Ubuntu 12.04 review – precisely what we feared
Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’, Canonical’s biggest ever LTS has arrived, but can the latest round of improvements win over its critics? Linux User’s editor, Russell Barnes, takes a look at the broader view…
Over the last 18 months Ubuntu, the Linux world’s most widely recognised distribution, has undergone the most intense period of development of its eight-year existence. This period of transition hasn’t been easy for Canonical, which has taken on the monumental task of reinventing Ubuntu’s GUI in the face of vocal opposition from a sizeable portion of its user base.
When we recently interviewed Canonical CEO, Jane Silber, she spoke quite candidly about the run up to Unity, not to mention the perception of arrogance to their approach. Encapsulated within just a few sentences she also managed to touch on what some consider being the company’s biggest triumph, and others its most fundamental flaw.
On the plus side, Unity proves that open source software development and UI design don’t have to be disparate or incompatible disciplines. “If you go back three years nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research,” said Silber. “It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there.”
There’s no doubt that design, ergonomics and usability are pillars of modern software design and key areas in which open source has lacked any real focus in the past. As Unity’s many critics might argue, however, focus is exactly what Unity lacks. And this is all but confirmed in Jane Silber’s next sentence:
“I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.”
Silber is, of course, referring to the recently announced Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android projects, probably not to mention an unannounced tablet offering among other plans. This is where the real focus of Unity lies, not the product we’re evaluating today.
For these particular projects Unity makes perfect sense and we’re excited about what Unity can offer in touch-screen, TV and small form factor scenarios – it opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but this long-term promise comes at the cost of their flagship desktop offering.
Having already weighed up the core features of Ubuntu 12.04 from both positive and negative perspectives, we’ll save you from the already heavily publicised minutiae. Speaking in broad strokes Unity does little to improve usability; conversely, it’s actually quite detrimental in some areas. While it is no doubt a marvellous test bed, most desktop users aren’t reaping any kind of reward for this. Ubuntu has lost its focus.
Unity is almost as relevant to Ubuntu 12.04 as ASIMO is to Honda’s latest hatchback. It’s a technical exploration of a future problem – a concept destined for products still some years away from mainstream availability.
When you boil Unity down to its most basic premise, one core complaint that existed in 11.04 still exists today and is summarised quite nicely in a passage from Linux User’s Ubuntu 11.10 review:
“There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.”
Ultimately Ubuntu12.04 is not a pleasant experience for home office or professional users requiring either more mouse clicks or time away from the mouse typing searches.
It puts us in mind of Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5 personal electric vehicle. It was a product arguably 30 years ahead of its time, but Sinclair’s quintessentially British electric three-wheeler, with its canopy permanently open to the elements, simply wasn’t compatible with the quintessentially British weather. Once off the production line no amount of iteration could have saved it – it was never going to work.
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sorry sir, your revierw reeks of lack of professionalism.your black or white goggles view is not suitable for a serious or fair review. you better stick to regular negative comments and ridiculously antiunity /anticanonical writing, at some point, it gets really absurd.USABLE DESKTOP DESIGN IS NOT A WINDOWS 95 CLONE !!!
Your quote from a review of 11.10 probably hits the nail on the head for most linux distros from the “average” pc users perspective. I tried 11.10 and a few other distros and from my experience it’s just too much hassle.
Unable to connect via dongle wifi, unable to get printer/scanner to actually work, even if recognized then trawling through pages of blah blah on the respective forums, plus the intellectual superiority one encounters leaves much to be desired.
I can’t believe that Linux folk are this unable to live with change – the way it has always been done isn’t the best way. Hats Off to Canonical for being creative and trying something different. Personally I love Unity and could never go back to the old ways.
Was this the Ubuntu 12.04 review, or did i just click the wrong link? This “review” has got to be the worst “review” that i think i have ever read! I was looking for the 2nd page, or the “go to the next page” button to see if this so called author had anything of substance. I guess not! What rubbish!
I’ve been a Linux user since the mid 90′s. My first distribution was Slackware. A time when, gnome and KDE didn’t even exist yet, and if you wanted a graphical desktop, you needed to know the type of graphics processor you had on your video card, along with the refresh rates.
Fast-forward to 2006, when I finally decided to try Ubuntu for the very first time. I had been a hard-core S.u.S.E. and openSUSE prior to that, so I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I managed to install it on my laptop, and thought I would kick the tires a bit. For the most part, I liked what I saw, but felt that it just wasn’t for me (mainly because of openSUSE).
Jump ahead again, to the past few years, and I’ve been on the Linux Mint bandwagon. To me, they had it right. I had Mint installed on the very same laptop I mentioned earlier. I then switched to LMDE, especially because I’ve always been a fan of the Debian project. Everything was going fine until gnomeshell came into the picture. So once again, I’m on the hunt for a new distribution to work with as my main distro of choice. I had been holding out for the past several months, because I was waiting to find out more about this new release of Ubuntu.
Finally, April 26, 2012… the day in which I had been waiting for arrives. I immediately locate a mirror to download the ISO of this latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I burn the image to disk, and all day long, I am staring at this disk. My anticipation for loading up this new version of Ubuntu on that same laptop that I still have after all these years was building up ALL DAY LONG. When I finally made it home, I grabbed my laptop, low-level formatted the hard drive so I could start with a clean slate. I threw in the installation disk, turned on the laptop, and saw that wonderful “ubuntu” lettering across the middle of the screen, along with a series of dots just below… flashing as if they were telling me to be patient. I knew I was about to enter the “Installation Zone.”
Then it hit me. That sinking feeling of disappointment. So, I let it sit for several minutes, only to come to the conclusion that maybe my laptop (even though it is a Turion 64) might not be able to handle the 64-bit version. So, I went to one of my other computers, and downloaded the 32-bit version instead. Once again, the same result.
Ubuntu has once again disappointed me with their so-called, worthless attempt at a distribution. As a result, in my furry to get my laptop back up and running, I decided to download CentOS 6,2 (64-bit), and managed to install it onto my old, archaic laptop flawlessly.
I have never really been a fan of Ubuntu, and this just sealed the deal!!!
[quote]“There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.”
Ultimately Ubuntu12.04 is not a pleasant experience for home office or professional users requiring either more mouse clicks or time away from the mouse typing searches.[/quote]
Exactly.
Unity is very pretty, but ultimately it pretty awful.
[quote]Was this the Ubuntu 12.04 review, or did i just click the wrong link? This “review” has got to be the worst “review” that i think i have ever read![/quote]
No finally an honest review.
[quote]I can’t believe that Linux folk are this unable to live with change [/quote]
I have no trouble living with change, I changed to KDE 4.
Good article this is why Linuxmint is popular.
Funny, it works for me…
Canonical has fallen into the trap of arrogance. Unity is not something any serious business would use as a standard desktop environment. Suse or Centos would be the obvious choices for businesses serious about switching to Linux on the desktop.
@ Russell Barnes:
I think that you can’t handle the reality, and the reality is telling us that the personal computing of the future relies on tablets, small form factor PC’s, smartphones … I think that you are bunch of complainers … They are giving you a free desktop, they are not getting any money from you, so what made you think that is a good strategy for them to support your vintage PC when the world is moving on ultra-portable … I know, you are going to say that i do not understand the “open source” model. Maybe i don’t, but i understand “money” … Look at the Linux kernel code contributors, aren’t the major contributors the software giants like Red Hat, Microsoft, Intel … Canonical is hoping of getting the attention of the big players and finally get some money, and stay away of the complainers that are not supporting them in any way … So, you think that is good strategy to develop for desktop, portables, TVs, servers … You are complaining about their lack of focus, where in reality your definition of “focus” is fragmenting their software model even further … If you are not happy, maybe you should buy Windows 8 … Oh, wait … they have removed the start button …
I think that user experience is a largely personal one. From reading this article, it was clear that the ‘reviewers’ mind was made up before they ever looked at the distribution.
Personally, I like where Ubuntu is heading. You are absolutely entitled to your opinion, and the fact that you don’t like it is very clear.
I enjoy keyboard shortcuts, and while I haven’t even installed the latest version of unity, as someone who uses keyboard shortcuts very efficiently and for most everything, I suspsect that I will have to use the mouse even less with the latest iteration of ubuntu.
I think some people are impressed by the simplicity of keyboard shortcuts, while others are impressed by the simplicity of mouse gestures or whatever. Both are very useful in the right hands, so I think to judge one or the other in absolute terms without the context of realizing that all users are different is misleading at best, but still your right.
If your problem is that you find it difficult to find your files in Ubuntu, then you’ve got a problem, becauise ubuntu uses nautilus (as lots of gnome based distros). If you can’t find your favourite browser, text processor and media player it is pretty easy just type alt-f2 and then write the name of the program you want to use (you can also stick your favourite programs to the launcher)… It is not that difficult….
Unity it is not difficult to use, it might require some time to to get used to but no longer than the time it took you to learn how to use Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Windows XP… and much sorter than the required to learn how to install Arch or Gentoo.
I find these lowest common denominator reviews hilarious. Let’s just shit on the entire release because of the desktop version and ignore the fact that the vast majority of 12.04 LTS use will be on the server side of things, as far as that goes this has been one of the best releases in the history of Linux from my experience. Shit like Unity preference should be the prime indicator of just how shallow a review is, and this one wouldn’t even drown a fly.
As for quality, let me say that am totally disappointed in the current release as I was unable to install either 32 or 64 bit versions on a laptop that previously ran all earlier version since 8.04. Instead of the blue screen of death, I got the blank screen of nothing after installation finally decided to end almost an hour into each install. Reinstalled 10.04 and 11.10 without any problems as a test. The corporate environment in the USA and around the world is dominated by Windows, like it or not. If any serious linux vendor wishes to make inroads into this already established culture, then their product must take into account the amount of resistance to change to something as radically different as Unity. This is simply marketing 101. Canonical is so wrapped up in their quest to reshape thinking about the desktop, that they can’t see the forest for the trees. Canonical is trying to force their ideas on everyone much the same as Microsoft has done without much regard for their loyal user base (remember Vista). Shuttlesworth has become to full of himself. Instead of making improvements to 10.04 aimed at business he departs into waters unknown.
Well it’s clear this “reviewer” is getting paid or gifted favors by Microsoft or Apple. Or he must not have seriously tried Ubuntu 12.04. People reading this should go somewhere else to read serious articles or reviews, this sure is not the right place to be informed.
Unity is great, It great at to teach me how to spell English. As a non-English native user, I found it is extramly hard to “search” based on English. So I have to learn hard on my English spelling… Now I can spell “Terminal”, at least for the first few letters…
I liked this Linux User review of Ubuntu Precise Pangolin very much! It came through to me as very balanced in accurately covering both the pluses and minuses of this very widely recognized Linux distribution. Although to be fair, I’ve also heard mention that Ubuntu doesn’t always acknowledge its Linux roots that well.
I find it disappointing that many of the first commentators put down this great Linux User review all by itself.
I myself will continue to look forward to more great Linux User reviews on related distributions, such as Linux Mint and Bodhi Linux.
What I find funny is the fact that everyone is so obsessed with unity. I actually have tried unity and I dislike it. However, I really like Gnome 3.
Before Ubuntu I had OpenSuse… and what happened? One day the entire system failed and gave me a kernel panic and I was annoyed. Alas, I tried Fedora. It was Fedora 15 and just had the new Gnome 3 shell up and I was interested. It worked great and I loved it, though Fedora itself seemed to always have issues and errors and problems popping up. This continued through Fedora 16 and then I decided to, for the first time, try out Ubuntu.
I installed 11.04 and found Unity to be ridiculously buggy, though the problem was easily fixed once I downloaded the familiar Gnome 3 shell. What was great, however, was that I had absolutely no problems with it. Unlike glitchy Fedora, Gnome 3 on Ubuntu worked flawlessly and that is why I am sticking with Ubuntu.
If you don’t like Unity, fine.
Additionally if you like the mac interface more you can just use Classic Gnome with Cairo Dock… easy and efficient.
In the end people should stop complaining about Ubuntu :)
Reviews are by definition a personal opinion. Not everyone will agree with everything the author feels, but may will empathise. The Distribution is a bit more than the desktop environment of course, and of course anyone can install whatever they like. What I like about Unity is the opportunity it gives users and developers to have another perspective, a trip away from the beaten path. This kind of innovation whether it succeeds or fails will only broaden minds and Linux horizons.
As far as a laptop not working with Ubuntu. I would say this. Hardware manufacturers go out of the way to make sure their hardware work with Windows. they have no interest in Linux…so Windows works with almost all hardware. Linux despite having little or no hardware vendor support also works on almost all hardware. This is because when sometimes Linux does not work, a user reports it, searches for answers, or fixes it. Every machine that I have had that started off not working with Ubuntu, has after a little while suddenly started working.
Like tracyanne above, I also think this is a good, honest review of Ubuntu 12.04 along with its default desktop offering Unity. No doubt many more Ubuntu fanbois — and fangals ;) — will see fit to attack the messenger of any bad news (this Ubuntu 12.04 review) rather than the messages within.
For Linux newbies such as what maybe ‘felicia’ might be, I suggest reading more reviews on popular newbie distros OTHER than solely those of Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Bodhi, and then maybe getting some good advice directly from a VARIETY of sources! Longer-term Linux users, OTOH, would seem to benefit more by waiting awhile so that Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-based distros can stabilize a bit more before jumping right into these and getting burned by such things as the Unity-usability problems mentioned in this review.
Just my own 2cents on this.
well, it’s got a nice wallpaper.
Aw, come on! I think a lot of us are suffering from a mentality that we failed to ditch along with Windows or Mac environments. Unity isn’t what you like? So what! How long does it take for you to change to GNOME, KDE4, XFCE, E17, IceWM…? We aren’t locked in, so what does it really matter? If you’re like me, you’ll have a half dozen DM’s installed and change between them whenever the mood hits. Last month, I tried Unity. It looks gorgeous, but it just doesn’t fit me. To be honest, I loathe it in its current iteration. But that’s today, and I have other DM’s that I am perfectly happy with. If you like Unity, use it. Else, try one of the other excellent desktop managers and be thankful to be running something where you have freedom of choice!
@pmccartney – I switched to CentOS either.
I’ve been using Ubuntu since version 5. But since introduction of Unity in version 11 I switched to CentOS.
CentOS works well, installs well even on my Turion 64 X2 laptop and it provides good old Gnome 2.28.
I let others guys play with new functionalities or so-called “features”, I need PC for work, for earning money, not wasting time and Gnome 2 is brilliantly suits this purpose in CentOS.
UNITY is great and works wonderfully for me. HUD is more than awesome. I’ve been using ubuntu 12.04 right from beta1. I never had a problem with it. Unity is very usable and productive.
A lot of people don’ t get the criticism that people like me (fairly technical) have regarding Unity so I’ll try to be as outspoken as I can be.
I left Ubuntu after I discovered Unity does not have advantages if I simply want to get stuff working. Although I see the beauty of Unity I do not think aesthetics is enough of a reason to choose a desktop. Unity is beautiful but a lot of things do not work, is not intuitive and breaks your normal flow of works and it seems to need multiple clicks or mouse movements to accomplish the same. Then there is this huge memory overkill as the who desktops feels sluggish (to a extent my criticism is the same for GNOME3 and with KDE4 I have different problems)
For me Unity is a nice idea EXECUTED badly by Canonical and therefor I abandoned ship and went to OpenSUSE with LXDE. I never felt better.
