Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit."
Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.
"Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago
Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived.
The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether they've "lost it".
I think even most of the people who did put them back on the right are probably using them on the left now.
At the time it did seem a bit arbitrary and I thought it was an attempt to be more 'mac like'.
However looking at it along side Unity and the rest of the UI changes it made perfect sense to move the buttons their.
Personally I had no problems adapting to the buttons being on the left, it seemed to be more of an issue to change it from the defaults than to just get used to it.
I also like the idea of Mir provided they keep it compatible with Wayland. Having Android support for native Linux apps would be great.
About my only issue with Unity right now is the 'disappearing' menu. Not having it visible things visible can make you forget it exits, you do need that visual reminder. My mum keeps asking me things like how to print, the only thing I have to do is tell her to move the mouse to the top of the screen then she can figure it out. The apps draw is a bit of a pain to navigate. I think something the UI people have forgotten is that you need to be able to 'discover' these features (or the apps) and be reminded that they exist. If I browse a menu, then I will see all the apps I have installed or all the options I can choose.
In any case I'm using Awesome now. The desktop environment is mattering less and less. Almost everything is either in a terminal or web browser.
I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end.
I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads).
Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!
To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water.
I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.
>Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!
They think they're a content company trying to put their on OS on as many devices as possible (control a horizontal).
Really they're a platform company, and they should be trying to make exactly one most popular thing (my guess is Amazon instances running Ubuntu) run as well as possible with all their other services, like their package manager, their cloud, etc. They should try to own a vertical, like Apple does.
I don't know if that many devs are really into macs, most I know aren't and those who do are usually because their company uses/issues them one. In some parts its more peer-pressure than actual convenience. Still unity tries to copy a lot of OSX's look&feel to the point that its just awkward.
I would add that the problem with current ubuntu is that it tries to appeal to both casual and power users and manages to enrage both. Users coming from Windows (still 90% of all PC users) plain hate unity and find it confusing, it used to be that i out of 3 people I showed ubuntu to would install it but after unity I haven't been able to convince anyone because the first thing they see is an OS that makes no sense.
All power users I know prefer even gnome3 to unity, but most stick to KDE and xfce. A lot and I mean a lot have moved to Cinnamon, no surprise there since that environment is awesome, basically what ubuntu should be like. Of course if unity is too mac-like Cinnamon is too windows-like, but it manages to pull a lot of stuff that unity just can't while remaining fairly snappy unlike the sluggishness of the "dash".
Since Windows 8 started shipping, its users trying out Ubuntu for the first time may be more familiar with Unity due to them both having similar search functions and layout.
You cannot always be the first, especially when you aren't the one making hardware. I'd rather have Ubuntu doing what is currently is rather than thousands of Linux derivatives making slightly different variations of the same model on the same hardware it's been on since the beginning.
> The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.
I consider myself an advanced user (currently running i3 tiling window manager, very recommended) and even I really didn't ever want to be using gconf-edit.
I guess I felt the gist was more that Shuttleworth and the upper echelon of Ubuntu have appointed themselves soft-BDFLs and despite the cries of the community, design decisions are not something he tends to bend on.
The justification was flimsy at best to shift the buttons left. It just made it more "Apple-ish"
Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.
Granted, the paradigm is shifting with touch, but it has been an established guideline in window design for quite some time.
Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
This sounds reasonable if you only look at the last decade, but it simply isn't historically true.
The notion of a window manipulation widget first arrived[1] in 1984 with the Macintosh, which had a close box on the left hand side of each window's title bar. Windows 1.0 shipped a year or two later, with one widget on the left and another on the right.[2] Amiga Workbench launched the same year, with a close widget on the left and two layering widgets on the right.[3] Macintosh added a maximize button on the right a couple of years later. Windows 3 echoed the Amiga look, with a close/menu widget on the left and minimize/maximize on the right. CDE and the other Unix window managers which came along around this time generally used the same setup: a close and/or menu widget on the left and one or two zoom widgets on the right. [4]
It was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft moved all of its widgets over to the right side of the title bar. Mac OS and the Unix window managers did not follow. In my recollection it was only with the rise of KDE that Linux GUI design started to follow the Microsoft path, with min/max/close on the right... but of course there was the pin widget on the left for a while.
Mac OS continued to have the close widget on the left and the min/max widgets on the right until OS X, which moved all three to the left to make room for a new toolbar show/hide widget. The toolbar concept flopped and the button went away, so there were no right-hand widgets for a while; but now there's the full-screen widget.
In conclusion, the window title bar is a land of contrasts. Thank you.
1 - The Macintosh predecessor "Lisa" had an icon on the left side of its window title bar, but I don't know whether this was an active widget or just a decoration.
2 - I never used Windows in this era and don't know what the widgets actually did.
3 - I think they were layering widgets, but I could be wrong; I only used an Amiga for an hour at a friend's house once.
4 - I remember Solaris, Irix, and NeXTStep; the former two had the same system as Windows 3, while NeXTStep put the close box on the right and a single max/min button on the left.
Even Windows 95 (and up to at least 7, I think, although I don't use them much) still have a window control widget on the left side. The app icon, when it was still drawn, would invoke a control menu or close if you double clicked. I'm pretty sure that behavior continued to work in Vista/7 even after the actual control (the icon) isn't being drawn.
>Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
But.... /innovation/!
I'm a firm believer that you innovate to solve interesting problems, not just to be different (ahem... Apple). And while I agree that sometimes we don't even know a problem exists until we fix it, I don't really think I'll ever exclaim "Woowee, having these buttons on the left totally makes everything so much easier! How did I ever work like this before?"
> Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.
As GP explained, it plays well with systray icons which have been on the right for a long time. There is only one bar to use(or use extra screen space) and I would rather have systray untouched.
Linux is really organic. Users are doing what they feel is the best way of doing things. If something better comes along, users will switch. The mindshare shifts to better project and old projects die. It is survival of the fittest.
If Ubuntu and others are willing to take the risk...let them.
Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.
"Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago
Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived.
The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether they've "lost it".