Ask Slashdot: Unity/Gnome 3/Win8/iOS — Do We Really Hate All New GUIs? 1040
Brad1138 writes "You see complaints about the 'next gen' GUI's all over the place, but do we really all hate them? Personally, I don't like them — I tried very hard to like Unity in Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 before giving up and switching to Mint (I am very happy there currently). But is it the vocal minority doing all the complaining, or is it the majority? Are we just too set in our ways?"
It's change for the sake of change (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem that I have with all the new GUIs that are coming out it seems like it's all just change for the sake of change.
Speaking for myself here (Score:3, Insightful)
But yeah, I REALLY dislike the dumbing down of GUIs, hiding everything behind big buttons to make it "touch-screen friendly" and just not considering the power user. I was fine with Netbook Editions of linux distros(even though I never used any for more than testing) but this is ridiculous. We have more screen space and screen resolution than ever before, and now it's all nice boxes with rounded corners? Sheesh.
"UI designers" just can't design UIs. (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's one thing we should learn from these ordeals, it's that people claiming to be "UI designers" should be shunned. Every commercial and open source project needs to limit the involvement of these people. They can make icons, but that's where it should end.
GNOME, Firefox, and Windows all had far more usable UIs when actual software developers were in charge of making the decisions. This isn't surprising, though. Software developers are mainly concerned with creating software that works, and that works well. "UI designers", on the other hand, are more interested in creating software that looks "pretty", even if it's damn impossible to use productively. Usability does not come from gradients and curved corners.
I actually value speed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to defend any of the new-ish UIs, but the conventional UI model has always sucked. Every moment I spend moving a window around or resizing it is frankly wasted time. Same with launching programs or organizing my menus.
If we can abandon the model where the user has to fiddle with a bunch of unnecessary crap just to use their computer, that would be a step forward.
Thing is, I'm not sure any of the new UIs are quite there; they made radical changes but only minor usability improvements.
Re:You're asking who? (Score:5, Insightful)
What answer do you expect on Slashdot?
The submitter is probably looking for answers from people who use Linux. There are a few of those on Slashdot so it's probably a good place to ask.
Like the submitter, I have tried hard to like Unity but really can't do it. I can see how it might be a good idea for netbooks with small screens where you run all apps maximised but that's not how I work. I have a big multiscreen set up at work and a modest sized laptop screen at home. In both cases I like to work with multiple overlapping windows - which is not a mode where Unity shines.
The shared menu bar at the top doesn't work for me - I would prefer it to be in the app window, close to where my mouse is already. I also dislike the fact that the menu options aren't visible until you move your mouse over the bar.
I also prefer focus-follows-mouse - this just doesn't work with the shared menu bar as your focus changes while moving the pointer from app window to menu bar.
The complete lack of support for applets is a real pain point for me too. I like having SSHMenu available, I like having the CPU and network monitors and I like having shortcut icons on the panel where I choose to put them.
Things which I found easy to do with a single mouse click in GNOME2 now require multiple key presses or worse, mouse clicks and keypresses. I've been sticking with GNOME2 in the mean time and it frustrates me that that option is disappearing and available alternatives seem worse than what I have now.
Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score:4, Insightful)
I started using windowing systems at DEC using DECwindows. my first wm was twm after trying and hating the motif wm. this was in the late 80's iirc. after leaving DEC, moved over to sun systems and grabbed twm and pretty much stayed there for 15 years or so. lately, I 'upgraded' to fvwm1.4 as my window mgr.
notice anything: there's no 'desktop' and I don't have any need for it. I'm quick to open a term window of some kind, do things in it and if a graphic app pops up, so be it; move its window, place it and use it.
drag to trash? really? people feel they need a desktop for that?
indicators work for me (new mail, battery, etc). no need for gnome or any proc-to-proc comms.
don't need my windows to 'shake' as I drag them across. opaque move has kept me happy for 20 yrs and its all the 'decoration' one really needs.
