Response to “9 features Ubuntu should implement”
This article came up on Digg today. It sounds like pathetic whining from a Mac fanboy–most, if not all, of it is patently absurd.
Feature 1: Weather on the desktop. First of all, there’s a taskbar icon for this. Second of all, I’m sure there’s a screenlet too. How much do you want?
Feature 2: Wallpapers that change over time. They already exist–natively in KDE, and there are several utilites for GNOME. And this is really the DE’s problem–not Ubuntu’s specifically.
Feature 3: Icon functionality. A lot of icons are already functional–I, for one, am a huge fan of how the icon for documents is the document itself. And really, who cares about how much space on a previously burned CD is being taken up?
Feature 4: Visual folder hierarchy. I feel like similar functionality can be achieved with the little file trees, but I begrudgingly admit that off the top of my head, I can’t think of how to do that in Ubuntu. There’s probably a utility that does it, if you know of one, say so in the comments. But again, who really needs this? I’m not sure I’d be willing to give it space on my HDD, to be perfectly honest…
Feature 5: Icons with messages. We do have a wide array of “emblems”, and you can also add specific notes under properties. Again, I feel like this is close enough to be a non-issue.
Feature 6: “A task bar more clean and orderly Icon”. I’m not one for making fun of people’s foreign language ability, but…I’m assuming this means “Clean and more orderly taskbar icons.” Um, unlike certain Redmond-based OS’s I can think of, we Ubuntu users have complete control over how our taskbars look. If you don’t like the arrangement of the icons, delete some, add some or move some.
Feature 7: Pre-installed media center. If Ubuntu came pre-installed with a media center, I’d have a fit, and then I’d remove it. But if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s Mythbuntu. Problem solved.
Feature 8:Animated post-installation introduction. This is in development.
Feature 9: Any other feature you can think of yourself. I feel like this is just a cheap writing trick since nine sounds a lot bigger than eight. Ten would’ve been nice, though…(I won’t be so bold to say that there aren’t ten features Ubuntu lacks, but…:) )
So I’m unimpressed. Ubuntu already has the majority of those features (or a close-enough analogue), that guy failed miserably in doing his homework before posting that, and even the things that Ubuntu doesn’t have are Linux/GNOME/KDE/Nautilus/Dolphin deficiciencies, not Ubuntu problems. I’m sorry that there are people like this on the Internet (but then again, what else is new?) but I’m very sorry something like that has 460 Diggs, and counting, and made the Linux/Unix front page. Chalk one up for FUD.
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Edit:OK, now I’m angry. That post was some lame-o who took this “liberal translation” in Spanish, ran it through Google Translate, and posted it on his blog. The Spanish translation (which was actually done by hand (I know Spanish, in case you were wondering)) came from this, the original post (in English, no less). That claimed it had ten features (which resolves the questions I had about number nine), but the counting went 1, 2, 3, 5, 6-10. So it was really nine (talk about cheap writing tricks–miscounting!?!?!). The Spanish translation is completely understandable, but I can’t get over how LinuxPoison ran that through Google Translate and posted it–not even taking the time to fix obvious Engrish cases. And they’re making money off it! Unbelievable.
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Very well said, I had similar comments on the Reddit article.
I hope the animated intro thing is optional and not invasive. It brings back awful memories of the “Click here to tour Windows XP” popup, which I’ve gotten rid of more times than I care to remember.
From what Brainstorm has to say, it looks like it’ll be a slideshow while Ubuntu’s installed. I think the logic is that if you don’t know about Ubuntu, you’ll just be hanging around monitoring the installer, and if you do know about Ubuntu, you know that you can just let it install itself and go get a cup of coffee–missing the slideshow. I thought it was a pretty nice compromise.
Hi,
I totally agree with you, when I first came across those ideas I thought they would really be a good addition to ubuntu but as I went on to create my own distro none of them sounded worthy! (the distro I am talking about is Xenon OS, one of my projects, http://xenon.kumailht.com/ )
When I wrote this post 6 months back, the intro to linux was not under construction so atleast one idea made its way out!
