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Comment by lincolnq | Hacker News Reader

I really admire Shuttleworth and the rest of the Ubuntu design team for being courageous about making basic changes to the desktop UI. Open source tends to produce a lot of design-by-committee or completely undesigned software, so having somebody making big decisions and experimenting is really valuable. Nobody else big is really doing this.

There are plenty of alternative window managers for Linux or whatever, but few organizations besides Ubuntu have the inclination and resources to actually make the required changes to the relevant applications such that the desktop feels in some way consistent. And I know ubuntu isn't quite there yet, but it feels like it's making really rapid progress, and it's very encouraging.

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Agreed. It's good to see him take this benevolent dictator approach and have the ambition of outdoing OSX in the user experience department. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Shuttleworth-...

... and have the ambition of outdoing OSX in the user experience department.

Is it really "outdoing OSX" if the UI is being done for a market that Apple isn't and doesn't seem to have an inclination of targeting? At least, for what the UI discussed in the initial link for this topic is about.

Sure it is - it may not be competing directly with OSX hardware-wise, but at the end of the day they are all desktop/laptop UIs.

but at the end of the day they are all desktop/laptop UIs.

The physical form of an 8" netbook isn't designed for the same type of use as a 15" — or even 13" — macbook pro is. Why should the UI be?

Perhaps I don't want to learn two interfaces, so it is sometimes better to choose consistency over some sort of pure ideal.

While this specific article may be focused on a UI change for the netbook, Shuttleworth's focus extends to the ubuntu UI in general. In fact, it may be wise choice to distinguish between pure desktop and netbook, time will tell.

I personally wish they would go and buy a Mac and leave the desktop as it is.

Care to elaborate? Apple's products and Ubuntu are entirely different in how they are managed. While Apple's is an almost entirely closed ecosystem, Ubuntu's is almost entirely open.

What's wrong with someone trying to innovate in the PC desktop space?

I don't consider copying a single menu bar as it is used on Macs since 1984 as an innovation. I detested the single menu bar on my Mac classic and I always thought the Windows way were preferable -- back then I was a Mac user. And I always found the arguments that Mac zealots put forwards in favour of the single menu bar, were ridiculous. And this post reminds me much to much of the justifications of back then. Those arguments were ridiculous in the 1990s and they still are in the 2010s.

If they thought the menu bar takes too much space, they whould work on minimizing it while it's not in use. But they shouldn't dislocate it from the window to which it belongs.

There's nothing ridiculous in Fitts' law.

It is for notebook (incl. netbook) users who hardly ever use the mouse/trackpad.

Just for reference, so we can all agree on what consitutes Fitts's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law

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"Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing", which means it might be less relevant for netbooks, but it still doesn't make it ridiculous.

In other news, Fitts's law is totally irrelevant to the point Shuttleworth is making. The problem he is trying to address is that of screen real estate.

> But they shouldn't dislocate it from the window to which it belongs.

In almost all cases on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the window is maximised, so the menubar would still be attached to it. This is a part of Shuttleworth's argument.

Lack of competition will kill Apple, so even if you love OSX, you'd better don't wish that.

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