Oh, please, please, COME ON Ubuntu development people!

[Liam Proven]

On 21 April 2011 13:12, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 21 April 2011 00:45, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:19 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>>>> On 16 April 2011 20:52, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Don't you think it would be nice to move this to sounder.  I am having
>>>>> trouble getting my wheelchair over here.
>>>>
>>>> We can't. The Powers that Be have just shut it down.
>>>>
>>> True, which makes me wonder about the whole Ubuntu/Canonical thing.
>>> Fortunately as you know well, there are other distros, I am at the
>>> moment playing with PCLinux OS, and Denbian stable.  On my production
>>> machine I am switching to Mint 10.04.2 for the mean time whilst I see
>>> what happens with Canonical.
>>
>> I've been looking into what Clem Lefebvre is planning for Mint 11.
>> Apparently, it will be based on GNOME 3, but with the traditional
>> panel layout - no GNOME Shell. I didn't even realise this was
>> possible, TBH. That certainly sounds like it will be worth a look for
>> those who like neither Unity nor the GNOME Shell, or whose hardware
>> isn't up to running them in their full composited glory.
>>
>> There is also now a second Debian-based Mint, to go with LMDE, the
>> Linux Mint Debian Edition, which currently uses a GNOME 2-based
>> desktop. There is now Linux Mint Xfce 201104 as well, which like LMDE
>> is also based directly off Debian and not Ubuntu.
>>
>> There are more options opening up for people who wish to leave Ubuntu,
>> Unity and GNOME 3 but keep the Debian base and the power of apt-get
>> and dpkg.
>>
>> I'm not planning to decamp just yet myself. I'm intrigued by Unity. I
>> am playing with it in a VM and whereas I don't find it an obvious or
>> intuitive environment, I will certainly give it a try on native
>> hardware when it's released.
>
> Ubuntu 11.04 has the "classic" desktop ("Ubuntu Classic") and GNOME 3
> has a legacy/fallback mode so if you don't like the new interfaces,
> you can choose to use the old ones. Maybe Mint'll have the
> legacy/fallback mode enabled by default.

I didn't know that about GNOME 3 - typically, the snazzy promotional
website, stuffed with just-slightly-irritating videos, is scant on
actual hard information.

I did know about Unity's fallback, as I've tried it. It might be
called "Ubuntu classic" but it isn't. It retains one of the features I
most dislike about Unity - the single menu bar at the top of the
screen. I can live with this on the Mac, although I prefer the
KDE/GNOME1+2/Windows way of menus in the window itself.

(Actually, best of all, I prefer the Acorn RISC OS way of only having
context menus.)

But an auto-hiding menu bar is, I think, a *disastrous* idea. One that
by design partially occludes the name of the app as well is just that
tiny bit worse.

The only thing worse than auto-hiding menus is removal of the Quit
option, which is planned for a future release. I use an Android phone
which has no Quit option and I absolutely detest the "feature" - it is
a nightmare and significantly impedes performance, not to mention
making certain operations difficult or annoying.

(E.g., leaving the browser *sometimes* leaves windows open and
sometimes doesn't, with no discernable pattern. But leaving the
Contacts app *always* goes back to the list, even if you are in
mid-edit, so it is *extremely* inconvenient to cut & paste info from
another app into a contacts record.)

> Unity might require a *little* effort to get used to it but it's good interface.

This may be the case, but what it fails to acknowledge is that some of
us have polished, refined workflows based on customised versions of
the existing GUI.

FWIW, I also am a Mac user, and a Windows user, and on the Mac I have
certain fairly sophisticated methods of driving the interface,
involving minor customisations, which Unity is completely unable to
support. E.g. the Unity app search is no use to me, as I don't have a
Windows key. Nor does my laptop. On the Mac, I drop an alias to my
Applications folder into the Dock and that gives me a hierarchical app
menu - but Ubuntu doesn't have an Apps folder, nor any analogue of
Windows' Start menu folder full of shortcuts, so I can't reproduce
this functionality either and must use the deeply crippled
not-quite-full-screen apps browser.

Ah well. I shall try to get used to it, but when the "no quit" option
is removed, I am off to a different desktop, even if I have to build
my own Ubuntu Remix.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508