Oh!, The nine was an actual mistake, some ppl commented the mistake, I also tried to fix it but I couldnt think of anything to add so I left it as it is. As you can see 10 didnt help me any more than 9 helped that loser! He got a lot more diggs than I got and that pissed me off!
I found out when he had around 400 diggs, I asked him to take it
down and redirect to my site, I doubt he will do it but lets see.
Around 10 bloggers have copied this post and translated it to various languages, only one asked my permission which I gave.
This guy is a freakin asshole, he copies posts from different languages and uses google to translate it and then posts it!
Thanks for your comment on my post
Kumail.H.T
Very good point. I wonder at the 100% copying concepts of some sploggers. You have got a story and the least you can do is to present it your way, a tad bit different?
Really enjoyed reading it. I was one of the first to test and review Ubuntu 8.10 a.k.a. Intrepid Ibex. I knew by then that Ubuntu is surely gonna make it big here.
Cheers!
By visual folder hierachy, might baobab be what you mean? It already ships with ubuntu, called “Disk usage analyzer”.
http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/
The pie chart is awesome:
http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/figures/baobab_fullscan.png
Yea, I have gone through http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2009/03/9-features-ubuntu-should-implement_07.html and seen that it has the link to the original post and that should be fine.
– John
How about decent fonts, properly installed, with appropriate anti-aliasing on install and not after hours of trolling the net?
Mac fanboy? Sounds more like the whining from a Vista fanboy, if you ask me.
I actually really liked suggestion #2. Well, I’d like it if it showed progress as the CD is burnt, not if it showed how used a CD is. I think this could apply to any file during copy – have a greyed out icon fill up with color as bits are copied.
#5 I thought had potential too. I wouldn’t have thought so before owning an iPhone. Seeing a little red number on an icon indicating how many software updates, emails, or tweets I have waiting is a wonderful way to show me what needs attention (although it does need to be tweakable). I suppose the best way to explain this is as a merger between application launchers and systray icons such that launchers can show extra information on hover or change their icon to show a new status.
I feel like most of #5s usefulness has already been accomplished. Right now my wifi has full bars and I have about 1/3 battery life. I know this from changing icons on my top bar. I don’t see a need to have this on desktop icons.
The funniest part is when you call a list of suggestions FUD, which, may I remind you, means Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Exactly how far from the real world are you currently?
@endi It is FUD, in the sense that it’s spreading false, negative things about Ubuntu around. Maybe not fear, but uncertainty and doubt in that people will think it doesn’t have those features when it actually does.
@Tobias I’m not sure that’s quite the same thing. It’s talking about folder organization, Baobab is about disk usage by folder.
I’ll admit the first time I installed Ubuntu a little slide show thing would have been nice. Sure I had disregarded the Windows walk through more times than I can count, but Ubuntu was a whole new world and it would have been nice. Fast forward about 2 years and I’m still using Ubuntu, so obviously it wasn’t necessary. I love it and in my opinion the only thing that I would like added is strong support from Adobe, and that’s not even an Ubuntu issue. Get your asses in gear Adobe! I want After EffectsLX (patent pending on that name in the event that hell freezes over and it actually happens).
After using Ubuntu for a year or two, my biggest gripe comes with audio management. At times I’ll have Amarok open and want to quickly see a video using VLC, but since the system seems to recognize only one audio stream, no sound will be produced. It’s annoying, but not a deal breaker; however, this will need to be addressed before the average user switches from Windows or OSX and stays with Ubuntu.
Given the problems I’ve seen when using/installing Ubuntu, eye-candy cruft like this should take a backseat to getting the thing more useable, especially for server environments.
You got blackhatted dawg. The OP, like 99.9 percent of the world does not give a crap about ubuntu. Geekboy digd traffic is nice though.
Why not have just saved yourself the 5 minutes it took you to write this, and have just put the words “WHO CARES” in a large faced font. Because that is all you said about the recommended implementations “I don’t want these features so WHO CARES?”
It seems like you wrote this article while angry.
