[OT] Ubuntu Should Be Forked!

[Liam Proven]

On 30 January 2012 20:32, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/30/2012 04:09 AM, Swapnil Bhartiya wrote:
>>
>> http://www.muktware.com/articles/3252/ubuntu-should-be-forked
>>
>> I have been a long time Ubuntu user, been using it since 2006. I loved
>> it and have been installing it on user's PC until version 11.04 came out
>> with Unity. Before you get a wrong impression let me make it clear that
>> I love to try new things as long as they don't come in between me and my
>> work.
>>
>> I started using Unity since its alpha days and am currently running
>> Ubuntu 12.04 with HUD and KDE 4.8. The reason is simple -- I am curious
>> and love trying new things. I am also running openSUSE with Gnome 3 to
>> stay updated with the latest development.
>>
>> I am not certain if I will continue to use Ubuntu after 12.04 if they
>> force HUD on me. Mark Shuttleworth has given clear indication that HUD
>> will ultimately replace the menus. I don't know what he meant by that.
>> When he introduced Unity has specifically said that this doesn't make
>> much sense for bigger screens and now we are all stuck with Unity and
>> Global Menus. We have seem mass exodus from Ubuntu to Linux Mint. Most
>> of my associates have moved to Linux Mint and DistroWatch is an
>> indicator of that migration.
>
>
> Jeeeez... just use KDE or XFCE or Mint then. Ubuntu supports those as well,
> through their noble efforts to make the Ubuntu platform open as possible. If
> you don't want HUD, don't use it. It's like complaining about limping home
> with a flat tire when you have a spare in the trunk. IYou cannot claim that
> Mark Shuttleworth has restricted your choices in any way, as that is not
> true.

Agreed and well said.

> And, if MicroSoft, or some other patent squatter, decides to sue over drop
> down menus, we'll be in the unmistakable clear, and Mint/KDE/XFCE/LXDE and
> the rest, including SUSE and Red Hat will be scrambling like mad, at the
> last minute, to adopt a HUD scheme

... Or something.

There's a difference between drop-down and pull-down menus. Pull-down
means that you have to point at the menu bar and click the mouse
button; drop-down means that you point at the menu bar and the menus
open by themselves; you need only click to select an option.

Apple invented the fixed top-of-the-screen pull-down menu bar with the
Lisa, I believe. The Mac copied it.

AmigaOS had a version too, but there, you had to right-click to make
the menu bar appear before you could use it. A horrible system, IMHO.

I am not sure who invented the /in-window/ menu bar fixed across the
top of the window - that /might/ have been MICROS~1 but I suspect
there was prior art. What I think /was/ original to MS was the idea of
keyboard control using Alt+a letter, with the active letter undelined
to show you which it was; so, for instance, I open files using Alt-F,
O, which is standard across Windows, KDE & GNOME in pretty much all
apps. I do a wordcount in Word/Writer with Alt-T, W - which is one of
the thousands of such keystrokes that are broken in MS Office
2007/2010.

However, the in-window menu bar and the keystroke access to it were
standardised as part of the IBM Common User Access system in the early
1980s and were also adopted in IBM OS/2 and OSF Motif on many Unix
boxes. (Along with many other Windows features.) I doubt very much
that any patents on it could be enforced now.

If Ubuntu wanted to get away from MS-style in-window menus, me, I'd
have preferred they shift to just context menus, as used in RISC OS
and some early Unix window managers. That was, there is /no/ menu bar,
ever, anyway; you just click one particular mouse button - the middle
button on RISC OS, the right button by convention now on modern PCs -
and the menu tree appears right where you're already pointing.

This also has the added bonus of removing the need to select the right
window and make it active by clicking on it before you can get at that
app's menu tree, which now affects both Unity and Mac OS X.

But it's not very discoverable. People need to know to click. Mind
you, they need to know what to type to use a HUD, so it's poorly
discoverable too. The auto-hiding menu bar isn't great in that respect
but I can see that people would stumble across it quickly.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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