Ubuntu and its community

Fri Jun 24 23:19:30 UTC 2011

Hi,

I agree with Eric's statement. Limiting options does not appeal to a 
broader audience.

Factually I would say that options are exactly what the name says: they 
are "optional". So if you do not like these options then ignore them and 
stick with the default behaviour of the product that you bought.

But you should at least have the "option" to modify the given behaviour 
if it does not appeal to you or if it does not meet your 
requirements/needs.

In bug 733349 I wrote – admittedly very polemic – about the restriction 
of options. I think that Ubuntu should accept that people want at least 
a bit of freedom to decide what they like and what they do not like. So 
assure the users that one really cares for them and their needs, I would 
recommend that one really MUST include some options to configure the 
system. Being able to configure some things out of the box would show 
their good will. It would show that Canonical accepts that their users 
are individuals we want some freedom in the configurability of the system.
In the bug I questioned where the Ubuntu development is heading. Are we 
reaching a point where some developers will decide that only three or 
five opened windows are allowed to be placed on a virtual desktop 
because more opened windows are confusing to a user? Will this happen 
sometimes.
See: I really would admit that five windows on one (virtual) desktop 
would confuse me. I usually have only two (or only one) opened window 
per virtual desktop. But I have to accept the fact that other people are 
happy with ten or fifteen windows opened at once and that some people 
are placing them on the same virtual desktop because they do not use the 
other three virtual desktops.

It is all about choice. And this choice is taken away from us step by step.

I really like the Honda example. Indeed, imagine that you buy a car but 
there are only three models available because modification are not 
allowed. Thus you cannot buy a cabriolet or a car with a better CD 
player or some car with a MP3 player.

Imagine you are working at an office. An office where you have to place 
the monitor of your computer at the right side of your desk and where 
you have to place all your pencils on the left. Not because you want 
them to be placed there but because options to change this are taken 
away from you. Imagine you are not allowed to place a picture on the 
wall or place some flowers near the window because of some policy that 
forbids it. That is Ubuntu Unity at the moment. The modern desktop of 
the operating system is actually and factually your office. You want to 
be comfortable in your own office and spent there a part of your 
life/time, thus you want it to look the way you like it.

I do not talk about big changes. I do not want the Launcher to be 
removed or the dash to be utterly revamped and reconstructed.  The 
things I heard most often when somebody complains are:

1) why can't I move the position of the launcher?

2) where do I modify the launcher so that it does not hide when a window 
gets to close to it

3) where can I change the quicklists entries and add some more

4) where can I modify the icons on the launcher so that I can click them 
and open more than one instance of nautilus

5) where can I modify the icons on the launcher so that clicking on them 
minimizes the corresponding opened window

There are some other issues I have encountered but these are indeed not 
about options but rather about some deeper, essential changes to the 
system which should not be debated here, at the moment (at least). They 
concern the search capabilities of the dash (which are horrible and 
utterly unintuitive at the moment) and some inconsistencies about the 
drag and drop behaviour of Unity as a whole.

Do you know what is funny? When we had a simple panel, this panel could 
be configure to autohide if you wanted it to autohide. Or you configured 
it to always stay visible. You could put at many application starters on 
it as you wanted and when you clicked a started three times you could 
actually get three opened windows. I really could click three times on 
Nautilus and get three windows. Is it so unusual to have more than one 
Nautilus window opened at once? So that I can drag a file from one 
window into the other? On the old panel I could place applets and there 
were many of them. I could choose the position of the old panel. When I 
wanted it on the right side of the screen, I placed it there and if I 
liked it placed on the bottom I placed it there.
When I first saw the Launcher I thought:"cool we are getting a dock". 
But the guys from Canonical always said its not a dock its the Launcher. 
And indeed it was. It was no dock, it was not a panel, it indeed was 
something new: it was a Launcher, which was less than a dock and less 
than the old panel. At the moment it has only half of the capabilities 
of a dock or the panel. It is the Launcher could also mean "it is a 
regression".

All I want are some basic functions that every other operating system of 
the world offers to the user. I want to decide what my workflow is. I do 
not want the operating system to dictate me how my workflow has to be.

I really have to thank everybody who answered to my post and I hope we 
can bring this discussion to a fruitful conclusion. Or better: I hope we 
will perhaps provide some impetus for a change.

@Miguel Branco:
Your post sounded as if you wanted to fork Unity. I do not want to 
produce a fork of Unity or something like that. That is the wrong way. 
Unity is good in many aspects. But there some things which have to 
improve. I would love it if we could start a discussion with the 
developers of Unity so that they perhaps accept some patches to the 
system which would allow the system to be more configurable.
If users provide patches of good quality I think it is the 
responsibility of the Canonical developers to have a look at them and 
perhaps include them in their code. This does not mean that they should 
change the default behaviour but I want the possibility to configure 
some simple things out of the box, so that I do not have to accept the 
default behaviour but can instead change some things to meet my own 
wishes and needs.
I do not call you naive because I still hope myself that Canonical will 
listen to the user feedback. But on the other hand I have been 
disappointed to often. When Mark Shuttleworth admitted he made some 
errors during the last release cycle I thought "wow, now we will hear 
about some changes". But now I still have not heard anything about these 
changes. I still cannot see that the development process became more 
transparent. Even worse: when you look at the blueprints page for 
Oneiric you will not find any point that involves any plan to diverge 
from the ideas they had during the Natty cycle.

@Evan Huus
I already knew about the Control Panel in Gnome3 , but factually I is 
not so different from the old gnome-control-center. The things you can 
control/configure with it are the same. That was the reason why I said, 
we need a trimmed down version of Ubuntu Teak which can be integrated 
into the Control Panel (though I have to admit, I said "control center" 
before).
Ideally there should be several entries in the Control Panel
1) to configure the launcher
2) to configure the dash

The first entry 1) should contain the already existing options from CCSM 
to configure the  dodge/autohide behaviour of the launche. Additionally, 
it should be able to configure the reactions to clicks on the launcher 
icons (thus an option to decide if the Launcher should behave like it 
does at the moment or like a Dock); the position of the launcher should 
be configurable here; ideally the quicklists entries should be modifiable

The second entry 2) should contain some of the options to configure the 
Dash that a couple of people demanded. Though I admittedly am not sure 
anymore what these demand are. But certainly we can collect some ideas 
concerning this aspect of configurability. I myself am so far content 
with the Dash (except for the search capabilites because I hope it will 
develop into some kind of blend between the Windows 7 start menu and Mac 
OS X's "Spotlight", but we will see).

@all
To just point it out again now: I do not want a fork or something like 
that. I just want the Canonical developers to listen. It would be 
wonderful I we together could create some patches and a category in the 
Control Panel to configure some aspects of the behaviour of the Launcher 
(and whatever else you can imagine). And I want this to be part of the 
official Ubuntu release. But this can only work if the Canonical 
developers ware willing to communicate with us. And I really hope that 
we will have a response from some Canonical employee within the next days.

Am 25.06.2011 00:06, schrieb Eric Morey:
> On Fri, 2011-06-24 at 15:22 -0500, Ramón Rocha wrote:
>> Additional options add complexity so it makes sense to omit them.
>> Would you agree?
>>
> I don't agree. Limiting options that are desired is not a way to appeal
> to a larger audience. If Honda decided to remove the additional option
> of retractable windows to limit complexity, they would surely see a
> decrease in sales.
>
>