Ubuntu's Unity Still Crashes A Lot, Usability Problems

[admiraljkb]

For me, having used a combination of Gnome 1, Gnome 2, and Windows for most of my life, the global menus are more or less a dealbreaker. I've done global menus on the Mac, but they seem to handle them a lot more intuitively there -- I dunno, it just wasn't as much of a PITA on Mac. Maybe because they have proper support for easily switching between windows (the dock at the bottom).

I just can't get used to it. I hate global menus. I didn't particularly care for them on Mac, but they're terrible on Unity.

To me, back in the 80's/90's the menus following the windows were less useful on the desktop (and made much less sense) with small/low resolution (800x600 and 1024x768) monitors back in the olden days when every app was typically maximized in spite of being in a windowing desktop environment. You had to maximize them just to be able to see more than a sliver of the document and then flip back and forth because you couldn't afford the expensive and complicated/buggy setup of a second monitor back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I truly fail to see why global menus seem to pick up steam on the modern desktop at the precise moment they are obsolete on the modern desktop?

I haven't tried Unity yet as I couldn't get it to boot a couple of months ago, but my experience on a buddie's Mac when I was helping out on something real quick was with with lots of windows open, spread across multiple monitors. Now I have to move my mouse across two monitors to get to the app menu? Are you kidding me? Not very intuitive, and very user unfriendly. The Mac UI needs some modernisation to be sure, and dropping global menus should be the first thing done to get it into the 2000's... I don't see why Unity would pick up such a backwards "FF" (Fossilized Feature).

I don't have those problems on KDE which is much friendlier/easier to use on the desktop with 2 1900x1200 monitors, and then when on my Netbook, it uses global menus where it makes sense, and makes the UI easier to use, not harder. Everything has been quite intuitive with Kubuntu in both desktop and netbook mode. Crap on KDE just works the way I expect it to or better these days, which is saying a lot considering the disaster that was 4.0. 10.10's Unity hasn't impressed me on the netbook as much as KDE did. I'm increasingly satisfied with each new release of KDE on normal desktop machines with 4GB ram and decent graphics, so I'll probably stay with it for a while.

[Awesomeness]

The reason people like XP is because... it works.

No, it does not. XP is utter garbage.
People “like” XP because a huge chunk of PC users never knew any OS besides XP. MS was so slow creating Vista, XP was the primary OS for almost 10 years. A whole generation grew up knowing only XP!

[deanjo]

No, it does not. XP is utter garbage.
People “like” XP because a huge chunk of PC users never knew any OS besides XP. MS was so slow creating Vista, XP was the primary OS for almost 10 years. A whole generation grew up knowing only XP!

Rubbish, those same people adapt to other OS's as well. There would be a whole generation that would be stuck in MS-DOS if that was the case. XP worked, did the job and had a whole crapload of other users to help support it.

[deanjo]

Also it is a well known trend with MS people will usually wait a few years when ever they offer a new OS. Vista didn't take off because it was relatively short lived. By the time people could justify upgrading Windows 7 was offered. We have seen the same thing happen with pretty much every windows release

Loads of 3.1 users bypassed Win 95 and went to Win 98
Loads of Win 98 user skipped Me and 2K and went XP
The same trend is applying to XP to Win 7 users.

[KuriKai]

They need something like this on the first startup

[smitty3268]

Rubbish, those same people adapt to other OS's as well. There would be a whole generation that would be stuck in MS-DOS if that was the case. XP worked, did the job and had a whole crapload of other users to help support it.

People don't adapt to other OS's, have you seen the market share numbers for Windows? People instinctively react negatively to change, regardless of whether the change is positive or negative. Take website design, for example. When a big site changes the design, it almost always gets hit by a wave of negative response by users. People are used to navigating one way, and all of a sudden they have to stop and think to get anything done. Fast forward a month, and everyone loves the new design and can't figure out how they lived without it before. MS went through the same thing - everyone hated Vista, and then a few years later people had gotten used to it by the time Win7 came out.

Now XP did work reasonably well. But you can't ignore the fact that it's extremely hard to get non-technical people to move away from what they are used to.

[curaga]

^ Nope, even after all these months, I still hate win7 UI and the new phoronix forums design.

