Another Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog review and some notes on MPT's blog entry

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

I posted a response on Technocrat.net in 
http://technocrat.net/comments.pl?sid=1926&op=&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=4034 
where bdotson asked if there was a compelling reason to switch from Fedora Core 3.

A few notes I'd add to Thomas' blog entry 
(http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/04/11/ubuntu):

- Point #42: "Unmount"ing something is technical sounding.  Something less 
technical should be used.  Ejecting a disc is fine.  Perhaps there is 
something one could use to describe disconnecting a camera (like "Disconnect 
camera")?

- Point #43: GNOME's CD player is also bad because it only works with analog 
connections.  If programs should "just work", CD players should play ripped 
audio.  I look forward to seeing a Sound Juicer that also plays and records 
ripped audio so the list of apps to do this job are short and simple--one.

- Generally, far more integration is needed.  Apps should not try to do online 
things when there is no working network connection.

- Point #66: Bugzilla is too hard for novices to use (and therefore will not 
be used by them).  Novices shouldn't have to care about what X.org, Nautilus, 
Metacity, etc. are or what makes them different from one another.  I think 
most novices will identify them collectively as some high-level class like 
"the GUI" or somesuch thing.  Ubuntu makes more of an effort than other 
organizations do with their Bugzillas, but there needs to be a feedback 
mechanism that lets users quickly give a short reflection on an arbitrary 
section of the OS.  The hardware database wizard (or whatever it's called) is 
a step in the right direction.

- GNOME (or perhaps its metacity) needs a way to let the user set the size of 
common UI elements.  The problem with working in bitmaps is that as screen 
resolution increases, the overall size of bitmaps decrease.  So it's hard for 
me to click on the tiny scrollbar buttons, scrollbar well, and scrollbar at 
1600x1200 despite that I need that much area for doing work in other programs.