Actually, I tried Ubuntu for a while and I would have to agree with the author of the response above. Computer illiteracy seems to be the driving factor behind “things that Ubuntu should do for us.” People are lazy, more to the point, the average person is a complete flippin idiot, with no idea of what exactly he does on the computer, just that it’s pretty pretty lights and sometimes writing a text document rewards them with a paycheck.
Ubuntu isn’t perfect, but it’s a really, really good operating system. The only reason I reverted to Vista was because the yokels at work insisted I “upgrade” to vista too. What a waste of a perfectly good computer.
The ONLY thing i could even think that might make Ubuntu even easier is if they streamlined their upgrade process a little. I missed the update from Edgy to Gusty and the only option was a clean-install, which is almost not worth the effort. Had I not had 2TB of data to keep intact, I would have completed the upgrade to Gusty.
> “Feature 7: [...] Um, unlike certain Redmond-based OS’s I can think of, we Ubuntu users have complete control over how our taskbars look. If you don’t like the arrangement of the icons, delete some, add some or move some.”
Total crap, for two different reasons.
1) The original author was referring to the Notification Area specifically, not the rest of the panel.
2) You can very easily add, delete, and rearrange icons on the Windows taskbar. You’re not even limited to the Quick Launch toolbar. You can add any arbitrary folder to the taskbar by right-clicking on it -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar…
Re: My post above (#20)
That’s actually “Feature 6″, not “Feature 7″. Whoops.
> “Feature 7: [...] If Ubuntu came pre-installed with a media center, I’d have a fit, and then I’d remove it.”
Let’s try a little experiment:
* “If Ubuntu came pre-installed with an office suite, I’d have a fit, and then I’d remove it. But if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s OpenOffice.org. Problem solved.”
* “If Ubuntu came pre-installed with a personal information manager, I’d have a fit, and then I’d remove it. But if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s Evolution. Problem solved.”
Huh… So, your entire response to Feature #7 was, “DO NOT WANT”. Really?
I felt the exact same way when I read the original post. I always felt the entire point of any linux based operating system is that with enough elbow-grease you can do anything you want. If you aren’t willing to put forth the effort to achieve what you want then you should fall back to a proprietary commercial OS.
Well, I’m not enjoyed by your tone. You may have said to what it could lead to think the desktop this way, or why would he want that particular feature.
First, don’t make me say something else, but package manager are to my mind a killer feature of open systems espcialy ubuntu one which is great, easy to use etc… Ok, but that’s not the way the user would want to interact with he desktop eventually. Because he wants smooth integration between what he wants to do and what he has to do to get it done (particulary installing software which is painful for everybody !).
Moreover, I think that more and more people want to have a different experience with their computer. I want it to speak to me, stop being harsh with criptic representation of data, HTTP 404 errors (is that a movie ?). Personnaly I can’t see a folder in front of me, it’s disgusting, like free porn.
Think it again, the most perfect machine in the world has no manual, or so many… whatever most people should’nt need manuals to do the basic computer operations : like create/edit almost anything and share.
I don’t agree with you, or I should say I don’t agree with your take on things.
Too many of the solutions are “You could just delete them”, “you could just install Mythbunut”, “you could do the tweaking yourself”.
For most people they need the default Ubuntu install to be done right. They can’t just install Mythbuntu because they don’t know how or they don’t have enough time/desire to learn. Same goes with all the other tweaking.
Most people need to have a pre-installed OS which just works. You need to understand this. Then, all the technically gifted people like you can move it back to how you like it because you can.
GNOME is good, but it’s not fun ! Let’s see where sexyness can lead KISS !
PS: the mac media center is a killer feature don’t say something else…
I agree with endi. Why such a hostile reaction to a list of suggestions which are, for the most part, actually pretty good?
I understand your anger at the article being ripped off, but the original content is constructive — I can’t see any reason to be so defensive.
Regarding your dismissal of each of the original points:
1. The point was to have the wallpaper adjusted to reflect the local weather. You ask “how much [weather] do you want”? Well, that much, apparently. No, it’s not important, but it is a -cool- idea.
