Comment by devonrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devonrt | Hacker News Reader

Calling 10.04 perfect is a real, long stretch. Even the authors own description of 10.04 hardly amounts to "perfect."

Its cosmetic changes are, in my opinion, dubious at best. Window controls are on the left hand side of the Window for no good reason. The color scheme is way too dark, it made me long for the old human theme. UI elements are glitchy in places. The "Me Menu" is useless to me. And why the heck did they ever remove the startup/shutdown options from the system menu? Why are they off on their own?

I like the idea of the Ubuntu Software Center but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. Last time I checked it was just another front end to apt. Many of the packages available are totally useless to the vast majority of people.

Ubuntu One and the Ubuntu Music store, well, we'll see how those go. Personally, I've never, ever used them and I have to wonder if they're the type of things that will actually draw people to Ubuntu

And, well, I hate to come off as a curmudgeon because I really do like Ubuntu, but to say that 10.04 blows OSX and Windows 7 out of the water is just wrong. It doesn't. For instance, why does Ubuntu still have the same old application menu? Both OSX and Windows 7 (and even KDE4) have moved away from this model. The categorized, hierarchical menus that have been around forever are really unhelpful. Why can't I search this menu like in Windows 7 and KDE4? For that matter, why can't I easily search everything like I can in Windows 7 and OSX (spotlight). If they really want to compete with Windows or OSX they need to give me better ways to find, sort and organize everything on my computer.

>The categorized, hierarchical menus that have been around forever are really unhelpful.

Call me old-fashioned but I liked this way better. Search-based interfaces don't help when you know what you want to do but don't know what applications are available to do it. On Ubuntu for people coming from other OS's, this is probably a very common experience (e.g., "I want to listen to music, what media programs are on this OS?"). I like being able to get on an Ubuntu box and riffle through the hierarchical application menu to see what's installed and what I might need to add for my own use. The fact that the hierarchy is well-integrated with the package manager makes it all the more worthwhile.

By moving away from this format in e.g. Mac OS X, I have a hard time keeping track of what applications I have installed without riffling through my entire Applications folder from time to time. Unless you put your Applications folder as a stack on your dock (which is not the default), I have no idea how typical users on Mac OS X remember and launch apps that aren't pinned to their docks.

I agree; I'd rather look for a task than have to search for an application by name. Of course, there's no reason it couldn't be hierarchical and have a search box.

I didn't necessarily suggest that the menu not be organized at all, just that the strict categorical hierarchical menus are lame. Why do some text editors go under the Utilities menu and others under the Programming menu (like Emacs). It's hard for a new user to know which menu a program is going to be under immediately after installing it, so they have to scrub all of them until they find it.

Why not have a more semantic approach? Why can't I tag my applications and have the application menu be more like a tag cloud and let applications be under multiple menus. At least then I could put Emacs under Editors and Programming.

It's a nice-to-have, for when you don't know exactly what you're looking for; I just wish that there were a way to make more people aware of things like Gnome Do as a complementary solution. http://do.davebsd.com/

Shutdown does belong on it's own. It's something most users will use all the time, unlike the rest of the system menu stuff. It's weird that it's on the right though, since they put the window close button on the left. To me, that's fundamentally inconsistent.

Then there's my Chrome browser which stubbornly maintains the window controls on the right.

No I wouldn't say it's perfect, but I do find it very clean and elegant. It certainly holds its own with Windows 7 and Mac OS.

I used it for a bit and I have to say that I like the window controls on the left. For me the mouse pointer usually hovers in the left side of my screen so they are closer to it = require less mouse movement.

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