Unity breaks basic UI principles

[Pongo Pan]

On Sat, 2011-04-30 at 12:43 +0200, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> On Saturday 30 April 2011 07:54:55 am Gilles Gravier wrote:
> > I remember something about open source being all about choice. That
> > sounds slightly incompatible with "that's not an option". :)
> 

> SuSE used to have a choice screen were you could decide if you wanted KDE or 
> Gnome. Why doesn't Ubuntu have such a choice (it could be under an advanced 
> option and it could require to download some stuff if you install from CD): 
> Unity, Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE 4 - even Trinity KDE as unsupported, why not?
> 
openSUSE still gives this choice in the main-line DVD.  The downside is
a *much* larger download and confusion for novice users.  The Canonical
motto clearly is KISS.

> I understand Ubuntu targets "basic" users and those are not supposed to make 
> choices, but on the other hand it may be too complicated for them to change 
> their UI, so they will probably change the distribution (I know so may who 
> don't make a difference between Linux and Gnome (or KDE).
> 
> Sorry, I'm a teacher, and I think this way of "the user is dumb, so let's make 
> the product as dumb as him" won't give good results in the end. Let's educate 
> the user - softly, but nevertheless.
> 
Canonical is clearly working toward one interface for all devices.  If
the user becomes adept at working with a tablet he will immediately be
adept at working with a netbook, PC, or a (very smart) smart phone when
he switches.  This may not be attractive to Linux nerds but ....

My wife just bought a new android smart phone.  She's very technical yet
it took her quite a while to figure out how to do some very basic things
because the interface was vastly different from her old telephone in the
same series from the same company. Suddenly the value of a familiar
cross-platform paradigm seemed higher.
 
> Just my 2 cents as usual,
> 
And my 0.02 interglactic credits.

-- 
pongo pan
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