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piper - 03.09.2006, 00:41 Uhr
Titel: Why Ubuntu Got It All Wrong

http://www.linuxforums.org/misc/why_ubu ... wrong.html

http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1 ... reshold=-1

Cathbard - 03.09.2006, 07:52 Uhr
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There is one interesting point. Linspire's CNR is now open sourced. Has anybody actually tried it on Kanotix yet?
I have no problem with apt-get, kpackage etc and aren't advocating using CNR as a complete replacement but I am curious. It seems to me that CNR is one click instead of three clicks so I'm not sure if there is any real advantage other than eye candy.
Any comments?

**Edit** I went hunting for CNR myself but apparently the code won't be available until Freespire 1.1 is released. Seems like it will need work before it is ready for general consumption and not just XSpire distros***
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/CNR_Warehouse

jackiebrown - 03.09.2006, 09:15 Uhr
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Actually, most of the reason mentioned in the article would applie to every flavor of linux except linspire and freespire.

I do not actually expect - nor really want - Ubuntu to make another desktop manager.

Come on. First the guy complains about too many choices in the package mangers then wants to add another desktop choice?

Cathbard - 03.09.2006, 12:04 Uhr
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Yeah, I thought he was a bit contradictory. On one hand he applauds diversity and on the other hand he wants consistency. You can't have it both ways.

hubi - 03.09.2006, 13:03 Uhr
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It's just a rant by a person who wants to run MS Office and Photoshop under Linux.

My questions are:

- why does he not use VMware?
- why does he not just buy a Windows-Box?

And now my list of 1001 apps which do not run under Windows ... Mr. Green

hubi

piper - 03.09.2006, 16:17 Uhr
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I was thinking this was a windows user period with no experience of linux whats-so-ever Winken

JimC - 03.09.2006, 17:03 Uhr
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I'm pretty much a Linux novice, as most of you guys know.

But, I sure wouldn't complain about Ubuntu's package management being too complex to use.

It's got to be one of the easier to use systems I've tried (using it's add/remove software menu choice). Then, if you want to get more than the well laid out (read popular) choices available, click on advanced for the full Synaptic menus.

I found Ubuntu so simple to use, that I think almost anyone would feel comfortable adding new software. That's probably one reason it's at the top of the distrowatch list right now (it's so easy to setup and use).

slam - 03.09.2006, 18:41 Uhr
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I agree 100% with Jim here. There is no other operating system around being so simple to use - I really love Ubuntu for that. It is definitely the best starting point for the "not so experienced" Windows refugee. And it comes with corporate design, serious marketing and the "fans & friends" attitude, which makes it very easy to try and adopt. However, if it does not work automagicially (and it often does not, as Kanotix users know very well) Ubuntu is a mad cow to ride. And it's even more nasty if your needs are not inside mainstream.

Ubuntu does a very good job for all other - more specialized - distributions. It moves and educates Windows users to free and open source software, and it teaches them Linux and Debian basics. We should be grateful - we don't have the money and the manpower (and - speaking about myself - not the patience) to do this job. Linux needs a solid growing desktop user base, and Ubuntu will build it for us.

However, if Ubuntu continues to damage Debian from inside, I will continue to fight against it. Please search for "slam Ubuntu" here if you are interested in that.

Greetings,
Chris

piper - 03.09.2006, 18:53 Uhr
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ROTFLMFAO

h2 - 03.09.2006, 19:04 Uhr
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These articles make absolutely no sense to me at all. What they are asking from any linux desktop is so radically much more than anyone asks from windows that's it's almost incomprehsible to me.

Can someone point out the windows package manager to me? Or the os x one? I must have missed them somewhere.

Yesterday somebody mentioned scite text editor, so I tried apt-get install -s scite to see if it was there, sure enough,, it was, I installed it, took about 30 seconds.

It's completely beyond me what these writers are thinking of at all to be honest, I don't know what they see, if they see anything, when they look at windows. To find any program for windows: open browser, search google for program name, hope you land on the real site for it, otherwise negotiate a network of spammy download sites until you get to the real software homepage, then download it, pay if required, save to disk, click .exe file to install, register/username and password if required, then click some config stuff on the installer, or select 'automatic install' instead of 'custom install'. Automatic of course usually adds even more junk to your system, garbage software, icons, spyware, etc. If custom, go through all the installer windows, until you're done.

At that point you are exactly where I would be with apt after about 30 seconds.

