Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Personally, my complaints are:

1) My tech support burden with my dad went through the roof when he upgraded his ubuntu box and wound up running unity. He cut his teeth on windows (well, actually he cut his teeth on an IBM 1620, but that's another story), and was doing fine in xfce, but unity threw him completely. He's getting the hang of it now, but he's no more productive than he was in xfce, and the switch has cost the two of us a lot of time.

2) There seems to be a general trend in UI design towards netbook/tablet optimized UI with a distinctly Mac flavor, which I think is a bone stupid idea for a whole host of reasons, and for which Unity and Gnome 3 are the standard bearers.

3) Nobody designing these things seems to give a fig about anyone who's been using computers for more than a year.

I've posted in some detail about my problems with macish UI before, so I won't go into it too deeply, but:

- window-docked menus suck for:
-- large screens
-- multihead
-- floating focus
-- programs (ie: gimp) that have lots of windows
-- use cases (ie: programming, monitoring, art) that use lots of windows

- maximize by default sucks for anyone trying to use a computer as a general purpose machine, rather than a word processing or web browsing appliance

I do like some of the things I'm hearing about quicksilver-style menus and the like; text is a far more rich form of interaction, and I'd like to see what a modern command-line aided interface would look like. It's one of the few places where it seems like some effort is being spent on long-term users and the technically competent, rather than people who have never used a computer before.

What I'd really like to see is an interface that grows with the user, and that is something the mainstream desktops (all of them, including the commercial ones) fail at horribly.

Apple (well, NeXT, really) had some interesting plumbing ideas with services, which Microsoft seems to be sort of building on with the pluggable pipeline apps for win8, but this is the sort of thing that we ought to have already in Linux. DBus + something quicksilver-esque, perhaps. Something that lets us move beyond the point and cry interface.

I call it the "point and cry" interface because your vocabulary is reduced to that of a baby. You point the mouse at things, hit the cry button, and hope mommy (the machine) knows what you want. Ok, we have right click for context now, but that ups the number of verbs to something you can still count on one hand most of the time. So you have the vocabulary of a two year old at the best of times.

And I guess ultimately that's the problem; I think the innovation effort is being spent at the wrong end, in the wrong direction. For new users, xfce or KDE or Gnome2 are just fine; the user is effectively a baby in a new world, learning how to survive. I've yet to see a windows user who couldn't sit down with any of those and start getting useful work done immediately. What we should be working on is places for those users to go once they get experienced. We should be providing the force-multiplying tools for experts that the other systems haven't even thought of, or don't care enough to implement. For all UI people curse the command line, you can do things in a few tens of characters that would take weeks to do in the file manager with a mouse.

Children grow up. We need to cater to the adults too. Nobody else is.