But if Canonical is able to pursue OEMS to sell machines with Ubuntu installed, it may actually happen that in a few years from now Ubuntu will be the leading desktop os for the masses.
@pmccartney: try arch.
Ubuntu lost me at Unity. I don’t own a tablet…just desktops and laptops. I understand that it does still have the under-hood power…but I don’t want to have to do any tweaking to get where I want to be on the desktop.
I just install and go. I don’t want to have to add free apps like “Flash and Java”. I just want it ready. This is 2012…NOT 1995! Fall into the same routine as M$ and will most likely get the same results M$ has received. Which are lots of unsecured areas within the OS. That’s what BLOAT-ware offers imho.
Of course, pre-installed apps like Flash/Java themselves could be tainted or easily exploited; I will just take my chances of having to patch these add-ons myself. Much easier and less bandwidth used. I live in an area where bandwidth is NOT priceless…Dutch Harbor, AK.
You should review Kubuntu 12.04 LTS.
User0815. Read tracyanne’ Profile…..IDIOT.
Bormasina Quote Stay away from the complainers who’s not supporting them, You need to seriously do your home work, Canonical has never contributed or will ever contribute any code to the Linux kernel. That’s from the horses mouth this week, He is using Linux for his own benefit. Like Apple used FreeBSD open source to develop OS/x
You gt one thing right Microsoft is contributing code to the Linux kernel. Not because they want to Because they have no other choice. For them it’s a case of we can’t beat it, We’ll have to joint it like it or not.
Has for change have you downloaded and tried out windows 8? There is no start button either If Buntu is all you have ever used, Please keep your mouth shut, you haven’t got a clue what Linux is.
Eric Proctor If keyboard short cuts is your main reason for liking buntu. Your easily pleased. Buntu is about your limit.
Marti You haven’t worked out what the author point of view is all about,
elitist If Buntu 12.04 is the best Linux release in the history of Linux Get your head out of the sand stop being an ostrich. You to have’t a clue what Linux is all about.
Dynaguy congratulation you can spell Terminal, because you used Buntu to learn it, My goodness wonders never cease,
felicia…. Come on Bodhi is worse then buntu and that’s saying something…….
istok well, it’s got a nice wallpaper. The mind boggles what a reason for using buntu, then again it’s a good a reason as any I suppose
tracyanne keep up the good work, I love your articles
While I’m not enthusiastic about Unity, neither do I find it as much of a failure as this review, and many others, claim. It’s basically a dock and an attempt to use a more or less train-able search bar in lieu of a multi-level mienu system. Finding things on systems with thousands of items is a legitimate problem. I don’t think HUD solves it. How good is it at finding things when the user doesn’t know thename? Can I enter: “Find the photos I loaded last Tuesday”? or, “Show me all the mail I’ve sent to Aunt Betty since January 1.” Those are the kind of things I want my computer interface to do.
No other desktop design — open or close source — that I am aware of is any better at dealing with those issues than Unity. Certainly, the design of Gnome 2 did not. Menus such as it used become dysfunctional when the user needs to go several layers deep. All the current nostalgia for its passing can be attributed to people naturally thinking what they are used to is better. Actually, it’s just habit.
Asserting that Ubuntu/Gnome designers are arrogant because they don’t allow themselves to be led around by people ranting on the Internet is inexplicable. Interface design is an essential part of computer use. It can’t be done by consensus or committee or, especially, engineers and wannabe engineers. It needs to be done by talented creative people with specialized expertise. For most of the history, people thought otherwise. The results can be seen in the spectacularly ugly and cumbersome window managers that we had to use until better things began to come along.
If you read the interview, you would understand that the phrase “I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.” was not about other Canonical sponsored projects.
But back to your “review”. You are such a malcontent. The fact that you don’t like/can’t use Unity doesn’t mean it’s bad. Of course it has some drawbacks, but it is also an improvement, and not only in tablet/smartphone/tv field. I consider myself power user but I do like Unity. The great thing about Unity is that it is not about clicking but about tiping. So instead of beeing angry at the design try using Unity the way, the creators intended it to be used.
I like Unity. I have no problem finding applications or files. It also works great with my dual monitor setup at work.
I can see where some people don’t/won’t like it, but there are so many other choices available that
the whining seems pointless.
I always found the old-school menu system to be tedious and difficult. I love HUD and the dash. It
really makes my workflow more enjoyable.
I have to speak up. I’ve been using Ubuntu since 8.04, then 10.04. It was a great, easy to use, easy to customize, easy to maintain, debian based distro. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Like many users, I’ve been quietly milling in the background, lurking, learning, and using it. The interface worked so well, that I never really thought that much about gnome2 after I customized it to my liking.
Now the Gnome team poisoned the well for everyone who used, nay, depended on their software. And for what benefits? Chasing the touch tablet market? How many average users, who just got a spankin’ new tablet, will root it, and install another linux distro on it? Very few. How many of those are going to dig typing in searches just to launch less-frequently used programs? Even fewer. It’s all a confused mess. They’ve thrown away a desktop metaphor that just works, tested and proven by millions of hours of usage. Now concerned users are delurking, and offering up well founded opinions that they are going down the wrong path. The response… get with the changes or get left behind, without even assessing the criticism in any objective manner. The idea of hurtling the cursor across the screen, type, hurtle some more… there’s no economy. And the revolutionary idea is a cheap dock, big icons, and some shell-game work spaces?!!!
Unity is Canonical’s response to Gnome3, and it ain’t a good one. More like a sit-com spinoff. Like Gnome3, is it touch screen or desktop based? It’s both and neither. Both that it attempts to bridge the divide, but neither in that it accomplished neither task well. They’re inferior desktops, and an inferior touch interfaces. When they concede that both are different devices in usage, then hopefully there will be progress. Even Microsoft is covering their asses in that if the metro interface doesn’t grab, there’s the traditional desktop. Under Gnome, they plan to abandon the ‘classic’ desktop. Perhaps that will change with user outcry.
Gnome 3 is an “unholy mess,” because of many defects by design. One such example is they want to bring to us, is flat file systems. You know where every file appears as to be in one single folder, like on a tablet? FFS. WHY? Then make us dependent on searching for our files, instead of a logical hierarchal file system. IMO, it’s adopting one of the limitations of a tablet device and imposing it on users, without rational thought as to why it’s a good idea or bad idea. File search should augment, not usurp, file navigation. If there is one feature that users consistently ask for on many tablets, is to have folder navigation in file dialogs. A lot of tablet programs auto-name files, without user interaction, so how can one find a file if one doesn’t know the name? Is gnome3 going to go this far? And what if you have a HUGE filesystem, with millions of files. Then what? Flat file access only works with a few files. IMO, a bad, bad, idea.
Then there is the zeitgeist service, quietly running in the background, cataloguing all your activities. All the websites you visit, all the chats, all the emails, all the files accessed. Then stows it all into an SQL file, just to launch programs!!!! In unity, I disabled zeitgeist service. It broke unity. I re-enabled it and all the programs popped back up. Now they included privacy controls, to disable operations that are logged. It’s like taking a trip from America to Europe, via Asia.
Again, it gets back to this search for everything you want to do. The practical problem is on tablets, that typing, no matter how good the onscreen keyboard is, is radically slower than just poking and swiping motions. On desktops, it is assuming that the gui is inefficient. GUI’s have worked in the past… seriously.
There were MANY other things that needed fixing. Wifi dongle support is a excellent example of something that needed to be brought into the 21st century. Instead, we get a half-baked interface.
I’m exercising my liberty by not using this cruft. Hello XFCE.
Geezus!!! Please just STFU already. Unity is not hard to learn. It’s miles much more usable and requires fewer mouse clicks than either Gnome Shell or even KDE. So you can’t move the freaking side bar by default. Who even cares??? Ubuntu is LINUX folks. So you don’t like Unity, change the desktop UI and move on with your “Unity is too easy for my geek mind, I need something harder because easy is too hard for me” attitudes. Damn freetards are the most vocal and annoying.
Never said Unity was hard to learn.
@ Carling: Please learn how to read first. Do not twist my words. Stop offending people. Ubuntu is not my only Linux experience. Canonical is charging 0$ for Ubuntu and yet you are complaining.
As for your point on Windows 8: exactly, there is no start button (that was my point), so, as i i said, learn how to read first, then you can come here to discuss … without offending anybody …
OK, so you hate Unity? I am not a fan myself.
But a Distro != Desktop Environment. I’ve been running Ubuntu 12.04 since 2nd beta on my HTPC with very few issues. There are tons of DE choices out there and most if not all will run on Ubuntu’s very reliable platform. I switched to Gnome Classic, you got other choices. To me Ubuntu’s stability and release schedule make it a worthwhile choice.
Geez, what a poorly written review. Here’s a suggestion: rather than “speaking in broad strokes”, write in plain English instead. Or was this an assignment for your creative writing class?
And, you never did explain what ‘fear” you had, as mentioned in the title.
This review is spot on. Unity is ugly, unusable, and nobody outside of Canonical wants it. As a result, Ubuntu is becoming more and more irrelevant every day.
I’m sorry but this is not a review, it’s just an opinion (repeated ad nauseam) on Unity, which has been part of Ubuntu for a full year now.
If you really don’t think there are any differences between 11.04 and 12.04, then just don’t do a review of the latter and refer your readers to the former.
Unity is not a tablet oriented interface. Stop repeating this idiotic meme. Unity has been built with keyboards in mind, not fingers on a touch screen. The fact that it uses big icons on the launcher can only mean it’s a tablet interface for really ill informed users and reviewers. There are global menus (albeit hidden for dumb aesthetics reasons), there’s the HUD, there’s a search box as the primary interface of the dash, there are indicators with complex mouse-interaction usage. What does all this have to do with tablets? Just grab a tablet with Ubuntu’s ARM version compatible hardware and check for yourself. Try installing 12.04 on that tablet and using it for a week and prove us how Unity was designed for tablets. Good luck.
I was looking for reviews, but this one shows why I shouldn’t so early: serious reviewers are actually trying the new release and it will take them a few days to make a real review, not just spouting memes and cliches on Unity alone.
Ubuntu 12.04 is great!
Long time Linux user.
Uni teacher- everything gets done on Linux.
It’s second nature using Linux on an overhead projector.
Currently 5 machines all 12.04- running smooth.
It is really nice to see innovation finally coming from open source and free software developers. If you want to stay where you are, you are naturally free to do that, as well.
But I don’t plan to do so.
An awful lot of the stuff that reviewers say is hard to find or access in Unity is fiddly stuff that, with a good OS, they shouldn’t be wasting time on.
F*CK this guy, your review like a garbage.
Just downloaded Xubuntu (with a “X”). It’s great. My most powerful machines will get Mint 13 when it comes out. My low powered old machines get Peppermint, Crunchbang and a few others.
@Aleve Sicofante – Reviews are just the elongated opinions of the person reviewing the product. Always was, always will be.
There’s so much angst over the latest Ubuntu…why? Just pick a different distro and run with it.
Very poorly written. It looks you are very amateurish. Are you anti canonical?. This page should be closed.
I´m new, but I love my Ubuntu 10.04. Will keep it past it´s bed time. And then finally forced to move to Mint or another. Sigh…
I agree with the review. They have spent far too much effort just wasting time and money on the time wasting Unity interface. 12.04 underneath Unity is actually very good. By installing Cinnamon from the Linux Mint team 12.04 can be transformed into a fast, easy to use OS, which is what is what Ubuntu should have done in the first place.
[quote]Unity is not hard to learn. It’s miles much more usable and requires fewer mouse clicks than either Gnome Shell or even KDE.[quote]
With, KDE, ALT+F2 (Krunner) and you don’t need stupid menus anymore. 0 Clicks. Kde for the win! :D
I have been using Ubuntu 12.04 since Beta 2 and have it running on one laptop and 2 desktops. Unity is a great launcher (as has been said previously) amongst other things and Ubuntu 12.04 has been rock solid. Mostly for me Canonical dares to be different. Whatever the benefits of distros like Linux Mint, they are just Ubuntu derivatives and mostly “boring”. Only my opinion – give me the vision and direction of Ubuntu anytime.
Wow you sir are a serious troll! All you wrote about here is your own hatred for Unity… nothing but a personal opinion, yet you think we all thought the exact same about 12.04.
12.04 is a great release, best Ubuntu release ever! Just because its not to your taste doesn’t mean you should mindlessly bash it.
By the way you can install and use a different desktop environment in Ubuntu. Stop reviewing the desktop environment and start reviewing the OS! -_-
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I just installed it, and after using it for a while, I found that this release was superior. After more than a year migrating to LinuxMint, I am considering going back to Ubuntu because of this 12.04.
Unity is like eye candy…..specifically like someone jamming a drooly gooey sucker right in your eye!
Ive been using Unix for 20 yrs, so explain to me why Ubuntu chooses to release its largest LTS ever, after tons of complaints from people hating Unity…and they dont simply put in a choice during the install….”what desktop would you prefer….Unity or Gnome Classic”? They certainly had room for it.
After suffering through Ubuntu 11 and tweaking it to get some sort of functionality out of it…my hopes that Canonical would listen to its user base are dashed and Im backing up my personal files so I can install Linux Mint. Its Debian, its functional and miracle of miracles…they seem to listen to their user base!
For me, the important thing is “Does it work?” Does it have drivers for my h/w? Are they robust? Does it work the way I want to use it? Is ZFS rock solid on it? Is Wine rock solid? Is VirtualBox rock solid? Does it have the multimedia plugins I need? Personally, I do not like Unity, and I will probably install Kubuntu 12.04 LTS on a brand new disk. I presently have Ubuntu 11.10 installed amd bastardized with Kubuntu, so I want a clean system install. I’ll see how it all works. For me! BTW, I have used Linux since Slackware 0.95.
I gave my kids a choice between Unity and Gnome when 11.04 came out. They chose Unity and have never looked back. My oldest updated her desktop without my help to 12.04. Of course, she is still using Unity. I don’t like Unity for myself, but apparently, for people without prior biases, it seems to be the right direction. I have a netbook that looked terrible with Kubuntu, so I use Unity on it. It is slow to load, but after that it seems to work just fine. On my production system, I installed 12.04 and immediately installed kubuntu-desktop. Of course, on Ubuntu 10.04, I did the same thing; I simply cannot stomach Gnome. That is my cup of tea, er, coffee, as it were. I, too, started using Linux when Slackware 1.0 was brand new.
I think Canonical is doing the right thing and I hope they stay the course and continue to make Unity responsive and low-bandwidth. Anything that did not hail Gnome as the holy grail of computing would earn Canonical the disdain of some. As for those that feel Canonical is not listening to them, I would point out that the people who like Unity, like my kids, think that Canonical is doing just fine. For me, I have gotten old and just want a desktop that works. I don’t want to have to tweak everything, including drivers, to make it all happen out of the box. I have not been disappointed overall in that regard since I have been using Ubuntu.
This review is disappointing. It doesn’t begin to properly critique Unity’s interface design weaknesses. It seeks to misrepresent the author’s (quite reasonable) personal preferences as constituting a design flaw in the software. The software isn’t flawless, but your preferences aren’t a flaw in other people’s software.
Unity as it currently exists is an ambitious step in a new, keyboard-centric direction. Weaknesses include the inability to browse/ find applications that are unknown to the user, or for which the user doesn’t know the name. Advanced users who are heavy mousers are particularly disadvantaged. Beginners’ needs may be well served by the Launcher; advanced mousers are less likely to be satisfied.