I guess I don't see the draw of a desktop once you have a very powerful cli shell (term windows) at your disposal.
my system is very fast with ghz-class cpus but with NO 'desktop' pile of daemons and procs that sit around and talk to each other behind my back ;) fvwm really does all you need in a windowing environment.
as long as I can disable their desktop stuff and simply start my own wm, I'm happy. think of all that free ram and cpu cycles I have, too.
unity? oh please! as a famous politician once said, 'go fuck yourself!'.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:3, Insightful)
The perfect UI for 90% of all use cases has existed for decades. I think In The Beginning Was The Command Line [cryptonomicon.com] should be required reading for all of those "Intro to Computer Literacy" classes they tend to require of college freshmen (or did about 6 years ago when I was still taking classes). I can see GUIs for Photoshop or Final Cut or whatever, but the vast majority of my computer usage is spent in bash/zsh and vim. And I'm not even describing my coding/sysadmin work, this is home use. As far as GUIs go, I liked Enlightenment, and I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. Lion is shite, Windows has always been shite, and Unity pisses me off. GNOME 3 is probably the least shite of the new ones, but that's not saying much.
It's time for a change; accept it (Score:2, Insightful)
Now many of these new, individual products will suck but that doesn't mean anyone should disdain the necessary process of inventing the next era. Even if you really hate the new systems, at least pay attention to and be vocal about the pieces of them you liked. Your input won't be useful if you never say something positive; who wants to make a business strategy out of pleasing the un-pleasable?
Need for change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about an article just asking for rants. I'll chip in my rant...
I think the challenge is the UI paradigm preceding this generation is just too mature and way too many UI developers really have a hard time justifying their continued work. The MATE and Trinity projects forked out of an apparent strong desire to keep things as they are and have some confidence it won't magically bit-rot away, but they are far from 'glamorous' and really don't have much of substance to actually *do*, the job is pretty much already complete.
Now a whole generation of UI designers are largely pretending that computers *didn't* catch on every where and that some mythical large mass of people cannot cope with the UIs that all evidence suggests are working just fine. For a time they were sated with the genuine issue of UI design not scaling down to ~4" screens, but they are seized with the silly notion that there must be *one* UI to rule all form factors. MS decides their Metro UI is the answer for phones/tablets/desktops (despite not even making sufficient headway in the handset arena to prove that out even in the most likely case). Nearly every review of use of the Metro-UI in Windows 8 suggests a degree of awkwardness in the laptop and desktop case. Apple decides the iOS experience should dominate the OSX world (Apple is a bit of a special case, they can pretty much do *anything* and their loyal userbase will lap it up, it's more like a fashion brand and they probably see minimal difference in business results between the times they truly deliver an enriching experience and when they make missteps). Gnome 3 pisses away tons of screen real estate on oversized default titlebars to accommodate inprecise touch interaction regardless of context whilst also hiding their 'dock' for fear of wasting real estate.
A large part of this is what I think is a bad assumption that tablets will just logically displace all laptops/desktops. iPad has seen commercial success (for reasons I think are more fanboy than a 'genuine' revolution) and now a ton of companies are wondering why they can't reproduce those results and get people off their laptops and assume something must be 'wrong' since tablets are *obviously* the way of the future.
Anyway, if you want the UI paradigm to continue as it has been, throw your weight behind MATE (or see if MGSE successfully decrapifies Gnome 3) or Trinity. Elect not to upgrade from Windows 7 if you prefer that (though you are at the mercy of MS in that scenario and you cannot force them to keep Windows 7 going). Alternatively prove me wrong by embracing KDE4, Gnome3, Metro, full-screen OSX apps as you get off my lawn.
for better or for worse, (Score:4, Insightful)
The way I look at this issue, is that these UI's are being written, not because there is some outstanding need to implement such new features, but because the vendors that made them wanted to look like they were still innovative and agile.
Sticking with the same tried and true ui, and simply optimizing every bit of code that makes it work, to the point of perfectly polished code perfection is not what gets non computer experts excited about purchases. What does, is "the shiny!".
Thses days, I could clearly see a need for a very efficient and simple ui system for cross device remote purposes. The less the window manager has to do to present information, the better it would be for that purpose. However, that is not the direction that the ui is being pushed.
Realistically, in terms of functionality, you could build a useful ui using blitting tech from 20 years ago, and be just fine.
Instead, we are using more processing and memory cability to run solitaire than entire mega corps had in their computing labs from that period. (That dx10 certified gpu you have rendering aero for you, so that solitaire can present pixel shaded 3d cards to you is able to crank out more flops than a cray supercomputer from the 90s. Think about what that means, when it is a requirement to play solitaire.)
Clearly, the ui designers simply reject the KISS principle of engineering, and do so because "we can, and resources are cheap."
