[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu - Wrong Direction?

[Paul Tansom]

** Alan Pope <alan at canonical.com> [2011-12-02 11:03]:
> On 01/12/11 23:52, thegeeksquadron at ymail.com wrote:
> >Is Ubuntu going in the wrong direction?
> 
> I personally don't believe so, no. I personally think it's going in
> exactly the _right_ direction, but some people seem obsessed by
> yesterday, today and tomorrow and not next year or next decade.

I agree, I think in the longer term this will probably be good. I certainly
prefer Unity to Gnome Shell (with the proviso that this is based on reading
about both, but only having used Unity so far!). My main gripe is that it has
been rushed out as the primary desktop when it is so painfully unfinished.
Things I want to do just aren't easy yet and force me to the command line and
Google (this feels very last millenium Linux!), and some of the changes I'm not
keen on I could easily adjust if there were configuration options for them.

A few examples:

The launcher pops out from the left when I want to bookmark a web page. I do
this by dragging it onto the bookmarks sidebar in Firefox because I like to
categories them and this is the easiest way to do it quickly. Unfortunately it
gets covered by the launcher and I have to reduce the size of the Firefox
window to drag it across and then maximise again. If I could configure it to
only pop out if I push the mouse to the side edge that would solve the problem.

I've got too many icons on my launcher and would like to categorise them into
sub groups that pop out sideways when clicked (much like the OS/2 Warp button
bar from the 1990s!), this isn't and option and I don't think it is likely to
be sadly. I may be able to do something if I can get my head around writing
lenses, but I haven't found any useful documentation yet. Choosing an
application from the launcher is not easy when they are bunched up at the
bottom.

I'd like to have the menus show all the time as I find myself with what I
describe as the "Unity twitch". I move the mouse up to the top to get at a
menu, but as I can't see where it is I don't hit my target straight away and
have to move the mouse sideways to get the right one once I can actually see
it.

I want to add parameters to the launcher icon, or add my own application to the
launcher (I really must find the configuration file to do this), but this
doesn't seem possible in an easy manner yet. If the application isn't available
through the dash then you can't drag it on (I have a scrip to start JTides that
I'd like to add), and if it is but you want to start with specific parameters
you can't (I want to start XTides with Portsmouth as the default location using
command line options).

There are others, but I won't go on. The main thing that I don't see getting
fixed to my liking is the move of the menus to the top of the screen. I've read
the Mac justifications about why this is good and half seen the point, but in
use it really isn't nice. For a start it kills mouse over focus which I used
extensively to have a small window open with reference data in and type into
the background window that was maximised. I've got past this one, all be it I'm
still annoyed when I'm resizing windows to achieve similar results, but the
hassle of working on a small window at the bottom right and having to move the
mouse all the way up to the top left and back to use a menu item is just plain
silly. The concept may have worked when Mac had small screens, but with the
size of modern screens it isn't so much fun - and you could possibly argue that
it isn't good for RSI (or are bigger movements better than smaller ones?).


I'm confident it will get there (mostly), but if I wasn't happy with Ubuntu on
the server (no GUI!) and preferring to stick with it on the desktop I'd likely
be looking around at alternatives. It seems a shame to lose people because
they've upgraded and found themselves using what is basically a development
release. Perhaps the LTS and other 6 monthly releases should be named
separately. Then it would be clearer that in between releases can be somewhat
experimental in many ways and more people would stick to the LTS versions.

As it is I'm more inclined to try to learn about lenses, etc. and see if I can
'fix' things without actually moving distro.

** end quote [Alan Pope]

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