Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 14, 2011 15:29 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04 by me@jasonclinton.com
Parent article: Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

It's only "broken on modern desktops" if by "modern desktops" you refer to recent Gnome-based environments. It works fine under KDE4 and every other Unix-based desktop / window manager I can think of.

It would indeed be unreasonable to demand that FFM be implemented as a *new* feature, but that's hardly the same thing as expecting a fully implemented and useful interface option to be retained in later versions of the software.

Anyway, from the way they appear to be set on alienating their entire userbase one discarded feature at a time, I expect they will soon be left with only those users who lack the necessary expertise to select a non-default desktop environment. A given feature may only be used by 20% of users--but that 20% is different for each feature. If you repeatedly alienate 20% of your remaining userbase you will rapidly run out of users (<1% left after 21 iterations).

Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 14, 2011 16:38 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

> It works fine under KDE4 and every other Unix-based desktop / window manager I can think of.

Plus Windows of course.

The Gimp does behave a bit weirdly with FFM on Windows (and slightly-less-but-still-a-bit weirdly in KDE for that matter) but some time this decade they're planning to release the single window version that should fix that and make using the Gimp a slightly less grueling experience.

Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 14, 2011 16:50 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

80% of statistics are made up....

Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 14, 2011 20:07 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] (1 responses)

It's only "broken on modern desktops" if by "modern desktops" you refer to recent Gnome-based environments.

What do you mean by "recent Gnome-based environments"? Are you saying that Unity and gnome-shell both suffer from focus-follows-mouse bugs (I have to admit to being a bit behind and not having tried either yet)? Or are you also implicating metacity in Gnome2 (which would go against my experience, but perhaps you know of a specific issue I don't)?

Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 14, 2011 21:23 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

I was referring mainly to the Unity desktop, but apparently the mainstream Gnome desktop environment is also making it more difficult to select FFM behavior compared to past versions--not to mention the way the new shared menu bar conflicts with a FFM focus policy. It's not being /removed/, per se, but their design decisions seem to assume it won't actually be /used/, which is nearly as bad.

Ubuntu reaffirms Unity plan for 11.04

Posted Apr 15, 2011 12:44 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

>I expect they will soon be left with only those users who lack the necessary expertise to select a non-default desktop environment.

Funny, that's also how Windows got its market share, if you s/desktop environment/operating system/.