Personally, I work around that issue by adding a classicmenu icon to my Ubuntu machine’s toolbar. This helps with browseability- I can now readily see all my “graphics” apps with just a two clicks; but this is only a stopgap. For one thing, it has insufficient keyboard access.
In the end, I suspect that this direction for Unity will not be as much of a success as its creators hope. On the other hand, there’s reason to hope that current deficiencies will be addressed.
@Anton: I was especially glad to know that CentOS kept with Gnome 2. I used Gnome 3 for a while with Debian, and for the most part, it takes some getting use to. I don’t mind it, but I really do like the Gnome 2 interface much better. Why Gnome went the route that they did with the new interface is beyond me (or for many other people I’m sure). It was a step in the wrong direction, IMO. As far as using KDE goes, I think I’ll wait until KDE 5 (whenever that will be) to give it another try. I’ve also used LXDE and XFCE. I really like XFCE, but ultimately, Gnome 2 is still the cat’s meow in my books.
@Joe, I’ve used Arch for Web and DB servers, and I’ve gone as far as installing it on my laptop. Arch is a great distro, but it’s definitely not for the noob or the faint of heart. The reason why I decided on CentOS is because I’ve used it in the past and really like what they continue to do. However the main reason is… at my office, I need to push a Windows 7 image, complete with AutoCAD and several of ther commercial apps we use to 30 workstations. This operation takes one full day per machine if I were to do the installation from scratch, along with all the updates and applications we use. So basically, I will be using FOG for this task, which installs just fine on CentOS. Anyway, I’m also considering giving Cinammon a try. The guys affiliated with the Linux Mint group have always been GREAT, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s looking really good. There are still some kinks that need to be ironed out, but I’m sure they’re in the process of doing just that.
I wasn’t going to bother with Ubuntu again, but I went through the hassle one more time. Unity interface is a mess, even more stupid than GNOME Shell interface. Well, this is for people to learn once for all that DICTATORS, for the more benevolent that they are – are never good. Whenever you should read this word, expect something to blow up down the road. Just for your info: Using RHEL 6.2
Ubuntu 12.04 is terrible because the Unity interface is terrible.
Install Ubuntu 12.04 (onto hardware, not vm) yesterday after many years away from it.
My verdict, Ubuntu 12.04′s untiy interface is good for a touchpad and not for a laptop/desktop.
Will use UNITY for a touchpad.
Will NOT use UNITY for a laptop/desktop.
Simple as that.
Linux is a simple thing, install what you like, use what makes you feel comfortable. Do not blindly follow what others (including PRs releases) say.
Linux users used to have a brain and can think for themselves.
Hope its still the same.
Although I’m not a fan of the Unity interface, I have to admit that it has improved a lot since 11.04. I got fed up with Unity’s clunkiness a while ago and went over to Mint 12 which though Ubuntu based has responded to Gnome 3 in a whole different way and is great to use.
I was always a fan of Ubuntu, but this direction they are taking just doesn’t make sense.
I can only speak for myself and for how I expect a distro to look and work.
It doesn’t look good or work.
Ubuntu is a great OS. Everything evolves let Unity. Sure it an LTD but don’t forget not every distro to come is LTD. I feel good about Unity. It has a place, it needs user input. It needs to evolve.
For over 12 years I supported Windows as my job and never really liked it. At home for over 15 years I have been using Macs and have, until recently loved it. Now, wanting a new laptop and desktop, and because of the high prices of Macs, I have been looking at Linux.
I have over the last couple of months been testing various distro’s and in the end I have settled on Ubuntu. Everything about 12.04 makes sense. It is far and away the most forward thinking OS available to my mind and I like the direction that Canonical are going with integration into other devices. Apple have been moving in this direction for the last couple of years and Microsoft are working that way as well.
Whilst I can understand long term Linux users not wanting changes as big as the way Ubuntu is going I’m afraid that the reality of life in the computer world is such that mobile devices are the future.
I have absolutely mo problem with Unity of my various devices. Maybe that is because I’m coming from a Mac background and there are many similarities between the two, although I would say that Ubuntu has many things that Apple wish they had thought of doing first. Mind you, knowing Apple they will probably claim they thought of all these things years ago and then sue everyone left, right and centre…:)
I for one am pleased that I have chosen Ubuntu. For me it just works “out of the box”. I have had no problems with drivers, software or anything. Maybe I’m lucky but so far everything is working fine.
The other distro I did try for quite a while was Mint and whilst it works fine for me it was not really progressive enough and was a little old fashioned in my view.
However, I accept that Ubuntu isn’t for everyone. After all, if we all liked the same things the world would be a boring place.
I’ here you all, but I’ hate unity now maybe not when I’ll try it in a parted HDD of a Win8 tablet.
So Canonical is betting on that and I like the future market dev. team at cannonical, the review itselt is sincere but please to all reviews from all reviewers, please take win 8 tablets into account from now on.
Quite a few CONICAL SHILLS offering scripted replies! This isabout MONEY AND POWER! Canonical is on the take and gives not a care about “community.” They are in it for themselves. I am sure they would be welcomed at Apple.
Troll much? No, don’t answer that. I can toll too, and I don’t care enough about your carefully-crafted contrarianism to come back here. Bye!
“Precise” is now out; I’ve loaded it and am using it.
I’ve read for over a year now how terrible Unity was going to be for the desktop.
Well, now that I’m using it I see that those opinions were dead wrong. I guess they were opinions of hidebound fogeys who are beyond their learning years.
Virtually everything I do on a desktop computer is as quick or quicker to access on Unity compared to Gnome 2.
Mouse is for sissies. I’d say more, but I’d like to keep my critique on the same level as this review.
.
For those who wants to read another review of Ubuntu 12.04, there is an option:
http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2012/04/ubuntu-1204-stairway-to-heaven.html
Everything I do has been on Ununtu Unity for an entire year now, beginning with 11.04. 11.04 was a lot to get used to and felt a little lacking in many areas, but 11.10 has been fantastic, and with 12.04 they have really polished it up, made it faster, and I think it looks much better. The learning curve to use Unity is not nearly as steep as the learning curve when I moved from Windows over to Linux 3 years ago.
I’m with all the commenters who say they wouldn’t go back to the old way. I love Ubuntu Unity and it looks like it will only be getting better. I can agree that it isn’t good for everyone, but then again, neither is a Mac or Microsoft product. Ubuntu may be the best OS out there for many, I know it is for me! The best part is that nobody is forced to use it and it is completely free if you choose to.
Thanks Ubuntu and Canonical and all the other Open-source software developers out there that have led us to this age!
Precisely the type of article that I can’t agree with. Ubuntu 12.04 is following the steps of 11.10 with a new approach to desktop.
We use Ubuntu as a desktop environment for newcomers on Linux in my company where Windows can’t fit the needs. The result is that Unity is well understood and that there is no complaints about « loosing » Windows 7. That’s a fact.
Now as a professionnal Linux user for 10 years, my team and I hardly made the switch to Unity, but after months of usage, we shall admit that this stays quite good. Using MacOS and Windows 7 too, daily, we have agreed that Unity is good, and simplier to daily use than the others. But in this case, that’s only our opinion.
We think that if there are so many distributions of Linux, there is a reason : choice and directions. It is a good point that some company, here Canonical, investigates in new Desktop alternatives. But that’s just an alternative. Suse, RedHat, Debian, Mint are also good distributions, and we can not blame Canonical to do something else, that fits some users, and doesn’t fit to others. So it’s not time to blame, it’s time to cheer up.
Linux can’t grow up with this type of article and will stay back behind Mac OS and Windows, wich have constant improvements, and also constant flows too.
Meanwhile, if Unity doesn’t fit, use Gnome or KDE, also available on Ubuntu, and many other distributions, and stay tuned.
“There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.”
– Ahm, like what?
Programs?
Alt, name of your program.
Don’t even know the name of the program you want to use?
Alt, “office” “video”, for image viewer, try “graphics” “picture” “image”, any of those get you there.
Files: Can’t use nautilus? whose fault is that??
I mean, You call people professional users that don’t know the names of the programs they use? And that can’t type with more than one finger of each hand so they have to use the mouse to be faster??
It is a valid criticism to not have an option to a menu that bunches programs together windows style mouse-searchably, but that is only a valid criticism for non-professional noobs that can’t type or don’t know even their programs..
Seriously, hard to find what?
And a note on workflow:
Finally the application switcher only switches within one workspace, which is the most important single improvement over 11.10..
I’ll be blunet. I don’t like Unit. I had great expectations before I installed Unbuntu 12.04 but to me there was nothing good on it. I few improvments, of course, but nothing major. The more I use Ubuntu 12.04 the more I see how solid and fast Windows 7 is. Sorry Ubuntu fans!
Ah! Ah! Ah! Review ridiculous!
“it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.”
How could they improve on filtered browsing or clicking a button and typing a couple of letters? How does any other OS handle this better?
“either more mouse clicks or time away from the mouse typing searches.”
Well, which do you want? You say mouse clicks are bad, but then in the same sentence you complain that you can’t use the mouse enough. This is just complaining about having options without even knowing what you want improved.
I think your review, although brief, hit some good points. I tried Unity for a week or two. I found that I could easily get comfortable with it if I had to, but why bother unless it offers me some usability improvement? There are many other desktop options. That’s why I don’t understand all the strong feelings about Unity – if you like it use it – if you don’t then use something else. I thought “choice” was a favorite buzzword of the Linux distro community?? Maybe the real problem is that Unity – at least initially – should have been an installable option, not the default Ubuntu desktop.
Two words: UNITY SUCKS. Your review was right on.
ITT: Anti-change butthurts
This boondogle reminds me of *** THE PLAN ***
For those not familiar with the plan I list it below. Enjoy!
The Plan
In the beginning was the plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the Workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying,
“It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh.”
And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
“It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof.”
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying,
“It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
such that none may abide by it.”
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying,
“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”
And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
“It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”
And the Directors then went unto the Vice-Presidents, saying unto them,
“It promotes growth, and it is very powerful.”
And the Vice-Presidents went unto the President, saying unto him,
“This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
of the company, with powerful effects.”
And the President Looked upon the Plan, and saw that it was good.
And the Plan became Policy.
This is how Shit Happens
The very fact that you are a Linux desktop user marks you as one who does not tread the beaten path so the accusations here that some people here are anti-change is ludicrous. In my view up till Meerkat Ubuntu was untouchable,fast pretty when tweaked, performance amazing, a joy to work with. The proof – in my office 60% of the development team turned to Ubuntu after seeing me use it and the IT team joined as well. Post Meerkat they have either returned to Windows, gone to Macs, stayed in Meerkat or in my case turned to LinuxMint and then to KDE, now I use MintKDE. I have really tried to like Unity because I really love Ubuntu but, I cannot. It does not look as good as Mint or KDE plasma. Its desktop experience is diabolical. “There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.” ne’er a truer phrase been written. In my view the only way to use Ubuntu at this point in time is to install the KDE Plasma desktop after installation.
To everyone installing on a laptop. Ubuntu 12.04 has a known kernel issue (being addressed) which affects Broadcom wireless cards. If the firmware for the card is not installed the kernel will hang. To work around this, disable the wireless card, install Ubuntu, and download the firmware using a wired or alternate wireless card.
I have been a big fan of linux for years, and I can say that UNITY ROCKS! This is my first exposure to Unity, as previously I stayed with the previous Ubuntu LTS up until now and having read all the comments on forums from people hating Unity to bits, I was expecting the worst.
Nevertheless, I installed the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and, I can say, I am impressed! I intend to stick with 12.04 as it is a LTS until my laptop dies! Thanks Ubuntu!
P.S. I already managed to convert a couple of friends to switch from windows to linux/ubuntu and both are absolutely delighted with the feel that the 12.04 desktop has.
I’ve avoided Unity like the plague just because I use my machine for work, and I just need productivity. Unity makes my desktop feels like a smartphone and I have one of those already.
Couldn’t stand Unity either. It’s not old-guy friendly. -And I don’t mean that as in: I can’t learn anything new. I am learning new things, constantly. It’s just that now, when I learn new things, I try to distinguish between the useful, the non-useful, and the just plain stupid. I have crap near-vision, and when I tried out the Pangolin I was confronted with a desktop that comes default with microtype for the font size. (This seems to be the going thing on Linux desktops, lately. -Way to alienate significant parts of an aging population, guys! -All the kids are doin’ it!) I couldn’t find the controls (assuming they even exist) to zoom, change screen resolution, or change the sizes of the system fonts. So what do I do? I say “Lose this OS”. I suffered through all of Win 9X. I got really sick of configuration issues being taken out of the hands of the user, and hard to enact. Unity and GNOME3 were giant backsteps, in my opinion. Plus I really, really, liked having GNOME Shell under Mint 12 eat 90+% of my resources and grind my system down to Win16 speed. -And KDE4? You must be joking. I’m not a moron, but I’ve tried using it three different times, on three different distros, and I literally could not figure out how to make it work. Seriously. I really wanted to like it. Yes, it is pretty, but I could not figure out how to bring up a simple program. I’m sure that I’ll feel like a fool when somebody finally clues me in about their oh, so clever design, but it is SOOOO Grandma-proof. Yes, I could change the desktop font and the color, but how about something really tricky, like a new word processing document? Apparently, I’m not qualified to bring up programs of my own choosing on these newer desktops. FFS, it’s like a new car with a joystick instead of a steering wheel. The designers have run amok. -And not even a little note, or a chip-voice, to say: “Use this joystick instead of the steering wheel you’re used to. Go: _(here)_ to find the instruction manual.” THAT is where I really lose patience with Unity. Having somebody make my choices for me, of how the box should be used, and not even getting a memo about the changes, is not exactly the kind of user-friendliness that used to mark the ‘Buntus. If I wanted mediocre design and no choices, I could have stayed with WinXP.
Fact is, I’m feeling pretty let down by Ubuntu, which I’ve been using religiously, and talking up to anyone that would listen, since DAPPER DRAKE. I stuck with Lucid until the support cycle ended, just to avoid Unity. A non-configurable desktop, what an improvement. -And so handy for those of us that use a mouse left-handed, or want a different keymap than the 19th Century kluge that “everybody” uses, or want to come up with our own organizational schemes for our work, or that just used the crap out of those Gnome panel applets. And I must say, to everybody that is talking about using tablets, and other small-screen devices: I hope your eyes hold out. Oh, and have fun trying to use a serious 3D animation program to unravel a knot of vertices on a complex model with that 6-inch display. Speaking of which, I have already gone pretty deep into memorizing full sets of keyboard shortcuts for apps that require it, to be efficient. -Like I need to memorize another full set of keyboard shortcuts just to get around on the system! The mouse was the great equalizer, and it does a lot of things very, very well, where the OS hasn’t decided to jettison it…
What I can’t figure out is how the three biggest desktops in Linux-dom suddenly lost their minds ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Is it something in the global food-chain, or the water?