I think I would tend to agree with the control panel point though, how both gnome and kde organize their menus is problematic at best, and ridiculous at worst, ubuntu for example, with those silly 3 choices ontop, which I have to read every time, no icons, strikes me as about as unuser friendly as anything I've ever come across, one item is fine, with subdirectories for system tweaks and admin.

That's not a gnome thing though, that's an ubuntu thing, I realized that when I checked out gnuLinEx, spanish only, sorry. It is far better designed than ubuntu, much better information layout, single icon for menu, nice looking too, and has a control panel, a very good one, maybe the best one I've seen yet on a linux desktop, at least for newer users.

kde's stuff is a mess, even after using it now for years I still cant' remember where specific system admin item are, although now I can make better guesses than I used to, for example, I know kuser is either in system or settings.

But these are not core issues, they are simply decisions, bad in my opinion, about how to organize menus. For some reason the very basics of good information architecture seems to have completely eluded both kde and gnome menu designers. That's: 5-7 top level items, branching down into submenus, which branch into submenus

at the top level, 10 would be the very maximum number you should have, but with 10, you can very easily support upto 5000 or more separate items in a clear, intuitive way. For example, in kde, system and settings are completely redundant, and should be combined by default, and system should contain all tweaking options, including k control center, which itself should actually contain most of the stuff in system and settings

and so on. But this isn't related to kde or gnome being inferior or old fashioned, it's just about poor decisions of where to locate menu items.

slam - 03.09.2006, 20:02 Uhr
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@h2: Long time ago you used Windows, because you did not mention how menus are managed there: By software company names! Winken

Greetings,
Chris

h2 - 03.09.2006, 20:26 Uhr
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windows menus definitely are not significantly better, especially the one long list of 'programs', what's annoying is that it's so trivial to actually just organize the stuff in a logical way, this has always been a very weak point for both kde and gnome, to me it's actually very hard to understand how something so basic is still an issue 5 years after kde and gnome started becoming decent options.

Personally, if I could just throw out the kde menus and use only the debian one I would, but that tends to break kde menus. I think debian menus are fairly coherent, reasonably intuitive, and fairly well thought out.

I was hoping that for once and for all I could just reorganize kmenu to have a fairly coherent structure, but as you found recently, doing any serious major reorganization of core components of kmenu breaks it completely.

It's so easy to do this right, there is an entire sub industry related to web site architecture devoted to this issue, the questions have been asked and the solutions are there now, it's a formula, simple to do:

5-7 main categories, divide each into 5-7, then each of those has the full options, utterly simple. There is even published and well known methods to achieve this organization, it's not complicated, and it's not rocket science, but it does take a willingness to a: admit the current system sucks, and b: to sit down and redo it.

The main method involves using flash cards and arranging them into piles, then redoing it several times. Then having totally untrained users look for what you want them to find. Then redoing it.

I'm hoping that even if kde doesn't ever make good menu options, they will at least fix the menu editor stuff so I can do it myself and not have to deal with it anymore.

Anyway, all besides the point, which was that kde/gnome are somehow old/ obsolete, etc. Weird view point to me. First thing that struck me about kde was how much better it was than windows in almost every way, especially when it came to the default applications. I think almost all major kde complaints come down to the extremely incoherent organization of the menus, and of the configurations in the control center, which I still, after almost 1 year of full time use, cannot consistently locate items.

By the way, re ubuntu, their 'ease of use' is a joke to me, the first time I tried the debian stable derived system gnuLinEx, also gnome, I found everything I wanted, and it's in spanish, not my strongest point in computing languages to put it mildly. gnuLinEx to me shows the actual way forward for a system designed for average users, if it was in english I would happily recommend it to any non advanced computer user who asked me what linux to use. It has a control panel, it doesn't have 3 non intuitive top level task bar menu options. It took me only a few minutes to find and change the keyboard layout to english standard, for example, from the default spanish. And that's with never having seen it before, and reading a language that is not my first, not my second, possibly not even my third. And it's not brown.