This is the biggest reason that I hate nearly all newer generation ui flavors.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
They Don't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
What becomes an issue is when all the GUIs out there seem to have showstopping bugs. KDE4 is a great example. I haven't used it in about 6 months, because it was nearly too glitchy to use and the constant graphical errors were starting to make my head hurt. I'm sure someone will tell me "KDE 4 works now!", but that's a lie and you know it. KDE 4 "worked" when I was forced back to Windows because I could barely use Firefox without having a seizure or at least slamming my keyboard through my monitor. I didn't even use the first releases of KDE 4: they wouldn't run. I only went to 4 at all when programs began to require QT4.
Yes, my ATI drivers had a hand in this, but that's part of the problem itself: why do all new GUIs demand glossy, sugar-coated rendering at the cost of my processing power? Why do they do so especially when they are aware of the driver issues that their member base constantly faces? Most GUI projects only want to look "cool" and seem new, not actually provide a usable product. That is evident in the horrible (or even non-existent) support for software rendering. For the record, even KDE4's non-accelerated mode rendered incorrectly.
I used to be the biggest proponent of Linux around, but it is really difficult to advocate something when its quality is dropping so quickly, and you yourself are barely able to operate it. Linux-sphere developers don't care about the user anymore, they care about themselves and doing what they want. This is evident in how almost every Linux-oriented project is now run as a dictatorship. Do not question project leaders. They know best. It wasn't always that way, and it needs to go back. The reason we are seeing more forks of major projects than ever before is precisely because of that. "My way or the highway" invariably leads to forks.
Meanwhile, Windows still seems to have no issues. I hate that I am using it, but I actually have things I need to do. I can't rely on a system that is built on so many flawed systems and only gets worse with every release. It's time for Linux developers to pull their heads out of their asses and start working to actually make a usable product again, or others will start jumping ship, too.
Another example of all this is Blender. Blender was a love-it-or-hate-it GUI. Eventually, if you forced yourself to use it, you would love it and no longer want to use anything else. Getting to that point was more brutal than anything, but it was arguably worth it. So what did the developers do in the most recent version? Completely change the UI. Every hotkey changed, the menu layout completely flipped around, and in general all the things the users had gotten used to no longer being as they were. Worst part is, it is still impossible to put it even close to how it was. I'm not convinced this change was in any way for the good: it's still as hard to learn as ever, and of course, now EVERYONE has to learn it again. Why was this done? Who knows. Certainly not me. I frankly don't care, either, as I no longer use Blender, nor will I ever use it again. And, yet again, Maya and 3DS keep on.
Re:Don't ask me now! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask me before you make the changes.
So that you can tell Henry Ford that you want a faster horse?
Analogy fail.
How's this:
Henry Ford moved the steering mechanism to the floor board and all drivers must steer with their feet. The Ford Motor Co. says that it is better because it frees up your hands to hold and read the newspaper while drinking your cocktail. It doesn't matter that I like the old steering wheel and work better with it. For has refused to include them in any new models, even if the driver requests one because Henry Ford has done the research and determined that steering with the feet is better, end of story.
Third party companies are offing modifications to the car to add a steering wheel like device to the car. XFCE Co has created handle bars that fit over where the old steering wheel used to be. FVWM offers a set of vice grips that will clamp on to rod that used to hold the steering wheel. Other companies have varying solutions to the wheel, but it is up to the driver to install and maintain whichever solution they go with.
Or, they can buy a Chevy.
Guess which one I chose.
Re:People also hated... (Score:5, Insightful)
People hate change.
End of story.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:5, Insightful)
You do understand that you and I (IT guy that I was/am) are a *very* small percentage of the user base?
"And I'm not even describing my coding/sysadmin work, this is home use."
You're certainly not describing the home use of anywhere near a meaningful percentage of users either.
In the business world I of course used nothing but shells and flat text editors. On my home system, it makes no sense at all to confine myself that way.
Re:iOS (Score:5, Insightful)
As a longtime Linux and KDE user, I don't mind iOS at all actually. But only when I'm using an iPhone. I wouldn't want a minimalist interface like that on my PC or laptop. But on a handheld phone where I'm never doing more than one task at once, it's fine. The problem with all these stupid new UIs is that they're trying to force us all to use the same kind of interface on all our devices, and it doesn't work. It didn't work when MS was trying to get us to use a shrunken-down Win95 interface on handheld devices with styluses, and now that we've found we like touch- and gesture-based UIs on handheld devices, it doesn't work to have those UIs on desktop machines.
Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score:5, Insightful)
You hit the nail square on the head. I think what's happening is that the suits are running the companies now rather than the nerds, and so we're seeing what happens with suits everywhere - they see something work once, and they try to force it to work everywhere. This is why we see one good product quickly find itself surrounded with 50,000 lesser clones of itself.
"Hey, Survivor was a big hit! Quick, make me a billion more "reality" shows!"
MS and others are looking at the wildly successful smart phone and assuming that it's entirely the OS that makes them successful. They're right, of course, but for the wrong reasons. The OS makes them successful because it makes something so freaking small very usable. Miniaturization adaptations used by iPhone/Android/etc are only slick on miniature things. Shove them onto a 25" widescreen that you don't want to be touching all the time, and the concept which was so loved on the phone is going to be hated on the big(ger) screen.
Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."
Gnome3 and Unity have nothing to do with planned obsolescence, getting people to buy new hardware, etc. Gnome doesn't sell hardware, and they give away their SW for free. Unity is part of a Linux distro that again, doesn't sell hardware (though they're trying to court some HW vendors to use their SW on their HW), and also gives away their SW for free. Unity is being caused by one man's idea that the only way he's going to make money with his SW company is to abandon serious Linux users, and try to convince non-Linux users to use his distro by putting a supposedly easy-to-use UI on it, and then make money when they buy stuff from the Ubuntu Store or whatever. Gnome doesn't really have a profit motive, its developers are volunteers or work for various companies like Red Hat (who doesn't even have a desktop distro, only a server one), and they're just stupid, to relate to the quote above: they've drunk the one-UI-for-all-devices kool-aid, and genuinely think we all need to be using the exact same UI on cellphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, and multi-screen PCs in order to "reduce confusion", so they're trying to force everyone down that path.
Re:iOS (Score:4, Insightful)
iOS
mouse
There's your problem.
Re:You're asking who? (Score:4, Insightful)
I will continue to like it until I try to run something I know I installed but can't remember the name of, because there doesn't seem to be any way to show an organized list of installed programs like in the old GNOME2 interface.
They want to steer you into the locked-down mobile paradigm where less is more. And war is peace. And some other generic but worrysome contradiction. Why bother even thinking about other things? They are not prerequisites to going to Facebook and Amazon. Facebook. Amazon.
Re:iOS (Score:2, Insightful)
Millions of people think Justine Bieber is awesome too. Shiny does not necessarily mean great.
Re:lost a friend over installation of KDE 4 (Score:5, Insightful)
>
it all installed: i ran it, logged them in... and could i understand what the fuck was going on? not a chance. it was incredibly embarrassing. i spent 15 minutes _failing_ to do something as simple as set their background image. first we couldn't find it - i had to log in at the console and use "find . | xargs grep {filename}". then we couldn't find how to even _change_ the background image. on standard desktops, it's right-mouse, click "set background". done.>
So, if I understand your story well, you're trying to give your friend a computing solution that you have never even looked at before yourself? No wonder you're running into trouble.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:5, Insightful)
The perfect UI for 90% of all use cases has existed for decades. I think In The Beginning Was The Command Line should be required reading for all of those "Intro to Computer Literacy" classes they tend to require of college freshmen (or did about 6 years ago when I was still taking classes).
You're trolling us, right?
Computers today (I dunno, maybe you're writing that Slashdot message from 1986) do things like organize photos, edit videos, surf the web, serve as media centers, composing WYSIWYG documents-- all things the CLI is godawful at dealing with. That's maybe 99% of what people use their computers for.
For the other 1%? Sure the CLI's fine. But who gives a fuck? We want an interface for the 99%.
The output-mostly revolution and its discontents (Score:5, Insightful)
Phone screens and tablets are output-mostly devices. Their primary function is content delivery, not content creation. Inherent in the touchscreen concept is that pointing, dragging, and viewing work work well, but input is slow and difficult.
Exporting the output-mostly metaphor to desktop machines is painful for people who do any significant input or content creation. But that's what seems to be happening. This reflects what the average user is now doing with a computer - watching TV. A third of Internet traffic is now Netflix.
