HP nc4010

Tue Nov 16 16:52:25 CST 2004

On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 16:11 -0500, Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Here is a translation of some of my notes; please do pass them on. 
> You're free to use my name and e-mail with these, and people can get in 
> touch if they have questions or comments.
> 
Cc'ing ubuntu-devel.

> Overall, I gave the distro a rave review, so the following should be 
> taken as constructive criticism given in the best of faith. The comments 
> regarding Windows users are based on my experience with putting several 
> Linux virgins in front of a fresh Ubuntu install, asking them to do 
> certain things ("connect the USB hard drive and play a movie"), and 
> observing their behavior carefully.
> 
> - Robert Love's netapplet ought to be installed by default. Netapplet is 
> a panel applet showing the user all the network interfaces installed, 
> and if any are wireless (and receiving), a list of all wireless networks 
> in range, along with signal strength and encryption status. This allows 
> OS X or XP style painless wireless network detection. Netapplet was 
> imported into GNOME recently, so that might explain its absence from Ubuntu.
> 
Neither the netapplet or RedHat's NetworkManager were quite stable and
polished enough to go into warty, hoary will almost certainly have one
of them -- or with any luck an exciting combination of the two.

> - Totem by default seems to register certain MIME types (e.g. RealMedia) 
> that it can't play. Windows users are taken aback by this, thinking they 
> did something wrong.
> 

> - The login screen looks very professional, and strong kudos are in 
> order to the graphics team at Ubuntu. That said, users (particularly the 
> younger ones) like the idea of the XP style, browser login screen, where 
> picking a user comes down to clicking an icon. In fact, it's a lot 
> easier to explain to a kid that he needs to "click the yellow flower" 
> when he wants to use the computer, than it is to tell him to type in his 
> username and password. As is, the "Happy GNOME with Browser" login 
> screen is configurable, but an Ubuntu-styled "Human with Browser" 
> probably ought to be the default. Nota bene: the installation should 
> pick a random friendly icon for the user to begin with, instead of 
> assigning the standard "question-marked face silhouette".
> 
Better face browser support is intended in the future.

> - The multimedia aspect frustrated my test Windows users to no end. 
> Rhythmbox doesn't play WMA and AAC out of the box, which makes importing 
> existing music libraries next to impossible. No one has homogeneous mp3 
> music libraries anymore. What's much worse: when Rhythmbox stumbles upon 
> a WMA file, it doesn't skip over it, it takes up 100% of the CPU, and 
> pretends it's still importing songs happily. That's about the worst way 
> it could possibly react.
> 
> - Totem - rather, GStreamer - is unhappy about a range of video formats 
> that come its way. I watched a user with a collection of xvid-encoded 
> movie clips look around for 15 minutes in vain for some way to get a 
> useful error message that would tell him what to install to be able to 
> get proper playback. With a video system such as vlc, the problem 
> vanishes. Perhaps the default choice of video player should be reconsidered.
> 
Sadly we have to ship with this for legal reasons.

> - Evolution is flaky. It crashes in almost impossible to replicate ways, 
> and at least once or twice a day on a large (~7-8k messages) mailbox and 
> using an IMAP server. My Windows users liked the interface ("it's just 
> like Outlook!") but got very worried about their e-mail possibly 
> disappearing when Evolution kept crashing. "How do I know it won't eat 
> my messages?" With Thunderbird+Sunbird, the slick UI isn't quite there, 
> but things are visibly faster, and rock solid. Because first impressions 
> are important, I don't know if I could recommend a switch to Thunderbird 
> as the default mail client, but it ought to be considered. Evolution 
> just doesn't seem to be production-quality software.
> 

> - Software management is counter-intuitive. How is a new user supposed 
> to know that "Synaptic Package Manager" is what you use to install and 
> remove programs? It might as well have been written in Russian. Oh, and 
> even after being shown how to access synaptic, none of my Windows users 
> figured out that Synaptic was the name of the utility, not a part of the 
> program description. And after that, they asked "Why the hell would I 
> care what it's called? Why is that in the menu?", and I didn't have an 
> answer. Learn from Redmond: the Control Panel has an item called 
> "Add/Remove software". That's exactly what a user wants to read. 
> Seasoned users will stick to the shell, anyway.
> 
A simpler "add/remove software" UI is planned for hoary.

> - In the 64-bit version, the distribution installs sans compiler. What's 
> more, the repositories don't provide a compiler. The GCC docs are there, 
> but GCC itself is gone. There's no easily findable 64-bit AMD ELF binary 
> of GCC available for download online. I don't think I need to comment on 
> how bad this is: give the user a compiler!
> 
None of the architecture CDs install a compiler, it's simply not
something we feel most "users" need.  If you want to compile things, you
almost always need to install some -dev packages as well -- at that
point you need to learn how to install things from the network so having
to install a compiler (usually via the "build-essential" package) is no
great leap.

Unless I'm totally mistaken, installing build-essential on AMD64 gives
you a 64-bit AMD ELF binary of GCC.

> - All the hype with worms and viruses has Windows users scared. They 
> don't understand the issues at hand, but they know that SP2 gave them a 
> Security Center that "protects them". I watched a Windows user sit down 
> at my computer, search through every menu several times, turn to me and 
> say "I can't find the security settings. What if someone hacks me?" Now, 
> anyone in the audience who says "But Linux is more secure" should 
> realize that that's not what the point is here. We need to capitalize on 
> the raised security awareness that Redmond is stirring among users, not 
> try to silence it with pre-packaged pro-platform platitudes. To that 
> end, I propose Ubunutu installs with a default iptables policy of 
> allowing all outbound connections, related inbound connections, and 
> dropping all other packets. Then, a "Security / Firewall" item can be 
> added to the Computer -> System configuration menu that can bring up a 
> dialog box with a pretty graphic (lock, or something secure-looking), 
> and as simple as a "Enable firewall" or "Disable firewall". Future 
> releases can obviously incorporate better or more fine-grained 
> firewalling policies (smart application-level firewalling would be an 
> amazing end-goal) but even this would do.
> 
This seems rather silly.  It's a button to make users feel safer.
Ubuntu's default policy is exactly what you just described, no services
listen for incoming connections.

It's sufficiently trivial to fool the system's "related" checks if
you're actually *on* the system that this buys you no additional
security.

> - The stock Warty kernel seems quite good; I was overjoyed to see 
> madwifi drivers incorporated, which powered my Atheros AR5212, no 
> questions asked. I'd like to see integration with swsusp2 in the future, 
> which promises to deliver proper suspend/hibernate functionality.
> 
One of the goals of the laptop team for hoary is better laptop support.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at canonical.com
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