The hot-corner is obnoxious. It's also very obnoxious in Windows 7. However, Windows makes it both possible and super-easy to disable. Right-click the hot-corner, uncheck the menu item, done. People who use mice on unstable surfaces or who have slightly less than perfect motor control frequently hit those ****ing annoying hot-corners by accident on a frequent basis, completely disrupting their work flow. Clicks represent actions. Pointer movement means a change of possible targets, or it means your wrist brushed a track pad, or it means the table was bumped, or it means that the laptop surface shifted and the mouse slid. Mixing click-for-action and point-to-target is a good way to tell a lot of people "you can't use this OS, go away."
4) The new focus on full-screen everything by default. I don't even full-screen most apps on a 20" monitor. You can't imagine how little I want a full-screen window on a 30" monitor. Really. Full-screen makes sense on phones, tablets, and even netbooks. It does not make sense on a giant multi-monitor workstation.
5) No on-screen window/task management by default. Yes, the old GNOME 2 window list was lame. OS X did it a bit better. Windows 7 did it way better. GNOME 3 forgot that task management is something that workstation users need to do (including both quick launching of applications or monitoring running ones). The overview is nice sometimes, but not all the time.
6) Various little details. The lack of Power Off in the system menu is a common one. Yes, yes, tablets and phones are never powered off because they are not PC hardware. The giant $2,500 PC in my bedroom with the glowing LEDs and fans that could power a small plane really REALLY needs to be turned off at night so we can sleep, and (if one cares about electric bills) anytime it's not about to be used. Sleeping/hibernating is not reliable on Linux still (in fact, does not work on this PC on Linux without major issues).
7) Applications. Linux has none worth noting that Windows does not have. Windows has boat loads that Linux lacks. iOS has boat loads that Linux lacks. The only thing that GNOME is good for to an average consumer is browsing the Web, e.g. light casual computing. Only, there are far better options than GNOME for that use case.
The most annoying part is, of course, that GNOME 3 is also just a horrifically bad tablet interface. GNOME 3's interface is a GREAT fit for netbooks, as its paradigms are a good fit for ~11"-13" screens, touchpads, and light computing. Too bad netbooks are already dying off in popularity thanks to iPads and Ultrabooks, and the market that remains is already filled by Chromebooks.
Also, yes, a lot of similar complaints can be made about Windows 8 and OS X's direction. The regressions are less severe in those cases IMO (e.g., Windows 8 loses the awesome Start Menu, but not the entire rest of the PC desktop paradigm). Maybe Windows 8 will be the next Windows Vista. Maybe not. In either case, GNOME isn't going anywhere new in the market that it hasn't already failed to go in the last 15 years.
Start menus Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:00 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Application menus have a tighter pointer locality, and when done right (which no, GNOME 2's were not at all right, they were horrible) involved less contextual overhead and wrist strain. Are you describing the "start" menu here? I checked out the version of GNOME that Debian Squeeze provides, along with KDE 4, and the tendency to throw everything into the start menu so that you not only have simple menus but also a bunch of dynamic stuff haphazardly arranged - you could probably have a weather applet in there as well - which seems to also be a feature of recent Windows releases, resulting in a kind of mini-desktop within the desktop, is just horrible. KDE 4 seemed to elevate this to the level of high art by having iPod-like menus squeezed into the tiny porthole in question. What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of? With such a mess, I can understand people wanting to make more use of the screen to show menus, but I guess that full-screen menus don't really scale nicely to 30" monitors.
Start menus Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:10 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
He's referring to the MacOS-style global menubar.
Which is, by the way, unusable with sloppy-focus and other things old unix-geeks take for granted ;)
Start menus Posted Apr 3, 2012 13:29 UTC (Tue) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link]
> What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of?
Because I don't want the rest of my screen obscured when I'm looking for recently used documents in Start menu?
Start menus Posted Apr 3, 2012 22:25 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Couldn't you allow it to have just some of the 80%, though? Pretending that there's an iPod in the bottom left corner while the rest of the screen goes unused (apart from perhaps showing applets that only distract from the task at hand) seems to be a misallocation of resources.
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