-And to the guys who said: “-just get a different desktop!”, I have tried. I tried out the Mint12 GNOME classic fall-back, which wasn’t too awful (almost), and tried loading LXDE, and WMaker, which were too stripped-down to notice that second display on the system, and then I tried installing MATE. Somewhere in there, one of those changes borked my system. On restart, I get a goofy login that will not let me in as any user or as root, and starting Mint12 in rescue got me a “root prompt” that won’t let me do anything, at all. So, there’s the reality. Getting a different, non-mainstream desktop usually requires luck and / or a LOT of tweaking and breaking and tweaking some more to get what you want. I’m glad we all have that kind of time. I’m glad I have a borked install from trying to get a desktop that I could work with. I’m glad my _work box_ is now a paperweight until I can start throwing distros at it, and hope something sticks.
Here’s the problem: Any distro will support and integrate their desktop of choice better than they will the also-rans. I’d give the Pangolin another go if they had a real-live, full, well-integrated version of Enlightenment E17 that I could just pull out of Synaptic, configure, and USE. Instead we have the Unity / GNOME3 / KDE4 styling exercises, and they all have the miasma of ideological purity about them, and I’m allergic.
One last thing. Nice, fair article. -Except you stopped punching way too soon. Those cobblestones are barely wet…
*sigh*
Thanks for the review. Stick with Mint 12 it is then. *sigh* (again)
I WANT to use Ubuntu, but I also need to be able to get my work done with minimal hassles, Unity will not, cannot, aid me in this.
@aYo:
What does not walking a beaten path have to do with being pro or anti change???
If you truely love ubuntu so much then why wouldn’t you just use ubuntu with KDE or Gnome???
It really is a constant shock to me, in a world where the vast majority of linux installs are cli only, that there is so much focus on Unity, especially considering you can switch.
The other thing I don’t get is if most linux installs are cli, then linux users should be keyboard power users (over mouse clicks), I don’t think anyone would argue that unity is trying (and best used) with keyboard heavy users. Yet the most common complaint I hear about Unity is that it takes too many clicks?!?!?! (I don’t get it).
I have found it much quicker to find things b/c I don’t have to leave the keyboard as much (and everytime i do it costs me time). And I’d argue to most users (photoshop, etc are exceptions) that if you are using the mouse a lot you are probably not as productive as you could be.
I’ll be the first to admit, in 11.04 it was a little buggy (although not horrible). But it has been improved upon and I have not had issues with 12.04. Also 12.04 moved to a newer linux kernel etc.
Times are changing gnome2 is going away. So you’ll have to move on.
Also this dictator shit has to stop. Canonical are dictator b/c they actually did research and had groups they brought in to actually do market analysis?!?!?! Freakin ridiculous.
It’s funny when I hear Ubuntu complaints it reminds me of the kid that makes it big and his friends get left behind and become all bitter. Straight hater-aide!!!
Often I read quotes suggesting that Canonical has let a large proportion of their loyal users down by persisting with the Unity desktop and it’s development, usually followed by a quick blurb on how those loyal users have largely made Ubuntu what is is today. Some fact perhaps, however I look at the situation in a different direction. In my view, Canonical has simply used their right to develop open source software in a manner that they see fit, and in a direction that suits their own goals and expectations. After all, it’s their time and money that’s at stake and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the freedom that open source software should represent! Instead of Canonical owing their previous user base some kind of loyalty based on a percentage of opinion, I actually think that they are well within their rights to head in any direction that they desire. I believe that Canonical has put in the hard yards over time, and it’s the “loyal users” that have gone along for the ride completely free of charge.
When installing Ubuntu, there is no ULA that locks the potential user into using the Unity desktop. Users have been given free choice on the matter of desktop selection, easily confirmed by browsing the Software Centre once the system is installed. It blows my mind to hear individuals labelling Canonical as “arrogant” by perhaps arrogant people who not only expect the software to be free (as in free beer), but moan when it no longer “feels right” to their usage requirements. I know, I know, if they want their operating system to be widely accepted they really do need to listen to the people that are going to, or do in fact use it, agreed, but they have the right to their own direction right? Windows 8 is coming along soon, there’s another choice to anyone that feels let down, although not free (as in free beer of software freedom) but your still have choices.
This review has little to do with Ubuntu 12.04 as a whole, it highlights nothing beyond the user interface and is pointless with regards to the heading. Please, if your going to review an operating system, review it, or change the inappropriate heading.
I don’t use the Unity desktop because I have a choice, Canonical still gives me that freedom free of charge.
I just installed 12.04 dual boot on my pc. in the past I had issues with ubuntu alot of crashes and bugs media player not working little minor bugs that required works around etc. but this 12.04 is great. I have not issues at all its compatiable with all my office docs. broweses the web faster. love the icandy stuff. easy to find programs. vlc plays all my torrents fine. I think ubuntu is moving in the right direction..
My first succesful installation of linux was Ubuntu and then openSUSE and then Xubuntu. I have to admit that I am Gnome fan but as some above have mentionned, you can easily switch back to Gnome desktop if Unity doesn’t suit you as well as try out the various other desktops/window managers.
I feel that Ubuntu and linux in general being open source and free as in free beer allows us to relax and explore more and thus we can find what works best for us. For some it may be best to just install Xubuntu or Kubuntu instead, and you can still find equivalent software that will do the required job for you. The same goes to all the Ubuntu derivatives: Linux Mint, Bodhi linux etc…, the former specialized in installing all non-free codecs and multimedia apps for you, and, latter works well on older computers for for example. For some needing a system capable of handling low latencies and containing the related packages for audio recording like myself, an Ubuntu derivative is recommended such as Ubuntu Studio, KXStudio, or Tango Studio etc…
So in the end I am just grateful that there are so many options and flexibility and I want to remain neutral about the switch to Unity, rather my biggest concern is wether Ubuntu will always remain free or one day morph into just another commercial product. Although I have not had a chance to install this 12.04 version yet, I will give Unity another shot on my ”entertainment laptop” and if it doesn’t work out for me, i’ll just do : sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback and log out and end of story!
nice solid review; facts mixed with personal experience.
my own experiences with Ubuntu 11 and up have been similar to yours, and i am a programmer that has been using various flavors of Linux and Unix for ages. my recent experiences with the Ubuntu forums and IRC chats have made me want to abandon Linux in general.
some long-time Linux users can be very rabid and isolationist. Ubuntu users have been massively defensive to the point that they will attack anyone that dares to criticize it. the responses that i have seen and experienced fall into a few categories:
1) i understand your frustrations and have had similar experiences; i want to help. (rare)
2) it works fine for me. (no empathy and not helpful)
3) Linux is for real computer users and you are an idiot. (most common)
option 3 is so common that i really wonder if these people actually care about convincing people to use open source technologies.
i prefer the linux cli over any linux gui. well, i do like LXDE
anyways, looks like crap to me. just like all the other versions of ubuntu.
Something rather hilarious about Canonical converting their desktop OS into a tablet OS while still calling it a desktop OS, and at the same time releasing a business version of the OS. Why not simply leave the desktop version with a mouse based Gnome or KDE GUI and release a tablet version of Ubuntu (TUbuntu?) with Unity? Why make a tablet version of an OS and call it a desktop OS? Or if you want to market it as a desktop OS and have the facility to change the UI, as now, then why not ship it with a default Gnome 2 UI and allow Unity to be installed via the package manager, instead of a default tablet interface (Unity) and force people to download Gnome 2 if they want a real desktop UI?
And why oh why make a graphical UI that primarily uses a command line interface? Did’nt we invent GUI’s so that we did not need to use a command line? By all means have keyboard shortcuts as well as the graphical stuff, but why make the graphical stuff so convoluted and inefficient that you are forced to use a command line to get anything done quickly?
Basically Ubuntu seems to be regressing from a mutli-tasking GUI OS back to a command line driven single tasking OS – to DOS in fact.
In this case, I prefer the future to the past.
Ubuntu is free and it is the best linux distro available till now, and all those people who are talking against the Ubuntu 12.04 , can stop using Ubuntu other then complaining. No one is forcing them to use Ubuntu . So, guys, Please stop complaining and go for Windows, Mac or other Linux distros . . . . . .
This has got to be one of the WORST reviews I’ve read. It’s very poorly written and makes little to no sense.
There are an awful lot of assumptions being made by a number of commenter’s and in the article.
#1. That Unity was built for a touch screen.
Unity was built to be simple as are touch screen devices. This is a correlation yes, but not a connection. If it was built for touch screens, it would not have been released as a desktop environment.
#2. That the only reason people who dislike Unity is simply that they couldn’t figure out how to use it.
I can use it just fine thank you, heck… even my mom can use it. In fact, it’s her favourite and she loves it.
#3. That Canonical isn’t listening to the people who don’t like Unity.
Several features and bug fixes have already been applied because of this feedback.
To continue the point here, I think there are several things I use my desktop for both at home and at work, that I either A) can’t do with Unity or B) can’t do efficiently with Unity.
This article is simply highlighting the opinion that some of (many of?) us seem to have about the limitations of a desktop environment that is simple to use. I have my concerns about Windows and OSX as well. All of those issues stem from a convoluted and time consuming comparison of pro’s and con’s over the years and finding my best, most efficient operating system configuration for the work that I do.
I tried 12.04 beta for 22 days at home and at 16 days at work. I spent hours on forums asking how other people were doing certain things. Dual monitors, laptop, touchscreen (my mom has a Duo), workspaces, printing, music, tabbed browsing, scroll bars, file browsing, GIT, SVN, SSH, FTP, etc.. Most of the things other commenter’s have already talked about. All of which are well beyond the 3 myths above.
The bottom line is that I need something that allows me to produce. Unity is not that something. In my case, Windows is not that something either and neither is OSX. Gnome 2 was, and XFCE now is (Except Gigolo is a finicky little pos.) but there you go. Workflow is critical to me, not simplicity. Simplicity is critical to my mom, but she’s retired so…
I’m also willing to make another assertion, that anyone who does like Unity doesn’t have dual or triple monitors.
Personally I have a real liking for unity. Once I became accustomed to it I liked it better than old Gnome. I even switched around a little bit trying out Pear and Mint….here I am back with ubuntu and frankly I am happier here than anywhere else. The desktop really works.
Not sure I agree with everything you said, here is another point of view:
http://blog.jingaling.co.uk/2012/05/ubuntu-1204-precise-pangolin-review.html
sudo apt-get remove unity unity-2d –purge
sudo apt-get install gnome-classic
How hard is that people? Seriously, some of you, that have been with Linux “FOR SO LONG”, go on to rant, and then completely download a brand new distro just to get rid of Unity. I don’t like Unity as much as the next guy, but that is the point of Linux, to be free and have a choice, and my choice was to uninstall unity and install gnome-classic. Seriously, it’s like you people have raging windows-user-withdrawal. Either that or you are all new to Linux. Which I find hard to believe.
I like gnome-shell, and that’s ifne, but I also like gnome-classes, which is also fine, which is why I installed both of them. Nobody ever complains about the default theme Ubuntu comes with. Why? Because you can change it. So why complain about the default GUI if you have many choices? I still don’t know what to make of this anomaly. Linux is always so proud of all the choices and all the freedom to do things yourself and not caring about breaching copyright laws, and yet you guys complain about something that barely matters? Ubuntu is going through its teenage phase. Just pop the pimple and move on( whatever that means ).
Quite simply, why don’t they offer users the choice between Unity and a more conventional interface. I think it looks cool but find it a pain to use when I am flicking between many applications (and I currently have three keyboards on my desk which doesn’t help).
The only way, as far as I can see, they allow people to exercise choice is by leaving to another distro which is a shame as it is one rather basic feature that for some let’s the whole thing down.
Ok so I am going to flame myself. First off I should have read the post just above mine and second I should have spent 30seconds googling. Try this:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/classicgnome
Works a treat. Crazy to change distro for this reason when there is such a simple way to have what you want.
Ubuntu 12.04 loaded right away.Got my wireless up right away.Runs quick.Thank you Ubuntu !! I prefer open
source to Windows.
i totally agree the biggest mistake ever i put it on had a look and wiped it off and put 11 04 back on it is so slow and i don’t want icons on my desk top and having to click here and there to find the place you want just like Microsoft i have recommended ubuntu to people for being free and easy to use there is no way i would recommend 12 04 to any body back to basics please or i for one will have find a different o/s .may i say i run 9 computers and rebuild computers for a hobby being a grey haired surfer
I used to hate Unity until Ubuntu 12.04. HUD is awesome, and they have undertood that it is far to faster to reach what you want using the keyboard rather than the mouse. Clicking takes more time than timing. For this reason HUD makes everything faster, it kind of create commands for each application, e.g. Google Chrome, if you press Alt key and type “cl” +Enter you’ll be direct to “Clear History” page, and that’s way faster than clicking.
for me, NOTHING beats the simplicity of menus
This is my third and final “review” I will be reading on this website. I only got to this website recently to compare what people are saying about Mint and 12.04. The apparent biased reviews favoring Mint over Ubuntu just because of “how shiny” you can make it look.
All this reviewer was doing was complaining about Unity and never said much about the OS in a Ubuntu 12.04 review. Call this a Unity Personal Opinion, because a 12.04 review this is not. You can even install Cinnamon on 12.04 so you don’t have to be stuck with Unity if you hate it so much. With Gnome3, cinnamon, Unity and whatever else out there, this reviewer would have me believe that a single UI makes a OS useless and bad. Book by cover much?
I like that the review tells it straight . I am in the camp that Unity is a major step backwards in usability. I deinstalled all 11.X versions in favor of the older 10.X. Then manually upgraded the kernel to latest 3.x . That’s a fair bit of extra work to do – but getting away from unity was a real motivator.
This approach of lending more weight to the experience of tablet users – meanwhile sacrificing quality for desktop users – was it inspired by microsoft’s model of making a really dumbed down GUI (at least for users requiring many simultaneous open windows) for Windows 8?
“There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.” – what? huh? Unity has its drawbacks – sure. But searching for things is one of the areas where it really shines. Get your facts right.
Having used Ubuntu for the last 4 years 12.04 has been a real disappointment. Unity is the worst GUI I have ever seen and it took me, as a none technical user ages to work out how to get Gnome back. Under Unity it took for ever to find things and on my system it hid many of the required commands for the software. On top of that the video file converter winff will not work anymore after hours of upgrades etc. trying to get it to work, Devede is the same and now won’t make menu’s for me or handle mp4 files. My scanner is seen but won’t work anymore in spite of hours of searching and changes and upgrades. I am now having real doubts about 12.04 and wish I had never upgraded to it. All in all I will wait for a while to see if things improve but if not I think I will move to another Linux or even buy Windows 7. Its not free but it works and life is just too short to spend days trying to get everything to work with 12.04 and often failing.
I have one thing to say. gnome-panel
Here is what Canical just doesn’t seem to get. A new user for Ubuntu doesn’t know what to look for, the Unity and Lens are OK for previous users, but anyone new doesn’t even know what they have. Granted you can switch back to Classic mode, but again a new user isn’t going to figure this out with searching the web. People just don’t want to work that hard for an OS.
If Cananical wants to come close to mainstream it has to keep things simple and intuitive, make classic the default with Unity the option. Oh and focus on getting printers and scanners to work out of the box.
I have turned about 20 people on to Ubuntu over the last few years and this is their biggest complaints about Untity.
12.04 is just terrible IMHO. I had numerous problems installing it on my laptop. I’ve had no problems with older Ubuntu releases. Believe it or not, it took me 3 days to get things configured as they were on my old release (10.04). To make things even worse, my laptop really started overheating to temperatures that could damage hardware. Found out its was a kernel < 3.3 issue, upgaded kernel to 3.3.6. Still overheating heavily, KDE panel flashing, …
Sadly, I installed 10.04 back to normalize my work. All in all 12.04 is a big disapointment for me.