2. This idea is very close to #1. You say “there are several utilites for GNOME”. A constructive response would have been to link to them. And yes, it is an idea that’s suitable for Ubuntu to address, because that is the primary role of a distribution: packaging and integration of various components to make a cohesive desktop. Once again, by no means an important idea, but still cool. What’s wrong with cool ideas being thrown out there?
3. Dynamic icons sound like a pretty low priority to me, but the idea is still sound. You say “who cares about how much space on a previously burned CD is being taken up?” — the original idea already mentions that the intention is to show you how much free space there is to burn more data to that CD/DVD. You write as if you think this idea is absurd. I don’t see what’s so absurd about a visually pleasing free space indicator.
4. What are “the little file trees” you are talking about? The idea from the original post was to have a whole hierarchy of files and folders appear at once, showing as much as can fit on the screen (inferred from image), be able to search it easily, and then have it collapse away when you are done. It sounds to me like a great idea, and I’m yet to see it implemented anywhere.
5. Emblems are a far cry from custom annotations, and you have to go searching for the notes to know they are there. This suggestion was about, e.g., “in your face” reminders.
6. I agree that the intention behind this was phrased poorly, but you’ve missed the point. You say that “we Ubuntu users have complete control over how our taskbars look”. Well, yes, if we want to write our own GTK styles and/or patch the taskbar, but if you’re willing to get down and dirty with the code, you could also achieve a surprising amount of customisation with “certain Redmond-based OS’s” (note, for example, what Stardock have achieved with WindowBlinds). The image shows a reimagined time applet, and padding around the tray icons. Can you show me how to achieve a bit of (especially vertical) padding around my icons in GNOME? When I increase my panel height, my launchers become huge, but other applets (time, volume, NetworkManager) remain tiny. If it is your opinion that aesthetics are unimportant, then I know I will have no hope of convincing you. Otherwise I will be happy to write a blog post (with pictures!) on why I think icon spacing on panels is so important, and link to it here.
7. I have no strong feelings on this, but you say “if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s Mythbuntu”. Am I really supposed to believe that you think people should have to install a separate distribution just because they want to watch some TV? (Or do the relevant packages work out of the box on Ubuntu now?)
8. I have no particular interest in this, but it sounds like a good idea. And if it’s in development, then even better. But note that the original article was written -before- the brainstorm idea was marked as “in development”.
9. Cheap writing trick indeed. I’ll try not to take too much offence, though. =)
Final notes:
- “Ubuntu already has the majority of those features (or a close-enough analogue)”. I don’t know what you consider a “close-enough analogue”, but most of your dismissals sound like they were based on misunderstanding of the original suggestions.
- You say that “even the things that Ubuntu doesn’t have are Linux/GNOME/KDE/Nautilus/Dolphin deficiciencies (sic), not Ubuntu problems”. Canonical market Ubuntu as an operating system — not just a repository of packages of other people’s software. This means that ANY of the officially supported Ubuntu packages -are- “Ubuntu problems”. If there are Linux/GNOME/Nautilus deficiencies, then they are also Ubuntu deficiencies, because Ubuntu -is- Linux/Gnome/Nautilus(/etc.). That said, I would have preferred if the original author had pitched this as a list of “cool ideas for any operating system”, because most of these seem to be equally relevant to any modern OS.
Most of these ideas are absent from all major desktop operating systems. I’m yet to be convinced that a list of such feature suggestions in any way constitutes “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”.
Mick Russom said “Given the problems I’ve seen when using/installing Ubuntu, eye-candy cruft like this should take a backseat to getting the thing more useable, especially for server environments.”
Different people have different areas of interest and expertise. Having some people working on “eye-candy cruft” (I don’t see why, e.g., making the notification area more elegant constitutes “cruft”) does not necessarily detract from fixing up other problems.
And as a follow-up to my previous comment: by no means am I trying to suggest that Ubuntu is a bad operating system — I use it as my primary OS on all my machines, and apart from a few small exceptions (the odd game that won’t run in Wine), I won’t use a proprietary OS unless somebody (e.g. my employer) is paying me to do so. So there’s no need for the hypersensitive sorts to jump into the role of “defender”.
