- David L Norris
- Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Semi-topical babble about Radio, Computers, Linux, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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2005-04-11
Ubuntu Spatial
Ubuntu Spatial file manager mode sucks. If it isn't good enough to convince upstream GNOME to include it then it shouldn't be in Ubuntu.
The only reason I'm using Ubuntu at all is because of GNOME and Debian. I want GNOME to be GNOME and I want to use Debian software. If Mark Shuttleworth wants GNOME to be different I think everyone would appreciate him working with the GNOME developers to change it. This sort of stunt makes me reluctant to continue spending my free time and money advertising Ubuntu for his company.
Mark Shuttleworth should consider putting Matthew Thomas in charge of Ubuntu usability and start with fixing the problems in Ubuntu and GNOME he has described. I agree with nearly every point he makes. I especially agree that the menus belong on the menubar like with MacOS even if it means non-GNOME programs look different. And all of these changes need to be made right this very minute and not in October a few days before the next release. And major changes need to be immediately taken upstream and the details hashed out. If upstream GNOME doesn't want them as default that's wonderfully fine. But upstream GNOME should at least accept the changes.
It's a pretty solid design principal that you don't inflict a major change at your whim two days before a major release. Especially not undocumented changes which have unknown, untested implications for every single person using Ubuntu. This little change has introduced dozens of bugs and inconsistencies. As Matthew Thomas pointed out it doesn't even work much of the time. Worse, there's no obvious way for someone to revert to the documented behavior.
This is just like them changing the main menus in the last release. That ended up being a good change albeit poorly thought out at the time. Only when the new menus went upstream were they refined and documented to everyone's satisfaction. It seems like Mark sees injecting changes as some way to "brand" GNOME for Ubuntu or something. Well, it sucks. Really it does. I went to considerable effort to switch to Ubuntu because I wanted a non-hackish system. Now I have to patch every single system I install just to get it to work according to the GNOME documentation.
The only reason I'm using Ubuntu at all is because of GNOME and Debian. I want GNOME to be GNOME and I want to use Debian software. If Mark Shuttleworth wants GNOME to be different I think everyone would appreciate him working with the GNOME developers to change it. This sort of stunt makes me reluctant to continue spending my free time and money advertising Ubuntu for his company.
Mark Shuttleworth should consider putting Matthew Thomas in charge of Ubuntu usability and start with fixing the problems in Ubuntu and GNOME he has described. I agree with nearly every point he makes. I especially agree that the menus belong on the menubar like with MacOS even if it means non-GNOME programs look different. And all of these changes need to be made right this very minute and not in October a few days before the next release. And major changes need to be immediately taken upstream and the details hashed out. If upstream GNOME doesn't want them as default that's wonderfully fine. But upstream GNOME should at least accept the changes.
It's a pretty solid design principal that you don't inflict a major change at your whim two days before a major release. Especially not undocumented changes which have unknown, untested implications for every single person using Ubuntu. This little change has introduced dozens of bugs and inconsistencies. As Matthew Thomas pointed out it doesn't even work much of the time. Worse, there's no obvious way for someone to revert to the documented behavior.
This is just like them changing the main menus in the last release. That ended up being a good change albeit poorly thought out at the time. Only when the new menus went upstream were they refined and documented to everyone's satisfaction. It seems like Mark sees injecting changes as some way to "brand" GNOME for Ubuntu or something. Well, it sucks. Really it does. I went to considerable effort to switch to Ubuntu because I wanted a non-hackish system. Now I have to patch every single system I install just to get it to work according to the GNOME documentation.
Labels: linux