I think you’re spot on with your comments on Unity.
At least where it concerns desktop computers.
It runs fine on my laptop, and I actually got used to it to the point where I figured I’d stick it on my big desktop pc…. Holy. $4|t.
Sorry folks, saying the future of computing is in the ultraportable is narcissisistic BS. Just because your technology needs can be satisfied by a 300$ tablet doesn’t mean everyone’s can.
Some of us need Core i7 processors, SLi arrays and 4 monitors, whether its for graphics design, video editing, VM management, or any of a dozen tasks I perform on a regular basis. If you’re going to quit trying in the desktop arena, at least give us some warning…
Unity is fine (not great) for portable devices, although I don’t see how that panel would work on a smaller touchscreen.
Why is this not the “Ubuntu Netbook Remix” branch of development? The only solution I have for modern, multidisplay users of high end computers is: sudo apt-get install gnome-core
I had to go back to gdm, I just couldn’t use it, or fix it enough to use it.
I find Unity much better on Ubuntu 12.04, but if you need an interface like Gnome Panels or Windows XP, then you need the Xfce interface.
How to steps:
1 – install xfce4 and xfce4-goodies packages.
2 – at Ubuntu logon screen, select the Xfce session.
3 – you will have a Windows XP like interface with all the apps from a standard Ubuntu install and no doubles.
It works like on Windows 8 where you can choose the Metro interface or the Classic Windows XP interface.
Unity is simple and fast. I have no problem locating anything. Give it an honest shot and you’ll see the whole concept. It’s actually quite minimilistic.
If you can’t find something using what is visible on the desktop, you probably shouldn’t be using anything that plugs into the wall.
I have been using Windos from the first edition up to Windows 7. In May 2012 I tried six Linux OSes. I have been converted! Out of the lot i found Ubuntu 12.04 incredible. It installed the first time and my HP inkjet, Canon laser and the flat bed scanner works 100%. I love the HUD and can see the future of Ubuntu for Android with this icon system. Good bye Windows
Heldeman
12.04 will not install on my sister’s Athlon eMachine without *un-installing* the slideshow software in the live-CD system before-hand. Apparently a wide-spread problem – no validation of 32-bit Athlons in beta process? Even after successful installation, the resolution of the screen cannot be adjusted below 1024×768, making the entire thing unacceptable for my reasonably experienced sibling.
It may work fine on newer hardware, but now I have to find an alternative that fits the desktop paradigm. Those of you who think Unity is fine should ask your mom to try it.
- 18-year Linux user/advocate
1. Thank god for 12.04, I just read this entire set of comments and heldeman’s sum up my experience. Other than a brief fling W/Mandrake circa 2005, I have no experience with Linux, I find the entire design of 12.04 very easy to navigate.
2. Between the dock and a few desktop shortcuts I have all my frequently used programs easy to find. IMO certain sites that try to help with Ubuntu can be a bit intimidating, for instance when a question like how to create a desktop shortcut becomes a series of terminal commands. But overall the community is incredibly helpful.
~~ Zia a very good example of my second point, a newbie would have no clue what you are saying, I did my homework and will try this out in a VM on another machine before change my working installation. Thanks for the info.
I had no problem using this version of Unity coming from Gnome 2.xx. I don’t get why some reviews are so negative. It’s like the interface is completely unusable, which to me is a false impression. I’m curious what it is that you’re looking for that you can’t find.
Seriously? You’re telling me this brings nothing to the desktop. Yeahright. I did last year’s science project at school on the best desktop environments. KDE Plasma and Unity won for usablility with a close average– Unity was actually ahead. I asked people to do three things. Open up a web browser and go to Google.com, then type “This Is A Test” in the text editor, then log out. The third one was the hardest to find, except for in Unity and KDE.
Here is a summarized version of the results.
Results from Gnome Shell:
People had trouble even getting started. The desktop was “Too simple to work” and everyone who tried it kept bumping around, trying to find out how to do anything.
Results from LXDE:
Everyone did just about everything with relative ease, but it seemed a little sluggish to be ready with the main menu and the categories caught everyone off guard. Plus, all the logout options were hidden under one button.
Results from Xfce:
Same as LXDE after people found the menu
KDE:
People could find everything reasonably fast, with a nice interface and an intuitive menu system
Unity:
Same as KDE, only there were more comments about how well-organized and streamlined it felt.
I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 with unity for some time now and I have one word to describe it “Marvelous ”
Unity is far better than the detractors say, its all that I need. Its just that there are those who have an ol windows hankering that are convinced they need an old style start menu, they are very set in their ways and don’t see the revolution of evolution in hardware terms the changes brought by newer devices and other hard formats make the backward looking distro’s look like dinosaurs, for a long time PC’s really hardly changed for many years sure the processors got faster and the memory larger. However its how we want to use our computers now that are bringing in the changes to the software, so like everyone else Linux has to keep up or fade away, the makers of Ubuntu have recognized this and have taken the first steps to address that with a new and evolving O’s interface that will allow them to bridge the gap and evolve during a time of extreme change in hardware. All the backward looking Linux distros will eventually go the way of the dodo.
Have Many people already forgotten how many mouse clicks it takes to navigate through MS Windows (vista or win7)menu .??
Personally i find no problems with the new Ubuntu menu (unity) .I must say that initially i was a bit put out by it in 11-04 release but by the time Ubuntu had released 12-04 they had streamlined and tidyied up a bit ,It has become very easy to use i can just put the shortcuts to my fav programs into the launcher and its easy as
I like Ubuntu now 12-04 has matured and sure its a bit different but still that same friendly distro
I agree with the review! ubuntu 12.04 is a total mess its buggy and crashes alot. Unity is going to be the downfall of ubuntu if they want to make a tablet os make unity a seperate one not force it on the desktop users.
UNIX was my first system back in the early 1970s (at a University) – difficult to learn, but I was happy.
I build two dozen smaller home/business systems with CP/M 80- I was happy.
Then I was forced to DOS and MS-Win- PAIN, slow, crazy defaults, BSOD.
The minute Linux worked on a PC, I switched – happy again.
Red Hat – not happy, but it got better, so happy again.
Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 – very very happy.
Ubuntu 10.10 – OK but nothing better than 10.04.
11.04 – interesting but not better than 10.04.
11.10 – unhappy I can’t get my work done as fast.
12.04 – stomach PAIN, crashes, black screen lockups (it’s MS-Windows BSOD again).
So, I went to Apple Mac – happy, but Ubuntu 10.04 still runs my main three PCs – very happy.
Now, what am I going to do with no support for 10.04? Switch to Mac? Keep using 10.04 even after support stops? Switch to Mint?
I don’t know what I will do, but I AM SURE it will not be Ubuntu 12.04.
Does anyone have suggestions knowing my history? I’d like to hear them.
@Ravin Wind
Maybe try another distro. Yea i know 10.04 was a great distro i enjoyed it too .
well i run 12.04 on an old laptop NEC Versa m350 1.8 gig processor 80 gig HD 1 gig ram (used to be winxp )with no probs at all even the special buttons work (Home folder ,,Email button etc ).
Have used Linux mint before It ran well on an old machine as well.
Im sure you will hunt around for a distro that works sometimes a slightly lesser distro like Lubuntu is a good option ,Less bloat as it were and still highly configurable too.
Good luck .
@Ravin Wind
You could do what I’ve done and switch to KDE.
I’m very happily using Kubuntu 12.04 and find the KDE 4.8 plasma desktop environment great, very stable and pretty too. Still being based on Ubuntu/Debian (which I prefer) is a plus. KDE is so configurable too, very easy to customise it to your liking.
I don’t know why KDE seems to have such a bad press, I don’t have a problem with it at all and my system isn’t that powerful (Core2-Duo 1.86Ghz, 2Gb ram, Intel integrated graphics).
I’ve used Ubuntu since 8.04 and very much liked it until they forced Unity on us (really not suited to a desktop system IMO). I tried Unity for a while but didn’t like it.
I’ve been an ubuntu fan since the beginning.
Unfortunately ub12 is several steps back from ub11.
Instead of “click-slide-slide-click” to start a program, it now is
“slide-click-select an icon down the bottom-select filter top right-select group-select more results-scroll- and(finally) click.
It is also very confusing that all functions are all at the top of the screen instead of the top of the window (except firefox).
To have to (mouse)travel from first highlighting the window of choice, to the top of the screen, is simply wasted time. It is not saving desktop space either, so why bother.
It is also a waste of time (mouse)traveling to something you can’t see till you get there.
All this pop-up stuff is just a pain.
Please go back to “simple excellence” or “excellent simplicity”.
I wanted to like Unity. I was excited about it initially in 11.04. Then I began to realize over time that Unity was making most tasks more difficult for me than they needed to be. I went on a Distro and Desktop Environment journey from about July of last year until 12.04 was released, but I really wanted to come back to Ubuntu. Then I saw all of the reviews of 12.04 and I was excited. I was sure that I would now be happy with Unity so I eagerly awaited the final release.
I suppose that if I enjoyed typing the name of the application that I want to run, Unity may not be so unusable to me. But being a person who enjoys using the mouse, I find the Unity Lenses confusing and unhelpful. Three different categories: Recent, Downloads, Available Apps, all in the same Lense. I find it cluttered and confusing. Why bother with the confusion when I can just simply right click the Home Folder in the Launcher and open to the folder where I want to go without any need to search for files in a lens?
I suppose if I just tossed everything randomly into my Documents, Videos, Pictures, and Music folders, using Unity would help ease the confusion. But I have everything neatly organized into sub-folders, and in the same amount of time it takes for Unity to search for a file that I have in a sub-folder (it takes time) I can click to that file. I just don’t see any advantage to using the lenses provided in Unity. (There are some neat extra lenses available though through PPA, but nothing I can’t live without.) Even if I prevent the Dash from showing Recent and Available Apps, I still have to click to “See More Results” in the Applications lens. Why does it not display all Available Apps by default if it’s the only category visible?
I don’t know, it’s just not working for me. Perhaps if I knew a way to delete the “Dash Home” lens and just leave the Applications lens it may not be so annoying. But if I do I’ll basically leave Unity looking like a duplicate of Gnome 3, which I find to be much simpler. My only real complaints with Gnome 3 are the lack of a shutdown button – although I hear that will be getting fixed – and the fact that I get so used to moving my mouse to the top left that I do it on my Windows 7 computer at work. Using the Gnome Tweak tool I can allow files to appear on the desktop, and give myself Computer and Home icons on the desktop.
In conclusion, I’ve got Gnome Classic working, Gnome 3, Cinnamon and KDE all installed now and I’m switching around to figure out what works best for me. The funny thing is that between those 4, I can’t decide which I prefer. But I have no problem now concluding that Unity is not for me, and it probably never will be. :(
I think the most important thing to note is that people can come up with a list of very specific and valid reasons why they dislike Unity. We aren’t all just hating for the sake of hating. And no, It’s not that we can’t accept change (some of us actually like Gnome 3). We’ve tried it, we’ve wanted to like it, but we just can’t see any benefit to using it.
Many people who sincerely want to stay with Ubuntu just find that Unity does not work well for them, and they have no choice but to use a different desktop environment. I also think that a lot of people are sticking with Unity despite sharing some of the frustrations other people have expressed in this thread, simply because they don’t want to leave Ubuntu. Perhaps they are afraid to try another distro or another desktop.
One very interesting point I want to add is that using the old Gnome 2x Desktop, you could pin applications to the panels for easy launching. You could pin tons of applications to the panels, as many as you’d ever pin to the launcher in Unity. So what is the benefit of the launcher? The fact that it sits on the left side of the screen and that it’s fatter? The bottom panel in Gnome 2x could be enlarged and placed along the left side of the screen as well. So what is the benefit of the Unity Launcher?
Then there is the Dash compared to the old Applications and Places menus. Is the Dash really easier to navigate than the Applications and Places menus? I certainly have not found the Dash to be simpler, in fact I find it much more difficult to get where I want to go.
Logically speaking, and logically comparing, I just don’t see any significant advantages in Unity to make it more useable than Gnome 2x. In fact, I find the opposite to be true. XFCE does a much better job using a Launcher than Unity does. Move the Launcher in XFCE to the left side of the screen and you’ve got a Unity clone that just works better.
What where the Canonical people THINKING???
For Linux to succeed, it has to win over the Windows world. In order to win over the Windows world, the system has to be immediately recognizable and intuitive. There is NOTHING recognizable or even SLIGHTLY intuitive about this latest version of Ubuntu. In fact, I would have to say this is absolutely the most unintuitive piece of software I have ever encountered.
I used to recommend switching from Windblows to Ubuntu to everyone. Now I cannot recommend it to ANYONE!
I used to tell people, it looks just like Windows and works just like Windows. You’ll be productive in no time.
I can’t tell them… it looks like nothing you have ever seen before, is as obtuse as it is possible for an OS to be and even I can’t find anything at all on this system. I have COMPLETELY stopped trying to sell people on Ubuntu.
This dumb mistake ranks right up there with New Coke and, “Say fellas, why don’t we fire Steve Jobs?”
I, just like a previous poster, have been using linux since the mid 90′s. I was a serious DOS user and I did not like how I was constrained by Windows 95 when it came out. It made a difficult process out of everything I could easily do beforehand. That was when I bought one of those 4 inch thick linux manuals with a Slackware installation disk in the back cover. I wiped the drive and started learning LInux the old fashioned and hard way.
Unity gives me the same feeling I had when Microsoft pushed Windows 95 down all of our throats. I still use Ubuntu, but I use the LXDE version now. I did not want Windows then and I do not want Unity now.
If I ever jump on the tablet fad I may decide I like Unity. But at this point, I cannot see that happening.
Yes, I just called tablets a fad. I do that because everyone I know, who has a tablet, adds a keyboard as soon as they start using the thing. Why bother buying a tablet? A laptop is a fraction of the price.
just been trying out Ubuntu 12.04….trash. the big trouble with Linux is that it’s so damned unusable unless you happen to be a techie. For the ordinary “average” computer user the sheer hassle of installing with a terminal or some other “command prompt” style window, means that Linux will probably always be a minority interest….sort of like rubber fetishism… fun for the initiates but alien to us ordinary mortals…oh well back to Windows, at least it’s easy to set up. You see some-one , probably a smart ass will say that I or others should spend some time learning about using the OS and perhaps buy a few books etc…my answer is why should I… I just wan’t the damn thing to work. I don’t want to immerse myself in Linux commands etc…I have a life that I wish to get on with..you know friends, family etc. I can’t be arsed spending my evenings geeking out on Linux..I just want my computer to work….not sit up to 4:30 in the effing morning just trying to get my DVD drive to be see by this shitty OS UBUNTU….yeah I’m highly pissed off. Isn’t Ubuntu some African word for “should have stuck with WIndows”
What we want is “fast, simple, intuitive”.
Not fancy pantsy windows/apple copie attempts.
They are shit. Linux rules!
Well, at least untill ubuntu 12.
Get back to real.