It's so simple to do this well, I thought it maybe wasn't possible or something with the current gnome/kde design, but as soon as I tried gnuLinex I realized right away that the problem is somewhere else, it's not in the desktop managers, it's in the people making the useability decisions, which is what I've been suspecting more and more over the last year. This suspicion was confirmed when I read the main gnome useability guy is straight out of college, with almost no real world useability experience. That did not surprise me at all when I learned that, by the way.

hubi - 03.09.2006, 20:48 Uhr
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slam wrote about corporate design of Ubunu, Kubuntu obviously got one as well now:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/EdgyEft/Knot2/Kubuntu

Is it just me who finds that theme utterly ugly?

hubi

slam - 03.09.2006, 21:40 Uhr
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Well, everybody here knows that I never really liked the "dog brown taste" of Ubuntu. But at least it was balanced somehow with everything else. The new orange look is better, but I still don't get the message.
However, the recent "viola" color scheme for Kubuntu Edgy is just disgusting - even my daughter's most stupid friends call it "sh*t!".
Greetings,
Chris

UncleDeadley - 04.09.2006, 04:37 Uhr
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Cathbard hat folgendes geschrieben::

Yeah, I thought he was a bit contradictory. On one hand he applauds diversity and on the other hand he wants consistency. You can't have it both ways.

What about consistently diverse? Would that count as having it both ways Winken

jackiebrown - 04.09.2006, 06:10 Uhr
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h2 hat folgendes geschrieben::

They're working on options:
http://dot.kde.org/1157321671/

Cathbard - 04.09.2006, 06:17 Uhr
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UncleDeadley hat folgendes geschrieben::

Cathbard hat folgendes geschrieben::

Yeah, I thought he was a bit contradictory. On one hand he applauds diversity and on the other hand he wants consistency. You can't have it both ways.

What about consistently diverse? Would that count as having it both ways Winken

LMAO

Ubuntu is generally quite easy to setup except for sound and then it is a dog. Why they don't include alsaconf is beyond me. That has to be the number one thing I get hassled about by Ubuntu noobs. Still, that's not all bad because it's sent a few people over here to Kanotix Winken

My other peeves - ugly, ugly, ugly. It looks like somebody took a crap on your screen. Now it looks like somebody that's been eating oranges has taken a crap on your screen.
Gnome - gnomes are ugly rigid little mongrels that should stay in the garden where the dogs can crap on them ......... hmmm maybe that's the connection. Lachen

The number one peeve - what slam says about it undermining debian. I'm getting sick of looking for debs only to find it is a debian destroying Ubuntu deb ...grrrrr

The only thing I didn't like about Kanotix was that the graphics were uninspiring. Well you know what I'm doing in that department. I doubt anything I could do would stop Ubuntu being the ugliest thing this side of the public toilet at a chilli festival.

**edit** I stand corrected. It can get uglier. I just looked at those screenies of Kubuntu Edgy.........was the designer colour blind? What was he thinking? That is one of the worst clashes I've ever seen .... eerkkk

slh - 04.09.2006, 14:40 Uhr
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Cathbard, wait a few weeks, it will be applauded as innovative design soon...

hubi - 04.09.2006, 15:23 Uhr
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Cathbard hat folgendes geschrieben::

Ubuntu is generally quite easy to setup except for sound and then it is a dog. Why they don't include alsaconf is beyond me. That has to be the number one thing I get hassled about by Ubuntu noobs. Still, that's not all bad because it's sent a few people over here to Kanotix

The only thing I didn't like about Kanotix was that the graphics were uninspiring. Well you know what I'm doing in that department. I doubt anything I could do would stop Ubuntu being the ugliest thing this side of the public toilet at a chilli festival.

**edit** I stand corrected. It can get uglier. I just looked at those screenies of Kubuntu Edgy.........was the designer colour blind? What was he thinking? That is one of the worst clashes I've ever seen .... eerkkk

First part:
yes. My way as well: Fedora - Ubuntu - SuSE, Kubuntu - a short try of Debian (too tough for me) - Kanotix (heaven).

Second part:
a beautiful Kanotix to one's likings is done in about five minutes, and the default scheme is quite functional working with it as live CD.

Third part:
The new Kubuntu default colour scheme is ... hmmm. Does the K stand for "Kindergarten Ubuntu"? Or who is the target group? You have to install it in a darkroom and change everything before you can reappear in public if you are a grown up.

hubi

Gowator - 04.09.2006, 16:00 Uhr
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slam hat folgendes geschrieben::

@h2: Long time ago you used Windows, because you did not mention how menus are managed there: By software company names! Winken

Greetings,
Chris

they are?
I thought they were all on the desktop?

Damn... must install and see this devastatingly clever feature.

Damn... just realised the install screws my boot manager.... even cleverer..I mean I wouldn't want to be installing windows if i wanted to use linux...