Incidentally, while the low end is struggling with point and drag UIs, the high end of 3D animation and engineering systems is finally getting that problem solved. 3D content creation systems have been painful for two decades. Finally, programs like Autodesk Inventor have managed to make 3D drawing and navigation fluid, without requiring vast numbers of hotkeys or multiple 2D views. You do, however, need something with a sharper point than a finger, like a mouse or tablet, to get work done in that space.
Re:You're asking who? (Score:3, Insightful)
The open source, anybody can contribute ideas, rapid release development methodology would be the perfect way to prototype new UI ideas and designs-- if the community weren't a bunch of whiny luddite complainers.
Re:"UI designers" just can't design UIs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Err...I don't think you have actually met any real UI designers, ever, in your life, or even read about what they do. Or else you're thinking of people who calim to be "UI designers" and confusing them with people who actually do HCI [wikipedia.org]. I suspect what you are actually talking about is a graphic designer; but that is very different from someone who designs user interfaces based on well known HCI principles.
It's about far more than making things look pretty (and actual software developers are NOT the experts in that field, either, by the way). It's about studying how to make things usable. I am not an HCI expert, but I work with one, and I know that when she starts a project she sits down with users, interviews them, spends time observing how they work, until she understands the processes they go through better than anyone. Then she works with the developers to implement something that's usable, that makes sense, based on scientific research principles about how people work.
Software developers are not interface designers. That's not their job. It's a different discipline, and when it's done properly it's magic. Software designers might or might not understand the workflows and the business processes. (Usually not, in anything but the simplest possible businesses.) None of this is a criticism of developers; it's recognition that they are experts in their field, and these projects work best when you get other experts in other fields working side by side with your developers.
It's actually kind of frightening you got modded up +5 insightful. You're saying the equivalent of claiming a server administrator is the best at development. He or she might be really good at writing scripts, but real enterprise level software development is not even on the same plane.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has supported users for years... On whatever F-ing interface they've had to use... 3270-Mainframe, Windows, AIX, Solaris (CLI or GUI), it all came down to one simple thing:
How do I do my job?
Frankly, it doesn't matter a damn what the interface is. For most business grunts, end users, whomever, it really doesn't matter what's in front of them because they'll learn how to use it. If it works, and if works *reliably* then the end users end up loving it. I've heard the phrase, "It's ugly as sin, but it works" and "It looks nice, but I can't use it" enough.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh, then why don't car companies design cars for little old ladies from Pasadena, and not for performance geeks. Hell, aside from backwater stretches in UT and MT, where in the US do most cars even need a speedometer that shows more than 80 MPH? Why do most office apps have deep functionality reserved for mail-merge, legal forms, dynamic embedding, cross functionality like functions in docs and database queries in spreadsheets, code-driven customizations, etc, if most of us never touch 90% of that crap? Why have all those extraneous buttons on my microwave? Why have advanced ANYTHING, since only a very small percentage of users care about even HALF of the functions on any such system or device.
I'll tell you why: My mom right-clicks for SOME functions. My sister doesn't care about 9/10ths of the UI, but is passionate about a few advanced features that niche neatly into her daily workflow. And ditto for everyone I know: each of us has a generic common usage footprint and a few unique specialties out of the advanced features that call for more depth or nuance than touch on a small tablet so far provides.
tl;dr: just because every function in an advanced-feature product is ignored by the majority of users by itself does not mean most people do NONE of that stuff.
PS: I never left Ub 10.10 as my primary workstation, and am migrating my working habits to a Mint VM. When I'm sure it does most of what I need, I'm gone -- It has taken Canonical/Ubuntu less than a year to push me from biggest fan to confused detractor and soon-to-be-ex-user. WTF, Shuttleworth?!
Re:You're asking who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope I think you have it completely backwards.
It's Open Source. So unless you're a developer your opinion is going to be derided, disregarded and dismissed.
If non-programmers want input on their products then they need to pay developers to prototype their ideas. A developer's idea of a great UI and innovative interface is:
> $ convert label.gif +matte \
\( +clone -shade 110x90 -normalize -negate +clone -compose Plus -composite \) \
\( -clone 0 -shade 110x50 -normalize -channel BG -fx 0 +channel -matte \) \
-delete 0 +swap -compose Multiply -composite button.gif
"So efficient!"