I have been using Windows for over twenty years. about a year ago I found out about Linux. I had heard of it before, but I had no idea that it was making OS for free. so I decided to check into it a little more. Since then I have tried several distros. My favorite one has been mint 12. It just works really well on my older desktop. It does everything I need it to do. Then a friend of mine had a relatively new desktop with a bad hdd. So I decided to put an old hdd in it and try it out with ubuntu 12.04. Since then I have decided to use this distro for myself in all my PCs. As far as I can tell, this is a really good distro. With windows, you get what you get and if you want it different you gotta break an agreement and do some under the table crap or you gotta pay for some useless program or you download some hacked file with a trojan in it. Then you gotta do all this crap to fix it and then buy antivirus spyware removal moneyhungry BS just to get running right. Just when you think you’re in the clear…..BAM, time to pay for renewal of the antivirus crap.
With ubuntu, that really isnt a problem. With any Linux, personalization is always available. All this complaining you people are doing is just….well…..STUPID. Take your whining butts back to Microsoft and write them a big fat check for their software and when you need to make a document, write them another one. and when your pc crashes write them another.
I think that this whole mess has gotten out of line. Linux is trying to make us a good OS for free and allow us to have it our way. If you have a problem with Ubuntu 12.04, tweak it. spend a little time making it what you want it to be. The only real problem I have ever had with any distro is the wireless drivers mess. So if I had a real complaint, I guess it would be that linux has not yet really had one distro that is Really tuned Just for laptops. I know it may be the hardest because of all the proprietery components, but I think it should be a top five priority. With all the talk of going towards tablets and phones…..What about all those different devices and their special needs. Will ubuntu be able to meet those needs. so many different kinds of phones and tablets.
sorry, I like U12.04 very much so far and would LOVE to see it on my Atrix 4g.
Some of you guys should learn how to program and help code a distro instead of being a bunch of arrogant leeches with over inflated views of your importance. If you wrote one line of code I could see you bitching about them not listening to you but you don’t and know you feel emasculated because you now know how small your roll in this is.
For such high tech people your desire to keep things the same is retarded. There are millions of stuck in the mud Gnome2 based distro for you to use, instal one and shut up
unity really isn’t that bad, just use
alt + tab
alt + `
alt + f2
This is not a “review”. It is just a nagging wife commenting about what gets on her t i t s.
Just b o l l o c k s.
Learn what the world “review” means mate before you use it.
I have to admit this is probably the worst review I’ve ever read…Honestly!!!…
Coming from from an all windows background, with no knowledge of linux, I decided it was time upgrade my laptop to linux mint (the closest OS to windows layout) to check it out…I STRUGGLED TO EVEN DO THIS, getting the WiFi working, video was choppy…not a good experience that left a bitter taste in my mouth.
So I attempted Ubuntu…and all i can say is ..what a pleasure!!!!
I slapped that iso sucker on my usb stick, booted and installed it. everything was just magically working, I like the layout, I find the workspaces awesome to work in….and like any other new version of any other new product…it takes some getting use to, but once you understand the logic of the layout flow..easy-peazy!
I can defenately recomend this to any non-linux pro
This dialog could be about anything. Gay marriage, global warming, the Mets… The intellectuals are making clear, obvious, objective statements, while the emotionals are saying “Oh, you’re just a Windows lover”, or “Oh, you’re just a hater”, or “Oh, you just don’t understand user design”, or “Oh, you just hate change”…
Barnes’ statement was clear and obvious: You can’t get to what you need as quickly with this interface as you could with previous interfaces.
Let me be even clearer: I’m a ___ professional. There are certain applications I launch frequently. I need to be able to launch these applications with a minimum of actions. The notion of being able to place an icon on the desktop, or on a menu bar, or to customize menus, satisfies the requirement quite nicely. Yes, these paradigms are old and established, but they satisfy my requirements for accessing what I need quickly.
So you’re saying these paradigms are bad because they are old, and I’m saying they’re good because they satisfy my requirements.
And you’re saying Unity is good because it is new, and I’m telling you it’s bad because it doesn’t satisfy my requirement that I be able to launch my often-used applications quickly.
Barnes is correct when he says Ubuntu has lost focus. The article hits the nail on the head. Thousands of us are complaining that Unity doesn’t work for us. Ubuntu says, “tough”, find yourself another distro. Emotional users are saying all kinds of ridiculous stuff that, frankly, scares us intellectuals.
All these years and all these volunteer developer hours later, and Ubuntu 12.04 is still a pain in the ass to install on main-stream, popular computers, and still has egregious bugs in core functionality. Had Ubuntu focused on the core functionality, what a powerful distro it would be today.
This has turned out to be the end of my Ubuntu experience. I have been using Ubuntu for a few years now, and have finally given up with their meddling with things that didn’t need fixing, and not fixing those things that did need attention.
The communication has been better than most , but is still flakey with mobile broadband, and wireless simply sucks……..These are important…. eye candy that works counter intuitively is not.
The desktop is a disaster. If you could customise it and get rid of the things you didn’t want, or could move them to where you did want, could easily find programs you haven’t needed to use before etc etc etc….
In short, if you could customise it completely then I would probably give it another go…. but no, some one else knows best, and thinks I will wear it….. and yes I changed to gnome classic, but the task bar is still unmovable, the menu is over nested….. and does not work as well as the older desktops did.
I won’ wear it. Change for change sake is just dumb. Many good apps became bad apps because the owners kept giving you updates you didn’t need or want, until you moved to something else just to get away from the changes that were worse than the original design.
If they want to drive cursors all around the screen and type into dialogue boxes, then fine… bring back DOS or windows 3.1.. at least it will run fast, and wont be reporting crashes every few minutes…. and not even tell you what crashed!!
The whole thing is a step backwards, and the unity bit is just a trip down through history to the dark days of DOS. We moved to a GUI world….. away from the text world, because it is/was better for intuitive stuff.
I don’t wish to learn keystrokes for a desktop. I do want to learn keystrokes for an application that does specific things. Desktop GUI’s are a tool not an application, and the unity tool is busted to hell, works poorly, slowly, crashes, and is difficult to understand why they have done things as they have, which makes it difficult to intuitively use.
Those who like it see the world very differently to me……. I know when the Emperor has no clothes and will say so. It does not need to be different to be cool, it has to work better than that which it replaced, and clearly this is not the case with unity.
It is a big, bloated, hungry OS…. a backward step. It would not load onto the first three laptops I tried it on, it needed a Dell dual core 2ghz, 4gb memory just to load up…. any less and it would get only part way through……
It is a bad OS needing a good machine just to get it up and running.
……Its the pits. Thats how I found it, others have found it to be the bees knees. Our standards are clearly different on what we expect from a good OS and desktop environment.
In contradictory to the rather negative content, I believe we agree the screenshots are beatiful. That is one of the issue Ubuntu is evolving into (my personal opinion) getting more beautiful all the time.
My suggestion to be productive with Unity, to find what you need FASTER with Unity, is to lock only the most used applications. For me, publishing as example, LibreOffice Writer and friends, GIMP, Firefox Browser, etc. The number of apps locked in the dash should be such, as they do not need more space than the HEIGHT of the screen. Than it is easy to switch between those multiple applications you are occupied with.
Should you happen to work on different focus than your routine stuffs, eg. Video editing, you might want to lock a few additional related apps to the launcher, while unlocking unlikely required app for current activity, like unit converter. You should UNLOCK these launchers later if you go back to your routine office stuffs processing again.
For occasional used apps, there is this SUPER button, and type two or three letters related to the app you are looking, voila, some suggestion appears, you just point and click. This is definitely faster than menu.
Inside app, press ALT, than type a few letters to find the instruction you want, choose, DONE.
I was a confident user of Ubuntu until version 12.04 infected my version of 11.10. since then even after a full clean reinstallation of ubuntu 12.04 my system, which ran perfect under 11.10, no longer allows the login screen to fit properly, to the effect the login screen stretches off to infinity on the left and I see no Login selection field, so can’t select between desktops – it’s not a Unity thing as I hadn’t even started Unity, it was still on the newfangled LightMD login screen waiting for me to select user and then enter password. The only way I found to login was to immediately press enter soon as the login screen appeared, which got me into the guest user, then I could set my chosen user account as the default and have it auto login.
So I’m now into my correct user account after a restart, you have to run restart to get the auto login to work, as logging out just drops me into the useless login screen whith it’s screen resolution of hell.
Some sites suggested ammending the lightmd config file to set a specific resolution which would better fit my screen – however trying that killed Ubuntu completely as it no longer got to the login screen at all,
Result I no longer trust Ubuntu to work consistently, each subsequent restart seems to show an ever increasing number of software errors relating to the core of Ubuntu.
I think I shall be dumping Ubuntu 12.04 and either go back to 11.10 or switch to Fedora which really has proper user support where the user is king, not the multinational organisation putting out the OS.
@ mountain
Well spoken.
@ lance
I’ve been using linux since mandrake 7. About 12 years or so.
We used Redhat at UNI in computer science and caused a lot of suffering with our learner programming skills. But this is the first distribution that I’v ever seen “hang”.
And it does so on a regular basis.
MS is a business.
For them, if people need schooling to cope with a new release, that’s great. They love it. (MS that is)
And if it looks good, it will sell.
If I can draw a seemingly unrelated parallel with remote controls; what is the one button you will ever be in a hurry to find on a remote control?
That would be the “mute” button.
Your TV is blaring away, the phone is ringing, people are shouting, someone is gesticulating at you that your house is burning down, while you frantically try to find your glasses to search for the mute button.
The mute button should be the largest, most easy to find button on the remote.
Let MS deal with pretty, while Linux deals with sensible and user friendly.
Even the dumbest people will learn eventually.
I’ve been a Linux (various flavours of Unix BTW) user since the mid 90s and this version of Ubantu is the worst I have seen and used. Unix power uses AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
I disagree. As someone who does not use linux, I like unity. I like the keyboard search.
In the past when I’ve tried ubuntu, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an inferior version of Windows. I really disliked those menus.
Unity however is unique user interface, and I was no more baffled than I was as I attempted to use a mac for the first time. Whether Mac or Ubuntu, given five minutes I can figure out how to do things efficiently. They both have a small learning curb (as does windows) but all seem intuitive once you get the hang of it.
Ubuntu 12.04 is terrible. Nothing functions as it did before the upgrade from 11.04. And I am not interested in spending all of my time searching for the solutions. There better be updates that fix my problem for me this time, because this is making me and my husband – a professional programmer – pull out our hair. It’s horrid!
I am a new convert to Linux. I have switched my desk top pc to Ubuntu 12.04 and have a Samsung laptop that dual boots Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7.
Coming from a windows background I like the layout and feel of Ubuntu 12.04 and the Unity desktop but my biggest frustration is the lack of a simple means to syncronise applications on the pc with those on the laptop. It appears that all you can do is check one against the other to see if there are new pictures, documents or music files. To cap it all the preferred method for this appears to be using Ubuntu One cloud services. I have several issues with this.
First, the thing I want to syncronise the most is Thunderbird, in particular the address book, calendar and events which is seeming impossible.
Second, why on earth would I (or anyone else for that matter) want to upload personal files to a cloud server just to download them somewhere else. I have a usb stick and it works just fine.
All I want to be able to do is syncronise applications and data on the laptop with the pc over my local network i.e. via my router.
Is this really so dificult?
It seems to me rather obvious that there are two userbases out there: compute-consumers and compute-producers. The first group want a decent replacement to Windows where they can be productive with desktop tools at virtually no cost. The second are interested in system internals; they want to see the system in its full glory. Sadly, Canonical’s strategy is gradually isolating the second group, which is what it has depended on to get to where it is in the first place. While I’m happy to see paid-for apps in the Ubuntu Software Center, it will not be long before most apps will be only available for sale and the developer community will begin to cry fowl. Ubuntu with then no longer be a free desktop solution but will become a platform for developers to sell apps – just like Apple and Google have done. Canonical is basically using its userbase to validate its own corporate agenda.
I’m a compute-producer and I certainly feel alienated by Canonical’s recent developments. I no longer have control of my desktop as I have been accustomed to in the past. In short Canonical has performed a coup d’etat on its faithful user base at the prospect of grabbing the wider consumer industry. What has particularly disturbed me is how many apps have regressed in basic functionality. For example, I used to scroll across tabs in gedit. This is no longer the case. The list of options available in System Settings… is pitifully few. Now Compiz is enabled by default. I’m having to relearn what I really don’t need to. I want to become like Linus Torvalds in compute-productivity (read ‘Just for Fun’) and as it currently stands this will be unnecessarily difficult.
It certainly feels like I’m on Windows again – very bad taste in my mouth.
What Canonical has effectively done is dump years of peer-learning. This is unforgivable. Watch out for the impending big stick of your user base. See what happened to OpenOffice?
All of these back and forth bashing the basher is what’s silly! I like another poster started with Slackware and the bazillion disk downloads – in the early 90′s. Am I a kernel developer? No. Have I compiled the kernel and added ethernet drivers ‘back in the day’ ? Yep.
I am going to bash on Unity and Ubuntu. I had installed Ubuntu 11.04, changed the defaults to use Gnome – which was OK. It actually worked very well. After ditching the madness of KDE 4, I when back to Gnome on Ubuntu. Finally, it changes me to Unity.
Its not good – for a desktop. Wait and see with Windows 8. MS has already backed of its pure Metro only approach. They did “research” on Office with that ribbon crap. They must have interviewed the 10 people in world that were still on Word Perfect for DOS! Nobody I know (Software Developers) liked it – because they couldn’t find anything. It seemed like a reason to sell more training, books, certifications that really weren’t needed. It was better for the 10 people in the world that hadn’t used Word and Excel before. Those tools were good. They made MS more than Windows.
Apple got it right – in design. They have a Zen of design principles. Make a gui for a phone or table ( a limited input device computer ) work for that plat form. There are similarities to a general use computer ( Desktop ) but they are not the same. It has different interface capabilities like a mouse and keyboard.
Ubuntu should take note. Its fine to offer, but they seem to act heavy handed when my update to the later Ubuntu 11, yet again installed Unity – as default – ignoring my already overridden settings. They should focus on making a bad ass operating system on already proven (chosen) tools. That’s how they got big in the first place. Making it easy. The arrogance of saying they know better in the face of their users is how they will fall. MS got to be big britches and look now- Apple is kicking ass. I took a serious look and got a MacBook because of how awesome the iPhone was. Mac OS/X rocks because it is easy to use, but doesn’t make it super hard to get at Unix. I can use vi or get Gvim to my heart’s content. I just don’t have time to futz with a ‘new paradigm’ of interface on the desktop. Its been decided in general. Menus are it. My personal work computer is not a Redbox Kiosk… I write Java/Groovy/Perl/etc code. Ubuntu has become lame-o. It may become irrelevant. The limited interface space has been won – Android. Make a desktop a desktop and make it good for your *real* audience. They are tech inclined.
Like stated earlier: if you don’t like Unity then install the classic Genome or don’t install Ubuntu at all. I do like Unity but I know my way around in Ubuntu as a long time user. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and feel free to spend your hard earned bucks on a paid OS…
1. Install Ubuntu.
2. Two options:
A:
Open Ubuntu Software Center.
Type “Gnome Shell”.
Click Install.
B:
Open Terminal
Type “sudo apt-get install gnome-shell”
3. Log out.
4. Select “Gnome” from session list.
5. Log in.
6. Enjoy.
If geeks like you and a normal user like me are surprised….
What I wanted to say is may be out of topic…but I wanted to say it:
Installing 12.04 is a real adventure especially on a old pc… It reminded me my early youth (there is 15 years….) when I tried to install window95…
I am not a professional but I think I represent the core target of the marketing plan of Unity.