Cathbard - 04.09.2006, 17:32 Uhr
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The default art in Kanotix wasn't ugly, just a bit boring. Kubuntu Edgy on the other hand is liable to cause epileptic seizures if looked at for too long. Either that or the intestines may leap up and throttle the brain in order to save it from epicurean torture. Ubuntu is liable to send you running to the smallest room in the house due to associative recognition. I suppose that is functional in its way, but bodily functions and not computer functions. Lachen

Perhaps they want it listed by the world's medical associations as a cure for constipation. Maybe that's Shuttleworths true business plan. After all, pharmaceuticals are where the real money is.

Windows menu structure? That should be in the jokes thread. Winken

Cuddles - 08.09.2006, 14:11 Uhr
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Cathbard,

Interesting point, that about the "menu structure" of Windows... that being, menus off the "Start" button, which, "closely" resembles the "KMenu" button. Catagories, organized, by "who-knows-what" from that, pretty much the same for KMenu, etc...

I thought the whole "program company" ---> "program name" menu setup was goofy in Windows, but, take a look at where Debian is going, not to mention OpenOffice.Org -=- sub-menus off KMenu for "Debian" and for "Office"... Looks like Windows menus "infecting" Linux to me...

I do admit, I like the "structure" of the "new-comer" Debian menu sub-catagory, it makes for finding something, a lot quicker, but, I have found some entries in Debian, but not in other areas, and some in other areas, but not in the Debian - its hap-hazard, hodge-podgey. Are people designing where to put there menu entry by "random" ???

But, i have to final statement this, anything, I repeat, ANYTHING is better than what I remember Windows menus to be... Who would every think a GAME would be under the COMPANY NAME who made it, over, say, "Games" and just the game name???? I think "Windows" menus are just plain idiotic, and made to make the user, want to RANDOMLY click on ANYTHING to see what it might open... Lets just change the whole practice of "finding" and "selecting" a program to run, into, say, a "Wheel Of Future" device...

Spin the WHEEL, and see what program you get to RUN????

The LUCKY program is.... [drum roll sound clip].... Task Manager!!!

As for color schemes, thank God they are still user changable! The "personal" touch!

As for rants and raves "articles", it has come to my thinking, these people, or are they called "writters?", have lots of time, to not only rant about what they hate, but, also "praise" what they hate, as well. One of there "articles", when the subject has ANYTHING to do with comparing Windows to Linux, has had a "double-edged" sword. In one sentence, they praise the Linux OS for its greatness, only to come back in the next sentence, to do a 180 on it. Most of these "articles" are either humorous, ludicous, idiotic, or compare one fruit to something completely different. If anything, they are simply "fluff" and "bubble gum" for the reader. They are filled with miss-information, or partial, very small, information, in which case, the reader, if not knowledgable, is making assumptions on false, or partially-true, information... To put it lightly, giving a person without a clue on the usage of firearms, a loaded weapon, and saying: "go play with this for a few hours"... or "go play in the middle of traffic"... Partial information, in this case, would be to tell the person with the gun, to go and point it at people, and see, what happens...

I have to be honest here, though, I have only seen Knoppix and Kanotix, all the others, are just information I get from these forums, screen-shots, etc... If I was ever, ever, going to throw Kanotix out, and get another, it would have to be Debian, pure and simple. So, I would say, I have the Debian "bug", but, that goes with saying, I have to deal with its issues, menus and all... I may not like it, but, the alternatives, Windows? HAH! no way...

Gowator - 09.09.2006, 15:05 Uhr
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bah.. the menu is just the default....
So long as you can move it around and add/remove then I'm not to worried....
For instance you can just delete the whole kanotix menu ... don't see why anyone would but you can... try that in Windows!

Cuddles - 09.09.2006, 15:25 Uhr
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GoWater,

HAAAA!

Windows has got that one beat, I had this one when I was doing phone tech support for Windows...

Guy calls up, states he "somehow" has exhausted his complete hard drive space, reports he hasnt added any new programs, or software, and NOTHING is in the TrashCan...

I tell him to start up "My Computer" so we can see his drive stats, his remark, Which ICON is that? I have a few on the "Taskbar".

Come to find out, EVERY PROGRAM HE HAS installed, is running on the taskbar... to include Excel, Word, Publisher, Adobe, Media Player, Sound Players, Editors, you name it, its running! Come to find that he has "inadvertantly" and "accidently" MOVED EVERY PROGRAM in the menu from drive C out, into his StartUp Folder - sheesh! He then admits his system DOES take about an hour to boot, and, "Is that a common boot up time?"

This one was a fav around the tech support table, that, and, the guy who threw everything from Drive C out, into his trash can, and then wondered why it was full, and deleted it - sweet! He claimed he was only calling because he couldnt get anything in the MENU to run... Whoa!