Re: My take on Ubuntu after a few days of using
Eh. A lot of this is just familiarity with Windows, and I imagine you'd have similar feelings trying OSX for the first time. Ubuntu is its own thing, and you can't expect it to work and think like Windows. Some of the complaints are warranted, and others are things that I personally don't really see as valid but that I've seen complaints about before even from long-time users.
Originally Posted by
argvar
1. Unity launchpad placement is awkward on the left. No possibility of moving the launchpad to bottom or customizing it in any manner.
Eh, you get used to it. Your mouse spends a lot of time over there anyway, so it's actually quicker to get to than the bottom bar. It does have the potential to get in the way, for the same reason.
2. Not possible rearrange the order of the icons in the Unity launchpad.
Drag the icon outward, away from the launcher, then back in where you want it.
3. All instances of same application are stacked together, so it's not possible to select directly from the unity launchpad the instance you want.
The Windows method, with the window previews, is so damned cluttered ... but there's no question that it's faster. I don't honestly use the Launcher for window switching - just Alt Tab and Compiz Scale, which is a plugin that works like Mac's Exposé.
4. Alt-tab disables the mouse.
5. Alt-tab stacks multiple instances of same application, so you need to first stop on the application for it to expand it...and even then the presentation is awkward.
6. Alt-tab does only show icons, but not live window capture.
One thing I really like about the 13.04 release is that they finally got the Alt+Tab switcher working properly. There are alternative switchers (more Windows-like) available in the settings, but this one finally at least does what I expect it to. Previously, it would switch applications outright, even if the previous window was another window in the same application, which made it useless to me. Now, just tapping Alt+Tab takes you back to the previous window regardless of whether it's in the same app or another. The grouped windows take a bit of time to get used to, but they certainly make for a cleaner, simpler presentation, and previews wouldn't make sense with grouped applications.
If you want to switch directly between windows in the same application, you can hit the key above Tab instead.
7. Almost no possibility of customizing the look n' feel of the GUI. There are no alternative themes to select from, nor any way of modifying the theme easily.
There's a light theme in Appearance settings. There are also, of course, hundreds of themes available online. Modifying themes is trickier, although I'm just finicky enough to have to "fix" one or two things about any theme I install. I do still think the default theme is a little ugly, which is a very, very old complaint (and the theme is so iconic now that it would probably be a brand identity problem to make any major changes.)
8. Showing menu of an active application in the topmost bar makes no sense. I'd rather use that area for launch icons and move application menu to the application window.
17. I feel like the UI is bulky, and that I have more space to work with in Windows.
Which is a subjective effect - you don't - but an important one, I guess. The Launcher takes up as much space as the Windows taskbar if the taskbar is moved to one side, and the menu in the panel means that a maximized window is effectively full-screen, while the content areas of non-maximized windows are still as tall as they would be without a panel at all. Honestly, I think the damned theme has an effect here - that dark panel just seems so heavy.
The Launcher can be set to hide itself, again from Appearance settings, and that certainly helps the "boxed in" feeling.
16. Inconsistencies in the UI. Try right-clicking in the web browser window, see how the context menu looks like. Then right-click on the desktop, and then right-click on a icon in the launchpad. 3 different look n' feels!
The contrast between the Launcher menus and application menus is intentional and matches the contrast between the Launcher and the menu panel (along with the applications themselves.) It's a visual cue to distinguish between the application and the OS shell. The contrast between the smooth menus in some apps (including the file manager, which is the menu you see when you right-click the desktop) and the flat ugly ones in others is la-la-la technical BS as a result of recent changes to how windows are actually drawn - changes that started rolling in around 2011 and depend on application developers supporting the new standards.
9. Ubuntu does not help you install correct video card drivers after install.
18. Ubuntu does not help you discover nice tools to install, you need to know exactly what you want. There's also a lot of garbage in the software center.
It actually should prompt you about installing non-free video drivers. I don't have a lot of experience with this, but it worked the one time I had a non-Intel video card. (Intel cards just mostly work.)
10. Difficult to resize a application window, the border is too small. The resize cursor icons ugly.
11. The compact scrollbar is bad.
Eh, it led to a lot of arguments when it was introduced, but I think the hidden scrollbar is enough for those cases where you actually need a scrollbar, like jumping to a particular point in a document. It pains me to see Windows users pecking at the little arrow buttons on the scrollbar. I think the idea is that any pointing device made in the last five years has either a scroll wheel, a scroll region, or two-finger scrolling, so it's less important to have a scrollbar (at least until you need it) and more important to have an indication of where you are in the document. Personally, I like the edge-to-edge content.
It's also not remotely as fiddly as those damned resize areas. For about two glorious releases, Ubuntu used Mac OSX Aqua's neat little triangular grab handle superimposed onto the bottom right corner of all windows for resizing and no borders at all. No fat borders, nice, big click target; everyone's happy. It was ugly and functional in one release, pretty and functional in the next, and then inexplicably disappeared. The decision to switch back is one of my least favorite things about the current UI. I'll take the fiddliness over fat borders like the ones in Windows, but I know what I'm missing in Aqua.
15. Not possible to minimize all windows except current, e.g. window-shaking like in Windows.
A very neat little feature I'd love to have, but like the Mac OSX grab handles, just an odd little thing another OS does. It's not a common enough feature to expect it in a random OS. So far as I know, only Windows does this. You can do it in two steps with the window switcher - Alt+Tab to the desktop, then tap Alt+Tab once more. A workaround, but if you're going for "focus mode," it's probably worth the extra step.
More to the point, in Linux broadly, it's more common to move to a fresh workspace (desktop) when you want to focus on something. If you haven't tried workspace switching, try it out - it's the weird little button with the "cross" in it on the Launcher. Hit that, drag your window to an empty space, and then click that workspace to follow it. Very nice for getting away from the clutter, and it also means you don't have to dig back through minimized windows later to pick up where you left off.
13. Filesystem structure is confusing. You have no idea where an application is installed or things are.
Also true of an iPhone or Android, and for the same reasons. There's no reason to need to know where applications store their files in Ubuntu. They're usually spread out over a bunch of system folders, but you don't interact directly with that stuff anyway. That's what the package manager (Software Center) is for. In Windows, it sometimes makes sense to just download an executable file (the program itself) and run it from wherever you put it, but that's not how Linux works. All applications are handled through the package manager, which means that they won't leave files around when you remove them and always stay updated.
14. Defaults fonts are not good enough. I switched to OpenSans. Some text on web pages looks awful, and I see lot of "clipping" and overflowing.
Weird. What browser?
12. The toggle button is confusing.
The toggle button widget in some of the settings screens, or something else?
I know I shouldn't use tildes for decoration, but they always make me feel at home~
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