For the design, I have to admit that at first blush I have been seduced….In practice….a bite less.
I need to make to many clicks and it is not so easy to find what I am looking for…
But in windows 7 it is the same story… reason why I am style using XPpro (for the office).
Bref, for the design…every companies are scrambling to the new “standard design” and it is not a shame to test new concepts.
But for the new version…..there should said more clearly that it is not done for old PC and updating should not be proposed up front.
For a person like me, not bad but far to be good a computing stuff, this last version had been a bitter experience: update pb, drivers not present, a Pae kernel missing on the old PC, multi boot pb…bref 8h in 2 days.: all is written in discussion boards but you discover them too late…
I say you that bc I appreciate UBUNTU server (old distrib) but the lack of information/support can be a risk if Unity seeks to tap on the market of the middle-skilled class. (Thank you for me ;) )
I’ve tried Ubuntu 12.04 for several weeks, acknowledging the fact that it’s a major change from 10.04 and requires time for adjustment. However, after having used it, I feel that this review is spot on, at least w.r.t. desktop environments. I have no qualms, in principle, with a major interface change such as Unity. But it is now much more of a hassle getting to applications in general. I also find that 10.04 had a much more customizable desktop (e.g. adding panel items, including a resource monitor, application desktop shortcuts that actually work) with more efficient use of screen real estate. Ubuntu really needs to allow the two interface paradigms to live together or side-by-side. On the whole, 12.04 (for desktops) impairs my productivity and removes capabilities that I use on a daily basis. In my humble opinion it is a step backward that will likely have difficulty penetrating the office-user market. Unfortunately, if Ubuntu stays the course, they may end up losing market share in the area where they actually make money.
Ubuntu: Please find a way to bridge the chasm between 10.04 and 12.04.
Ubuntu 12 is designed for the casual user, not for the user who wants to get work done. The power user will feel frustrated due to the lack of a task bar, lack of pin-able shortcuts that you can just click once to go to a custom application or document, and the strange ALT-TAB setup where you can’t just cycle through open windows.
In short if you just dabble on the computer it’s fine, but if you are an IT professional, web designer, programmer, or anything close to a power user it will frustrate you with unrefined and un-tested GUI features.
Here my opinion: After using Ubuntu 11 and 12, I am still using LinuxMint.
- Although I am a software architect, I cannot even minimize the window and find it back…
- The SQL database is extremely slow compared to LinuxMint, I would lose many customers with Ubuntu.
- Connecting to a wireless network requires starting network connections and add a connection. But I cannot press the OK button or see what’s missing in my settings. I’m sure a TCP/IP expert should be able to configure a Wifi… but in Ubuntu that’s not possible.
- It’s still OK for my kids to play games in Ubuntu.
- I would recommend to install Cinnamon in Ubuntu, that solves many problems. Last few months, Cinnamon is really mature and a beautiful desktop.
greetings,
Bart
Heh… Commenting about change, realities of a tablet interface does not change the reality that even if it’s useful for a Tablet (Looking at it from a desktop perspective, I think it MIGHT be usable as a tablet interface, but until I get a tablet on ARM or X86 to try it, it’s a “remains to be seen” item) we’re NOT using Tablets with it, now ARE we? If it’s something that’s clumsy to use, perhaps trying to get it as an OPTION (Well, it is after a fashion…I opted for XFCE4 and Xubuntu…) and not default to it would be a GREAT idea.
As an aside, I’ve got 30+ years of industry experience, 20-ish doing Linux stuff including some firsts in the Linux space. I’ve done everything from embedded systems all the way over to porting games (Yes…if you bought the Humble Indie Bundle #2, you probably played one of them…) along with doing bespoke distributions for companies.
What Ubuntu’s done is painful. And…we won’t get into the constant app crashes they’re blaming on RAM/Hardware problems that each and every one of my machines has- and the hardware tests out fine and it seems that ONLY 12.04 has this problem and none of the other Ubuntus or other Linux distributions do.
Ultimately, an LTS is supposed to be robust, stable, and ultimately usable. Precise, sadly, is precisely the opposite right at the moment.
Why do software devs, and many users alike, always seem to think that change is always for the better?
It is not.
Gnome 2 was great. It was simple, very userfriendly and worked flawlessly. Unity and Gnome 3 are just not “good”… I have used Ubuntu for 5 years, but Ubuntu it will no longer be. Such a big pity. Luckily there is still Xubuntu (or Linux Mint, or Debian, or, or, or…).
Change is not always good. Change is not always progress (Windows 8, anyone?)
I have to agree..
I was really giving Unity a try, but I wanted to run ‘Gparted’ – problem is.. it says it’s installed, but when I try to run it from the app search, it acts like it wants me to go to packages and install it – but once there, it’s installed.. I’ve just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to run ‘gparted’ – seriously now…
Oh yes, this is in addition to the few hours I’ve spent doing ‘workarounds’ to get Ubuntu installed, and then booting to the LiveCD to repair the boot disk with grub. Sadly, it was easy to find and run Gparted from the LiveCD – why not the installed OS?
*sigh*
Unity is beautiful to look at but painfully incompatible to my way of working.
This has forced me to look at other Debian-based distros that offer a more adaptable interface.
Mint with the Cinnamon GUI is my current #1 choice.
Sorry Ubuntu.
I suspect that most people in the real world would be quite satisfied with Windows XP (or earlier versions of Ubuntu and Mac). This is not because the users are die-hard conservative traditionalists, but rather, for many people even Windows 95 could do all they wanted from a computer. That is why Microsoft extended the support for XP. I think that for most users (including educational establishments, businesses et al) Ubuntu 10.04 is enough. Whilst it is true that developments and refinements must take place to make the “heart” (the kernel) cope with developments in memory and hardware; but change for its own sake (and bloating) somewhat negatives that exercise.
There is some Dutchman on Youtube who makes his ancient laptop have a wireless connection. He uses Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 5.5 (beyond that IE versions will not work with Windows 95). He probably has word 97 or similar. A geek nostalgic exercise? I think not His video shows that everything that around 80% of the pouplation want to do on a computer they can do with 32mb memory and a 1Gb Hardrive – albeit slowly one would think – but judging from the video, performance is no worse than my Ubuntu 12.04 for simple tasks.
I was a sound engineer, restoring ancient recordings from the past. At the start, I used Windows 95; and whilst I had to almost have a cup of coffee waiting for some programs to process my file, I could still do “real time” previews without “stutter.” Of course things speeded up with Windows XP, but that is the main point of development – to make things faster, more efficient as hardware/memory/CPUs advance.
Ubuntu 12.04 has halted the advance of Ubuntu, because (like Vista) it fails to build on an established success and tries too hard. Ubuntu 11/12.04 should have been about ironing out any problems of and improving 10.04, which was getting towards “classical perfection.” Ubuntu 10.04 recognised my printers new and old, my video cards (new or old); now that simple “perfection” is lost. That I do not like Unity is not based on prejudice. In fact I do use Unity for “pleasure,” for an evening with a glass of wine, entertainment, surfing and casual media. But for actually doing anything important, quickly and efficiently, Unity is by any objective standards slower.
I have a PhD in a country where that actually means something (yes, immodest of me). But I am also a practical man, including hardworking years in industrial management and being a single father. I love innovation and new things – but Unity and 12.04 have destroyed my admiration for Ubuntu. Ubuntu had (as I said) “classical perfection” (or were heading that way). Ubuntu had a “cool” level headed, pragamtic approach, without the gimmicks of Microsoft (just to sell a new product). Sadly it has all changed.
It is absolute crap.
Sorry, but Ubuntu has not got it any more.
This is the second LTS in a row that is crap.
In the preview one the wireless was borked.
In this one there are new ¨features”:
USB mounting is not working.
Upgrading from Ubuntu makes DBus daemon fail.
As long as there are no quality assurances implemented Ubuntu will be useless.
Now they’ve a policy that every moron can call itself a “developer”.
Result: half of the software does not work properly or is abandoned.
Examples: Wine (all versions after 1.3.27), Testdisk, all so called “swap” managers.
On top of it the fine attitude of Ubuntu developers in LaunchPad. 9 out of 10 error reports are ignored or dismissed as being too inactive.
Way to go, Ubuntu!
There is only one good solution: Move on to better distro like ArchLinux or LInux Mint.
Sorry, stupid autocorrect. “preview one” must be previous one.
I think John is right. Even if he may be a “teccy” he puts in blunt language the problems with the “new” Ubuntu – focus has been lost, the advantages and simplicity of Linux all lost . One thing remains constant however’ you can still (just) make Ubuntu work; then you make the mistake of going ahead with updates. That, as usual with Ubuntu means that some or many programs (sorry apps) will not work anymore and the long search for a solution starts all over again.
I just love the main bug/problem forum where one finds blunt messages “bug solved” – yes, but where? Anyone who says “could you please tell me how it is solved?” is greeted by the usual “we’ve said it’s solved please stop asking the question.” Then of course there is the usual “if you don;t like it then go back to Windows” and “who needs Flash that works” and such like.
As I said above, Windows 95 probably made computing as easy (in terms of GUI and logic) for the USER as it was going to get – Ubuntu 10.04 is the same. Anything on top of that may be fancy, but pointless. The interface IS important.
Unity is wrong not because it is new and different and people do not like change, it goes against humanity. What??? A bit strong? What makes us human and special is that we have initution and make choices. We make connections and jump about when reading or working out problems. We are also creative. This involves our having a “palette” or a “toolbox” the presence of which allows us to make sudden clever links and devise clever solutions. Unity hides the choices. We are not reminded of all the things available to us. A simple drop-down menu does this. “Oh I wonder if that CD burner, which I have never used, might be better for this task?” Editting and viewing tools for (say) videos are in a menu system, altogteher. With Unity there is no Palette. You have to know that you have a program.
This may seem an odd complaint. But think of this. I wanted to make my home bathroom better. I went to a big DIY place. Everything is on display, prompting solutions I would never have thought of. Imagine if there was just a counter where I asked for taps. The man would get more and annoyed as each tap is brought out for inspection. Nothing would inspire me. Oh and I need a special spanner dawbs on you when you get home. In that Unity based store you have to know what you want to do and think you can do and with what tool. Nothing prompts experiment.
Now you might say that I must be pretty dim not to know what programs I have and what they could or might do. But working on problems means the human mind needs prompts and quick access. Unity is like a public library with no arrangment, no browsable catalogue, and the books having to be ordered from the basement. I went into the library yesterday looking for a book on the Hapsburgs – I came out with a general history of Spain because it was in the history section with hundreds of others from which to choose. Photocopier 10p a go a sign said – I know where it is. Its presence was signposted – it gave me an idea to photocopy a page from another book. Hiding the photocopier and the books would have meant a very short visit and my full human potential for thought, links, and action would not be met.
Unity does not recognise how the human mind works even for the simplest task. That is what is wrong with command line also, which seems to be an increasing fetish for the Unity lovers. With a GUI and menus one sees for example the option to encrypt an RAR archive. With command line you must have a reference book to know the command – again, nothing tempts you to try something because you might not know it is there. As for putting any results of your work in a place you want, with Linux that has always been a total fisaco in Ubuntu command line.
I appreciate the recognition of Ubuntu’s long-term goals in this review.
I like 12.04 and find it a big improvement (faster and smoother and a bit sexier). Even though they didn’t offer any mind-blowing big changes, the feel and smoothness has made a big leap that I definitely notice. I was very happy to make the upgrade.
I’m going to keep on sticking with Ubuntu because I like their ambition and goals for the community. Don’t get me wrong, I love Arch linux and the other variations too; they will always have their place in my heart. But in terms of growing the community, advancing the market-share, exploring new areas, and popularizing Linux, Ubuntu is doing the best work.
The one thing I dislike about Unity, which many agree with, is the navigation. I don’t like to have to remember the name of an application. I prefer remembering the physical location. In the old GUI I remembered apps by clicking on the app list on the left, then going to the app list near the bottom, then grabbing the app I wanted at the top of that list. It was very much about moving through an abstract but concrete space in my computer.
There was a sense of permanent place to my apps that i loved and made navigation brainless. Now I’m always forced to boot my working linguistical memory to remember the name of that app or the keyword which will find it. I know it seems trivial but it’s something major to me.
I am adjusting, but I’d love for the top bar of my dash home to be something static and again give me that feeling of navigating through a physical space. Or even better, a second optional button below “dash” that brought me to an organized structure of programs and GUI tools that I could open and navigate through. Something I could swap for “dash home” or have in combination to it.
This is one of the strangest things I have ever seen. A complete Os is given for free and it’s possible to configure it as much as you want…But people are complaining about it the same way as people are complaining about Microsoft and Windows 8.
Peopel are only complaining about Unity. Hell Im not a fan but I just install Cinnamon and get on with my life. I tried 4 Distros in one day in Vm and found three of them to have serious bugs. But Ubuntu just worked.
Gee people get a life….Don’T like it? Change it or use a other Distro….
I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my four years old notebook (AMD Turion X2), after few configurations and re-configurations (you can do that, because it is open source and free), it works perfectly fine, flawless. I used it for my works, Canonical has done a marvellous job. Keep up the good works.
I used M.S. starting with Windows 95 to Windows 7. six years ago I got tired of all the viruses that attack windows and installed Ubuntu in a desk top that had crashed becaus of a virius and needed to reload. That pc has never had another virus attack. I now run Ubuntu on two desk tops and 3 laptops. Now I only use M.S. for special apps that never need to connect to the internet.
If you can just remember Ubuntu is not M.S. and use it as it is intended you will find Ubuntu far superior to M.S. Use M.S. for games and it beats Ubuntu but stay away from the internet with M.S.
For most recent news you have to pay a visit internet
and on internet I found this web page as a finest website for most recent
updates.
I still don’t understand the complaints against Unity. Want to find something? Hit the Windows key and start typing. It pretty much works like Spotlight on the Mac. What’s the beef?
I use two versions of Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10, and the current Arch) and four versions of Windows (Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 8 Ultimate) pretty much every day. I use Android every day as well. I also use iOS and Mac OSX every week. They all are very good. I mean, really good. I think that maybe we’re spoiled by having so many excellent operating systems in our lives, such that if one of them changes something we liked, it’s hard to give the change time to “sink in.” At any rate, I’m fine with Unity. It works, it seems lightweight, it’s fast, I’m happy. Sorry it’s not working out so well for others.
I have used Linux for 10 years now after abandoning Microsoft in 2002 – Red Hat, Suse, Centos, then Ubuntu and everything was fine – I even switched from KDE to Gnome. I stayed with 10.04 LTS avoiding the disastrous 11 experiments that trashed everything – then after a crash had to move on to 12.04. I cannot say loud enough how truly horrible Unity is. I cannot find or do anything as my workstation I use for everything including development was turned into toytown. So pedalling back I find Gnome-Classic with no gizmos and it is just about usable but still I find things missing. Mark Shuttleworth, I met you once at Kingston University when you got an honorary degree – I suggest you return it. What a completely insane thing to have done – to chuck away all that goodwill and collective expertise, and for what precisely? I mean sure on a tablet it mught be OK but I don’t want to touch my screen. I want to get on with some productive work. I had used Ubuntu as the preferred teaching platform for my students but now that is all in ruins. I am now recommending they use Raspberry Pi with Arch Linux set up as a LAMP server. Thanks Mark – maybe you just got tired of success
Adam said it perfectly:
‘Unity is beautiful to look at but painfully incompatible to my way of working’. This is 100% my own feeling. I will try his suggestion of Linux Mint with the cinnamon desktop….