[babai]

Well, a few things:

Look at the specifications for the test system that Canonical used for this study. This is a typical Lenovo business laptop with fairly high-quality components, but the IGP is an Intel "HD Graphics". This tells me it's in the G45 family most probably, since the i3-370M is not a Sandy Bridge CPU. So this Intel IGP is in its prime right now: Intel has had years to work on the G45 generation's drivers; Intel IGPs continue to be immensely popular; and it has all the hardware features you could want for supporting something like Unity. It's a much more advanced chip than the 965G generation that preceded it, and it's been on the market much longer than the Sandy Bridge chips that, if they had used those, I'd have understood the crashiness to be a driver problem this early in the SNB game.

But, I've been running Fedora 15 Alpha using Gnome 3.0 and Gnome-Shell on my Lenovo ThinkPad X61T for close to two weeks now. The only things that have crashed are the Humble Indie Bundle games, and PulseAudio. Gnome-Shell has never crashed, and the PC has been on and in-use 8 to 20 hours per day. I'm using the open source graphics drivers on the 2.6.38 kernel, just like Ubuntu Natty would do. What's the difference? No Unity, no Compiz -- Gnome-Shell and Mutter instead.

The performance is also fantastic, even with the X61T's aging 965GM chipset. Transitioning from a maximized browser window to a gnome-shell window present (tap the Super / Windows key, similar to Unity) is smooth as silk. Now on my Radeon HD5970, the same transition does lag a bit sometimes, but I chalk that up to performance issues in r600g yet to be resolved :P

But on both chipsets, with Unity, I can get the same rate of crashes, drops in FPS (noticeable lag when hovering over icons), and lag when viewing the "Present" view of open windows, as reported in the usability study. So I'm basically one more person able to confirm the problems with Unity, and I've tested on both r600g and i965 classic.

And don't think the binary drivers are any better, either. ATI's support for Unity in Catalyst is still pretty rough around the edges; they made a release specifically to get it minimally working on Unity, but they admitted that there are still defects and crashers present. I've tried the same Catalyst driver on Fedora 15, and while still being woefully proprietary, it does indeed work well with Mutter and Gnome-Shell.

I can't speak to the NVidia binary driver as I don't own an Nvidia card.... but if the Nvidia binary driver is the only driver that works well with Unity, that's still a really big problem. The percentage of people who (a) have an Nvidia card and (b) know how to get the proprietary drivers working is probably about 20 - 30% of all Ubuntu desktop users, conservatively. Don't believe me? Look at the past Phoronix Linux Graphics Surveys, where some 80% of users just run whatever driver is installed by default in their distro. What's that for Nvidia cards? Nouveau, am I right? How well does Nouveau cope with Unity? Fermi cards?

All that aside, I 100% agree with you that Unity can rock. Any software can be trivially said to have the potential to be excellent at some point in the future, because no software is ever barred from the possibility of future enhancement, refactoring, etc.

And indeed, Unity is already doing things that would predispose it to rock in the near future. But will it be near enough for Natty? I still have my reservations!

Hmm, guess ur right natty might not be a very shiny release after all, but the development rate will help unity to be super polished by 11.10. Natty may be a forgettable release like karmic where they introduced a lot of changes under the hood but was a disaster in terms of hardware issues, but look at lucid it really set the standards. I think 11.10 will be a release where unity would shine.

[Awesomeness]

XP worked, did the job and had a whole crapload of other users to help support it.

Then go away and use XP if you love it so much.
You're obviously too young to remember that nice Lovesan virus. Oh, that was great: Distributing to XP computers without any user interaction. Fresh XP install and before one could even download any updated, boom! PC shuts down.
The only two workarounds were either to record a new XP installation CD and manually slipstream released updates to that medium or to download the updates via an unaffected OS, record them on CD, unplug the wired network connection and reinstall XP from scratch. Neither is user friendly in any way.

I've seen lots of people talking about Win2000 like you do about XP. XP was perceived as downgrade to a sluggish and crash-prone Fisher Price OS while Win2k was the OS that “just worked”.

It took MS many years of bugfixing, Service Packs, and hardware evolution (faster CPUs, more RAM) to get XP from completely crap to somewhat bearable.

[yogi_berra]

It took MS many years of bugfixing, Service Packs, and hardware evolution (faster CPUs, more RAM) to get XP from completely crap to somewhat bearable.

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

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