Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

[monraaf]

Ship Unity now as an opt in, not opt out choice. Label it as beta, which it is. Target it for full release in the next LTS. It is Canonical's first attempt at anything like this. Forcing something clearly flawed on users is something people do when they know it won't be taken up en mass on its own merits (See Explorer, Internet).

I agree that the compiz/unity desktop really is beta quality, and it will probably expose some graphics driver bugs as well, as will gnome-shell. But that's fine with me. Unity probably needs a lot of beta testers to get it in good shape, so this is a good opportunity. And natty still has the classic compiz free gnome desktop for those of us who are not interested in beta testing.

[kraftman]

And yet it has 30% of the Desktop market in the US and 47% globally...

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...-market-share/

Mainly because of available applications. This is the strongest MS point. Linux is great, but some important applications are missing on it thus its market share is still low. It's sad, but things like performance, security and stability doesn't matter for about 96% of computer users. They just want to use some specific programs.

[BlackStar]

Mainly because of available applications. This is the strongest MS point. Linux is great, but some important applications are missing on it thus its market share is still low. It's sad, but things like performance, security and stability doesn't matter for about 96% of computer users. They just want to use some specific programs.

Note that windows tends to perform better than linux on things that actually matter to desktop users: browser performance, flash performance, etc.

[BlackStar]

Because they're not packaging Gnome 3 as the default desktop environment for the distribution with one of the largest user bases when two weeks before the final release it's still in alpha shape.

Ship Unity now as an opt in, not opt out choice. Label it as beta, which it is. Target it for full release in the next LTS. It is Canonical's first attempt at anything like this. Forcing something clearly flawed on users is something people do when they know it won't be taken up en mass on its own merits (See Explorer, Internet).

Release early, release often. The mantra of the open source world.

You wanted a bike? Now you get to ride it.

[yogi_berra]

Release early, release often.

Screw that, I want software that actually does what the marketing department says it will.

[dokers]

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

I tried out the beta 2 live cd. I thought that unity was very nice eye candy that makes your life much harder! It seems like you have to search for what you want. I'm sure there is a browse feature but I couldn't figure it out. I don't want to type out everything, and if I don't know what I'm looking for how would I find it, that's why browsing is nice to see what programs you can run! I already miss gnome. I seriously doubt I will use Unity when I upgrade. I just hope they tested Gnome enough for this release and opting out of Unity is easy!!!

[daedaluz]

On my T60, Unity is so slow it's nearly unusable. Secondly, it's clumsier to use than classic GNOME with one evenings testing. Third problem lies with poor integration of non-GTK applications into new desktop, notably FreeMind and SMPlayer. I'm not pleased with the route Canonical is taking.