Frank
Ubuntu 12.04 works for us wonderfully !!!
I am using Ubuntu 12.04LTS (Precise Pangolin) and have no problems except the Nvidia drivers which Ubuntu doesn’t like but tolorates it and I know now that I should have had an ATI Radion HD graphics card but I am stuck with the one that I have installed and I just have to watch the running tempature of the GPU like a hawk otherwise it is stable with the exception of the Update Manager which reports that dpkg.exe is broken and I have tried to fix it using the command line command I found on a webpage about the dpkg.exe error.
for me unity is by far the best desktop environment i have ever used, linux, windows or mac period!! ive tried them all over the years, gnome, kde, lxde, xfce, openbox etc none of them come close. i alway disliked gnome 2 and kde. hail to the future, hail to change and moving forward!!
I recently migrated to Ubuntu but it has not been a completely enjoyable experience. As Tony says it is often difficult to install or get some programs to work properly and then “trawling through pages of blah blah on the respective forums, plus the intellectual superiority one encounters leaves much to be desired.” Exactly and we have several examples of that idiotic arrogant expertise in comments here.
I once checked an earlier Ubuntu version and liked the desktop – may have been Gnome 2. But Unity is like win7 in that it chooses for you and hides other options. Great that things are simple as long as you know what it is you want, so I agree with Adam that “add a second optional button below “dash” that brought me to an organized structure of programs and GUI tools that I could open and navigate through. Something I could swap for “dash home” or have in combination to it.”
Maybe it’s all my old windows experience that makes me want to see and understand where various things are lurking.
I have a problem with typing in any program in Unity since to repeat a keystroke I have to wait at least a second, and no one in the forums can help with this. I suspect a Logitech driver issue which may not be solvable – I’m sure there are multiple examples of such problems with Ubuntu – indeed there are in Windows etc but mostly easily and quickly corrected.
It simply sucks. How sad. The UI is anti-productive and it crashes. Looks like I’ll try mint.
Ubuntu is a curse. A piece of garbage.
I can deal with openbsd, freebsd, pfsense, rhel, centos, clearos, stuff that respects stability. I can even deal with gentoo.
Ive been using linux since 1.x kernel days. And I find debian to be a meh thing (like apt is some gift? give me a break, it just sucks in more than CPAN does with perl and people think thats cool)
I find kuntbuntu to be bloody curse. A mess. A devlopers dream and everyone else nightmare.
I have been a long time supporter of linux, and enjoyed the experience of a massive range of linuxes since redhat linux 6.0. Tried Slackware, Tried Gentoo, Tried Coral. Enjoyed Mandrake (the leader of a polished linux for years). The next generation to step up & take the field was PC linux OS for me for its ease of use. The only thing I thought that sucked about it was its packaging system, it used .rpms. instead of .debs. (in my experience (luck or not) I have found .debs to be more reliable. Its package manager Synaptic is still in use today. If it had of used .deb packages I would have deemed it to be the operating system of all operating systems. I Each and everyone of us have an opinion due to our own personal tastes. I migrated from Redhat to Debian from advise from a friend, then went to Ubuntu from Debian because it was easier & siplified. I totally believed in Ubuntu with their advertising launch using Nelson Mandela as their figurehead. I mean, what a launch, Nelson Mandela. If he wasn’t a sybol for freedom at that time then then who was. Then, at that time, the new to the world operating system was free and capable of reaching infinite heights. It had the reliable .deb packaing system. It was amongst the linuxes that became capble of read, write with NTFS volumes, it took about a year but LibreOffice became capable of opening the document.extX files that Msoft had put on the market. Over my time I’ve seen a race between Gnome & KDE Desktops.
Both have overtaken each other many times in looks and fuctionality. The KDE of old in the Redhat days was ugly and Gnome was cool. KDE became Icandy city in the Madrake days making Gnome look Ordinary. There have been many desktops of choice over time but the low resource ones lacked the fuctionality of ease and required the keyboard mastery of a guru most of us don’t have. Most linux programmmers were programming their code for K or G. Now there is a new one .XFCE. That is all good & adds choice to the Menu & I haven’t tried it yet but I will soon, What I have found sad is being pushed out of Ubuntu due to the policies being implemented with it’s CEO that I have to live with Unity desktop. It’s buggy, non fuctional, ugly, slow, hated and what is worst of all compulsory. Why would I like it ? You have given me NO CHOICE. I like many others before me, and many others after me that will make their own minds up and migrate now to mint only because of YOUR policy in place. Each one of us that leaves supporting your OS means nothing to you as a single person, but as you walk out the door of Ubuntu office, retrenched because of lack of funds do to low numbers of the masses, DON,T say you weren’t warned. Unless of course this is deliberate and you are trying to destroy freedom. Then you Ubuntu people need to take a good hard look at your CEO and your board of directors.
First off, I want to agree with just about everyone here, (except those who say something like “get your bloody head out of your arse, mate!”) Leave the flame-throwers to the military.
Some love Unity, others hate it. It’s your choice.
Me, I’m on of the “old geezers” who started with technology back in the mid 60′s, cut my teeth on computers when people were still arguing if the punch-card should be “9-edge” or “12-edge” down, and in what corner should the diagonal notch be placed.
And yes, I’m sorry, but my eyes haven’t been 20 years old in a very long time so reading the microscopic 2.5 point type that has become so prevalent isn’t even a matter of “difficult”. It’s a matter of “impossible” Not without holding a Bauch and Lomb magnifier to the screen.
My first Linux distro was a copy of Red Hat 5.0 given to me by my older brother – and I haven’t looked back. Of course, I still use Windows a great deal, (I’m typing this on a laptop that runs Windows 7), and I probably will continue to do so. Why? 100% of my clients use, and depend on, Windows based machines.
However I still have this special place in my heart for Linux.
I discovered Ubuntu back around version 7 or 8, I forget exactly which – and I was hooked! *FINALLY* a Linux distribution that I could install and – almost immediately – get busy with. Up to this point, Linux was a lot like Windows with respect to the amount of time spent between the initial install, and actually getting to use the machine.
In Windows, there is about 12 hours of Windows Update Hell to go through. In Linux, there is the day or two of chasing down why this particular thing doesn’t work, or that particular thing is way wonky. Seriously, when I would do a Linux install, I spent more time on a Windows machine searching the web for a solution to why the Linux box couldn’t do something trivially simple – like read a floppy disk.
Even though I have a through technical and engineering background, I still believe that a personal computer should become an “appliance”. You turn it on. You get busy and accomplish something, and then you turn it off when you’re done. Just like a television. Or a toaster.
(See my blog article on this exact same subject, located at:
http://www.qatechtips.com/2011/02/only-feature-linux-needs-concepts-in.html)
Ubuntu was such a breath of fresh air, that I even wrote a blog article extolling its virtues – claiming that it was the first Linux OS that I would feel confident putting on my wife’s or even my sainted mother’s computers.
Ubuntu’s claim to fame was that they were “humanizing” the computer, making Linux truly accessible to the masses. And I loved that.
Ubuntu’s slogan was, (note the past-tense here), “It’s all about choices!”
Unfortunately, starting at about Ubuntu 9.n, the commitment to “choice” has bee slowly ebbing away.
First, they throw Grub-2 at you. Which, (IMHO), revives everything that was universally hated and despised about LILO. Along with Grub-2, they tossed away the boot and system management tools in favor of “Plymouth” – which is virtually impossible to configure, unless you have a PhD in Python or Perl.
This was a disaster for me because I like to put desktop editions on my servers – after stripping out the cruft, as I believe in both a text AND graphical interface and the ability to choose between runlevel-3 and runlevel-5. And why? Some things are absolutely trivial to do from a command-line that are impossible or nearly so in the GUI. (tune2fs, anyone?), and there are things you can do in a GUI with trivial ease that are much more difficult to do using the command line. (Flipping through folders, re-arranging things, dragging-and-dropping things from here to there, etc.) And since most of the time my server machines are not sitting there with me in front of them, why have a desktop running and taking up processor time if I don’t need it? I could invoke it in a heartbeat if needed, and dismiss it back to a text based login just as quickly.
Starting with the 9.n versions, they started messing with the desktop, it becoming worse-and-worse with every iteration. Eventually, by 10.04 LTS they had converted the desktop to an entirely Mac-like paradigm. Was I given a choice about Grub-2, Plymouth, or having a Macintosh interface shoved down my throat? Nope.
(Viz.: http://www.qatechtips.com/2011/03/open-letter-to-cannonical-and-ubuntu.html)
Oh sure, I could “change” it. But why should I have to bother? It would not have been that difficult to ask what style of desktop I wanted – Windows-like or Mac-like? Why should I have spend non-trivial amounts of time on the Internet, trying to download a desktop “theme” that was both comfortable, and had buttons and controls that were easily seen. Windows got that right, way back with version 3!
I was especially amazed at the sudden “Mac-Attack” that Ubuntu had. This puzzled me since the largest source of potential cross-over users is from Windows. So they come to Ubuntu, and are immediately tossed in to a totally alien interface. Smart Move, Ubuntu!
Somewhere between 10.04 and the 11.n releases, they came up with “Unity”. IMHO, they should have called it “divisive” because that is precisely what it has done – split the formerly united Ubuntu community into a collection of spitting, name-calling, flame-throwing factions.
And it was somewhere between the 8.n releases and the 10.n releases that the Ubuntu fora became much less friendly and much more elitist. Attempts to question “Salvation by Shuttleworth” was met immediately with an almost brutal disregard for other people’s opinions. Almost if Ubuntu had become a religion, (or a controlling political regime), and even *thinking* against the Established Party Policy was likely to get the KGB, (oops! I meant the movers-and-shakers at Ubuntu), pissed enough at you to flame you off their fora. More and more of the “elitist” members were complaining about “dumbing down” Ubuntu. (Hey! That’s what got you there in the first place! You didn’t have to have a PhD in Computer Science to run the damn thing.)
If you like Unity, fine. You can have mine too. And yes, there are people out there who think Windows 8, along with Vista and ME, are wonderful examples of a polished operating system too. They can have mine as well.
Now – going back to the “Unity” verses “Desktop” paradigm issues – To some, the “regular” desktop is dull and boring. But, then again, so are the steering-wheel, brake pedal, and accelerator pedal “user interface” in your car. The automotive “user interface” hasn’t changed since sometime in the 1920′s or 30′s – and why? Because it works. Cars have evolved from 3 cylinder hand-cranked engines with a chain drive to today’s computer-controlled version – yet the “user interface” hasn’t changed.
Why do I like the “regular” desktop paradigm? Because it works. And like another poster said, it works the way people work.
The top of a “real” desk works the same way. You put files, folders, notes, and whatevers, in various places on the desk where they’re easy to grab when you need them. Your often used “apps”, the telephone, the stapler, the can with the pencils, paper-clips and rubber bands, note-pad, and the roll of tape are all placed strategically, where you can find them, virtually blindfolded, while you’re on the phone, looking at your computer screen, thinking of something entirely apart from “where did I hide the stapler THIS TIME?!” You don’t have to think that, because it’s where you always put it.
The computer desktop works because, believe it or not, is primarily visual. You depend much more on sight and “picture memory” than you do on literary and word memory. Why is the GUI so much easier to work with than a pure terminal-based command-line interface? For just that exact reason. Even the most literate among us thinks – at the most fundamental cellular level in our brains – in symbols and pictures.
Have you thought about WHY so many of our thoughts and ideas are “picture” based instead of “text” based? Or why “a picture is worth a thousand words”? It’s that way because our most ancient ancestors were visually based. Light travels faster than sound, so our cave-man ancestors could SEE the sabre-toothed-tiger long before they could HEAR it. Ergo they could position themselves for the quick kill, or the quick getaway. In either case, it was a matter of raw survival. Pictures beat words (almost) every time.
In contrast, despite it’s splashes of color and graphics, the Unity desktop is more “literary” based instead of “picture based” Sure, you can find something just by typing in the first few letters, but. . .
OK, people. Answer this one and tell me how many times has something like this happened to you:
You are flipping through the folders on your computer looking for an album you know you have, by the “Wright Brothers” when you stumble upon it – and blast it all! – they call themselves the “Right-Brothers”! You remember this *AFTER” you see the little icon for their album cover. No amount of “lens” or “typing the first few letters” would have gotten you there, sine you remembered an incorrect spelling.
The “classic” desktop paradigm has lasted so long, and has such a devoted following, because of the one simple fact: It works, and it works well. On a desktop.
Obviously, we”re not talking about Android tablets, or smartphones – they have a different use and as a result a different GUI that is more suited to it.
But for a REAL desktop computer, give me a REAL desktop where I can actually get some work done!
Conclusion:
I still think that the basic premise that Ubuntu started with is still valid. And I am absolutely awe-struck by some of the things that they have done. To give you an example quoted from one of my articles:
(quote)
Some of the features are absolutely unprecedented in the world of ‘nix operating systems, such as the automagic “apropos” feature where a mistaken or mistyped command is rejected – and the errant user is supplied with “did you mean. . . .?” suggestions. Even to the relatively experienced sysadmin, this feature is both welcome and useful.
(/quote)
However, the way it occurs to me is that the torch has been passed to a new generation. And I can’t say it better than the title of an article I saw in issue 167 of Linux Format magazine: “Mint: the new Ubuntu?”
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
I’ve had Linux on and off machines for a few years, but I’m definitely a newbie. And I don’t see what the Unity fuss is about.
I’ve a laptop that has MS Vista on it, and decided to wipe the drive, re-install Vista on a small partition, and let Ubuntu 12.04 have the majority of the drive. And I had just done a clean install of Windows 7 on a more modern desktop. So I was installing MS Vista, Win 7, and Ubuntu back-to-back.
Guess which ones had me gnashing my teeth? (Hint — not the penguin!!!)
OK, so I worked with Unity for a few months and found I didn’t appreciate it. I changed it to Gnome classic. This took less than 5 minutes. For me it works flawlessly. Gnome is my default, but I can boot to Unity if I feel like it.
I don’t get it. Are people confusing Ubuntu 12.04, an operating system, with Unity, a desktop? That’s understandable in the Windows world, and even more so in the Mac world. Not so much in Ubuntu.
(As you all know, the OS manages hardware, links dependencies, hosts applications, and performs file access. The desktop is the user interface. It must integrate seamlessly with the OS, but it is NOT the same thing.)
Maybe this review could be shortened to two lines:
“Installed Ubuntu 12.04 but didn’t like the desktop. Switched to Gnome.”
I’m not meaning to dis the reviewer; he’s expressing legitimate dissatisfaction with Ubuntu’s default desktop. And I’m probably talking out of turn, since I really am a newb with respect to Linux (despite installing Red Hat back in the 90s and Open Suse about 8 years ago, I never really explored Linux until the last year.) But still … I find it ironic that the Unity outrage prefigured the Windows 8 outrage, and they are occasioned by many of the same reasons. The difference is that it’s trivial to change Unity, and MS makes it harder to change the Win 8 interface.
On another subject: I sympathize with those who’ve had trouble installing Ubuntu 12.04. I’ve put persistent installs of both 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu on flashdrives, an external HD, and on PCs. But things can and do go wrong, and I sympathize.
Ubuntu has a user interface designed by people who think that orange and purple is a tasteful color scheme. ’nuff said.