Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

A week ago a discussion began on the Ubuntu development mailing list whether Ubuntu 11.04 should ship with Unity or the classic GNOME desktop as many people are concerned about the state of the Canonical-developed desktop and shipping it too prematurely. While it looks like they'll continue using Unity since they went ahead and released Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2 yesterday without any change, they have some published some rather frightening results from their user testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTMzMw

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Originally Posted by phoronix

Usability Problems

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No, no, no.
Ubuntu fanboys always tell us Canonical is the only one who understands usability.

I might switch back to Debian with the direction that Ubuntu has been moving... I installed beta 1 and not only did my desktop look like shit when I first booted up (lots of graphic corruption), my whole desktop crashed within 5 minutes. I thought that I would give it a chance and switch over to using the propriety drivers (AMD), but the situation was worse, the crashes happened right away. Fortunately, I was able to figure out to switch back to using metacity, and my system has been much more usable.

If Ubuntu pushes ahead with releasing Unity, I will be forced to tell the numerous people that I provide support to to not upgrade to save me the hassle. Go ahead and release a buggy product Mark, and watch your user base disappear.

This was my first thought: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/stickers/327b/

:D

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Originally Posted by Awesomeness

No, no, no.
Ubuntu fanboys always tell us Canonical is the only one who understands usability.

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Yeah, that's nonsense. This news clearly shows Canonical has no idea how to improve usability. They rather shouldn't do these kind of tests, so nobody learns about the usability problems unexperienced users run into, so nobody can complain. It works out for gnome-panel, gnome-shell and KDE after all.

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Originally Posted by sandain

I might switch back to Debian with the direction that Ubuntu has been moving... I installed beta 1 and not only did my desktop look like shit when I first booted up (lots of graphic corruption), my whole desktop crashed within 5 minutes. I thought that I would give it a chance and switch over to using the propriety drivers (AMD), but the situation was worse, the crashes happened right away. Fortunately, I was able to figure out to switch back to using metacity, and my system has been much more usable.

If Ubuntu pushes ahead with releasing Unity, I will be forced to tell the numerous people that I provide support to to not upgrade to save me the hassle. Go ahead and release a buggy product Mark, and watch your user base disappear.

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Yeah, I completely agree. I've tried Ubuntu 5.04 Alpha 2 six years ago and it crashed, so I really can't recommend Ubuntu to any of my friends.

I have been following unity development for a while now, and with an nvidia card crashes has almost disappeared in the last few unity updates. I guess most people use mac osx to compare usability in other interfaces, let me tell when I first tried mac (it was just leopard) it took a lot of time to find my applications menu.

I think with some more bug squashing unity can be made crash free, and some changes to the applications lens it *can* rock.

Here is what the participants of the usability test had to say about unity https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...il/002973.html its mostly positive

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Originally Posted by babai

I have been following unity development for a while now, and with an nvidia card crashes has almost disappeared in the last few unity updates. I guess most people use mac osx to compare usability in other interfaces, let me tell when I first tried mac (it was just leopard) it took a lot of time to find my applications menu.

I think with some more bug squashing unity can be made crash free, and some changes to the applications lens it *can* rock.

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Quote me the FUD.

Unity does not work for me as of Beta 1. If I get the chance to futz around with my desktop some more, I'll try it again with Beta 2, but don't hold your breath.. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.

My experience with Unity says that it is not ready for prime time.

As i said above that unity has improved a lot on getting rid of the crashes in last few releases, after the beta 1 there has been i think atleast 2 unity releases. Install the beta 2, update to the newest and see for urself. I'm not saying the crashes have gone, but they have certainly removed a lot of serious bugs. There is also two weeks left, hope they can get rid of most of them.

I suspect Xubuntu and Lubuntu are the same way. The main experimentation and breakage seems to have been around Ubuntu. Due to strange/improperly unexplained decisions starting with 10.04's UI, I've been behind Kubuntu instead for a fully featured Desktop Environment as it finally stabilised with KDE 4.5.

Kubuntu 11.04 is FAST and snappy. Largely thanks to the 2.6.38 kernel combined with KDE 4.6.2 which has fixed most of the issues I've had with KDE 4.x in the past. One nice thing about Linux - if you don't like the Desktop Environment switch. If the distro has reached the "bad" tipping point, switch. Lot more flexibility than Mac or Windows where for better or worse you're pretty stuck with whatever comes out that year. Some years are good (Win7, XP) some years bad (Vista, WinME).

Ubuntu Gnome all the way to 10.10 was making nice/steady improvements overall (except for the decision around the buttons moving to the left in 10.04). I understand having to do something (with Gnome 3 being the next KDE4 release), but I would have preferred if they had switched to KDE and applied the same level of effort to helping KDE fix issues and add features with the now stable KDE. Particularly since Ubuntu is going the QT route anyway.