Ideas Ubuntu should steal from Windows 7
techradar.com
techradar.com
Also, I outright disagree with some of their observations about ease of use. They say that Windows is actually pretty good at hand-holding when you "troubleshoot" something. Me? I've never once had any success using the "troubleshoot" tools to fix something. I've never once had a problem I couldn't solve by a quick search of Ubuntu's forums/documentation and editing the config files myself.
And I almost laughed when they said Ubuntu should use ideas from Windows UAC... All in all, I really think this article fails to realize the difference between Ubuntu and Windows. I don't think Ubuntu is trying to BE Windows. If anything, they're trying to reaplce it (and I don't even think that's their goal). There's no point in competing with Microsoft if you have the same vision as them. Ubuntu has it's own goal, so does Mac.
I've never once had a problem I couldn't solve by a quick search of Ubuntu's forums/documentation and editing the config files myself.
That's a lot harder than what the average computer user wants. When I used Ubuntu, I was terrified of the config files, and I hated forum searching to solve problems. It seemed like such an inelegant solution.
My legacy Windows XP install makes me want to bang my head on the wall.
the ui should either work, or tell the user why it doesnt work, troubleshoot is a band aid.
The documentation covers the basics, but it rarely helps if there is a problem.
I had a problem with graphics card issues last year and spent a couple weeks of research before finally finding a way to fix the problem myself. The forums and documentation didn't help.
And I found numerous other people asking the same question but not getting any answer. After I found the solution I posted it on their forum threads.
The "troubleshooting" section in Windows help is every bit as useful as horns on a goldfish.
But diving and getting lost in windows registry is not elegant either..
Regarding the article: many of these points seem really vague or really nit-picky, like the bit about drive encryption.
I also agree with you about Ubuntu not trying to be Windows. I think they want to instill the paradigm if you're going to change a setting, be prepared to do it as a superuser or root ahead of time. Linux security isn't going to change to be more like Windows security.
Also, automatic backup is a bit annoying for many home users, who do not have the required place to store their data.
The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows. Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market). Scrolling a window up and down can be enough to lag the system into unusability.
Microsoft invests hundreds of engineers on making the graphics system fast and responsive on any kind of graphics hardware. Linux needs to catch up in this field before they can play with the big boy. Someone needs to do something with X11.
In my opinion, that one thing is Unix.
The Unix model is full of philosophical details which are appealing to programmers, but which have been thoroughly discredited in the end user space: the minimization and generalization of APIs, the minimization and generalization of the notion of what a "file" is, the process or task based model of interaction, etc.
An end user OS needs to be document-centric instead of task-centric. It needs to have a spatial file manager, and support for that needs to be built into the filesystem. It needs a UI spec that is set in stone and backed up with usability research. The I/O patterns for a file on disk, the display, mouse, and sound card are all different; to get the most out of each the OS needs to provide for each specifically.
These things are precisely what made the original Macintosh such a revolution: the designers at Apple were willing to completely rethink what an OS is and should do. These days not even Apple is so bold, as its OS is basically a reskinned Unix. (Of course, consumer electronics and not computers are their new primary market and where they focus the most innovation.)
Is Google going to use X for the Chrome OS or will they roll their own?
EDIT: spelling.
Nothing that takes a lot of CPU is going to be faster than something that takes less CPU for the same amount of work, so the "yet" doesn't make much sense.
Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market).
I have a 10 year old PCI Matrox MGA 2064W Millennium that runs X just fine, all consumer level modern chipsets are more powerful than this ancient piece that I'm still getting use out of. How does the progress bar in full-screen gnome bog down the system? The progress bar only animates during video playback or during dragging, and during that time, the machine is busy seeking, decoding and drawing video, so that's the most likely candidate for system bogginess, not the progress bar in full-screen mode.
A single media player for audio and video is not desirable. They're separate and almost unrelated functions; the only time they might belong together is syncing to another device. That's not to say Rhythmbox couldn't use some polish.
How, exactly is Gnome's panel crude? I find panel applets far more natural than the system tray for little utilities that aren't part of a larger app, and I really don't care for Apple's dock. Is there some justification for this claim?
If I went back some 40 years and presented Gnome to IBM mainframe users, they would complain the lettering is not green on black.
But I would love to have the 3278 font available on my boxes.
And no, it's not exactly the one on x3270. They got the 6's and 9's wrong
[0] I say Windows here because I've only seen in with Windows users. Users of any other platform are used to the idea of different operating systems.