Comment by mrdingle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrdingle | Hacker News Reader

Man we really despise innovation attempts for some reason today on HN. Canonical is trying to push computing into the future and progress user interface by doing really hard stuff. They're sailing uncharted waters and giving us all a lot of good research, and all for free. This is honestly awesome. Not because it's going to be a UI revolution but because we get to see a well funded company, that cares about user rights, genuinely trying to innovate and make our lives better.

Plus the HUD sounds great. Anyone here use Quicksilver or mac spotlight or gnome do? I use them non stop, I can launch/search/command my computer using a simple interface without leaving my keyboard. Now I have this built into each application. And soon developers will start to build applications with this in mind and it'll get even slicker.

Theres no reason to poo on Canonical. They are trying super hard in the face of an ungrateful tech community. It's not about developing the system you personally would enjoy. It's about innovation and the future.

Think different mother fuckers.

I think the consensus is that everyone wants Ubuntu to be the "mainstream" Linux, which is most like the other mainstream desktop OSes and can be put up on a pedistal for its stability. All the recent changes like Unity and now this shake up a paradigm that has been in place for 2 decades.

I know for a fact that things like Unity keep me from installing Ubuntu on every family members PC as a general purpose OS. They are too different from Windows (nobody on my side really got on the OSX bandwagon) and then because of these constant huge UI changes things break that they can't fix and it would frustrate them to no end.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but I want to see experimental projects like this in some kind of Ubuntu test bad like Firefox has Aurora / Nightly to test new features. Things that work and are widely popular could be pushed into mainline releases, and things that aren't can be scrapped, maybe revisited later.

But throwing these paradigm shifts into release products makes everyone lean away from Ubuntu as a general purpose OS, which is what it was becoming best at. I think everyone just mourns the loss of potential.

I think they rightly don't care (or at least care less) about trying to convert older users who need a clone of the popular stuff.

There are way more users in trying to innovate and attract younger or less experienced computer users. If they get it right of course.

the only consensus i'm seeing is that everybody wants to hate ubuntu. a mainstream product is the perfect place to test new UI concepts, because mainstream users don't care about these things and they don't have any expectations. despite what you might think, being very similar but not quite windows is not a good thing for a mainstream user.

everybody i've tested unity on has adapted to it really quickly. the very basics need teaching (things like showing them how to open the launcher), but beyond that users are pretty good at discovering things for themselves. the problem with making things very like windows is that people expect it to be exactly like windows, and panic when something isn't where they expect it to be. unity removes expectations and the user starts off with a blank slate, and they can learn fairly quickly. also, mainstream users don't panic over change they way you imply they do. they just don't notice change. there's a presentation from google that mentions when testing google instant, many users didn't even notice anything different.

the people who are hating on unity and ubuntu are not speaking for the mainstream, they are speaking for the power users who have a library of learned behaviours that they don't want to unlearn. a mainstream user doesn't have a whole lot of learned behaviours to overcome, and they will benefit more from a UI improvement than any other because so many of them are essentially re-learning the system every single time they try to accomplish something. lots of people say they want ubuntu to be built for the mainstream, but what they actually mean is that they want is a distro built specifically for themselves.

> mainstream users don't care about these things and they don't have any expectations.

You talk like a "mainstream" user has never used a computer before.

> the very basics need teaching (things like showing them how to open the launcher),

This is the reason why, in Windows, the start button is called the start button. After all these years, the start button doesn't have a label anymore because everyone, everywhere, now knows you that click the button in the bottom left corner to do anything.

for all intents and purposes, it's pretty safe to assume that a mainstream user has never used a computer before. after a couple years of onsite tech support, the biggest thing i took away was that when the average user sits down at a computer, they don't remember any usage patterns they may have learned during their last session. the way to make your UI usable is to assume that every user is using your software for the first time, every time.

there was a good rant on the verge a while back about the condescending UI, but from everything i've seen a little condescension is an essential part of a good UI.

I was using Mint until last year until I switched back to Ubuntu again last december, for 11,10. I was not really looking forward to that since I had heard so many things about Unity being a horrible choice and so on. I was pleasantly surprised that it was far from being the broken interface many people were screaming about. It may not be perfect (I still prefer KDE for several reasons) but it is, nevertheless, functional and it does the job.

Mainsteam users who can't adapt to those kind of changes are not going to use Ubuntu anyway. Windows is already very good at keeping its interface consistent from one generation to another.

I see no reason to hate Ubuntu for their choices - I don't think they are after market leadership, they want to make a place for themselves, and differenciation is key to achieve that. And at heart, Unbuntu still retains a number of qualities like stability and relatively good compatibility across a large range of hardware.

I don't think people here are giving Canonical a hard time because they're trying to innovate. I think it's because while Canonical is innovating, they're shoving alpha-quality innovations down the throats of their users. They're making their users their alpha and beta testers, in effect.

This is a perfect example. If Canonical's past innovations are any hint, HUD will be released broken and unfinished--and in an LTS release no less. If they completely replace the menubar in this LTS, users will get mad (and rightly so), and Canonical will throw up their hands and say, "But guys it's not done yet! Give it a chance in the next release!" Which is what they always say.

That's no fun for people who just want to get work done.

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