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

[Tom H]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.

The "no quit" think intrigued because I hadn't heard of it before.
Google yielded this:
http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/

I've read the beginning and will go back to it later. I don't
understand; I would've thought that there'd be more pressing design
matters to deal with than eliminating "quit." Firefox comes to mind as
an app that needs to be restarted no matter which OS you're using.

I'd forgotten about the menu bar! I don't mind that it's detached but
the auto-hiding of the actual menus and the partial over-writing of
the application's name are a PitA. At least the auto-hiding of the
launcher can be turned off.