[...] morning about features “Ubuntu really needs”. The first post seemed a bit ditzy and the second for the most part was on the money – Ubuntu already has a truckload of features and most things it [...]
Hemmar:
“I always felt the entire point of any linux based operating system is that with enough elbow-grease you can do anything you want.”
Then you’ve missed a lot of other points with this simplistic view. How about other good reasons like usability, good package management, free licensing, choice of vendor, technical superiority under the hood, etc.?
“If you aren’t willing to put forth the effort to achieve what you want then you should fall back to a proprietary commercial OS.”
Just because people -can- do something, doesn’t mean they should be expected to. Yes, I can track down dependencies to compile {X application of choice}, then set up a sane configuration so that it fits in with my desktop. But if a nice little pre-configured package is provided by my OS, then even better! If something can be made better *out of the box*, then why not have that?
I’m not sure I’ll ever really understand this reasoning. Does it make you feel somehow “hardcore” to have to do things manually? Do, as a user, feel the need to reinvent the wheel over and over when your OS vendor could have just -given- you a wheel?
@Joseph Smidt Said, you made my point !
The thing is that most of the time is really easy and a matter of minute, sometime just a click on a webpage – so one may say that’s not to high level.
@Joseph Smidt Said, you still have to understand that technically gifted people are not like you minded and 2 of the same specie can still be different… That’s why one made Designers for their own use. For example, I am unable to use a Windows because the windows manager is just too boring ! but that’s a preference. I will explain you how Distros and generaly speaking software-maker do to attract technically gifted people… they add kind of so obvious ester eggs for computer nerds like the green on black terminal. There is also this stupid joke about launchpad. You nerds are concerned, that a point you have to understand ! Stop being so poets and bring some dirty 3D vertex in there, I want my brand new vaio (which can’t run xp) to burn gigabits of RAM in sexyness, sexyness and Kissness !
Cl1mh4224rd: Spot on. I wonder if these comments will be deleted? =P
Jeff Said,
never had to use a scanner recently (got a scanner/print combo thing). What you describe seems terrific ! You can’t say that in front of everybody ! plus you may be wrong.
Cl1mh4224rd: << what is this, another nerd thing to get the KGB cover this one ?
This is eerily familiar…
http://bash.org/?152037
quite agree, all of those features are fluff anyway, not that theses much wrong with one or two bits of fluff, but we dont wont to turn linux into a doughnut like vista now do we…
that is super lame of them to steal content for profit but i’m still curious if gnome developers are working on making notification areas “hideable” you know like the “Redmond OS” – also i wonder if nautilus will ever incorporate the other redmond feature of being able to rename files without first entering the file properties.
@Bastetx, you miss the point, the competition is not windows anymore, maybe mac some time… I tell you the monster is coming.
@amir, catch if you can
@amir a
Well you can either autohide the whole panel (Right-click it->Properties->Autohide checkbox), or you can just remove the icons you don’t want (by the way, my issue with Windows is that the taskbar gets out of hand very quickly, and removing icons from it is seldom permanent)(I also don’t like how you’re limited to one, you can’t change it’s color effectively, you can’t move all of it’s components around (like the Start Menu button, for instance), and a few other things).
I do agree it would be nice if icons autohid when not in use, but mine aren’t really taking up that much space.
@LURK MOAR : you made just that append def GBY (): return
Whatever people miss that doable is not the only thing which is important.
And there is work in this way, Aza Raskin with http://www.humanized.com/ and now mozilla (ubiquity) which looks really familiar. Any input about ZUIs is valuable, and I’m not aware of any consumer accessible OS that kan do that kind of thing. Don’t be affraid of consuming RAM or cycles, a little mouse even told me once that graphical programming was kind of comming, I don’t know when nor even have papers about that, but you techies will enjoy that as much as John Joe.
Ok it’s a bit far from the present subject, but genneraly speaking thing are gonna be smoother (at least for those who want it to be like that because people still use gnome 1.2 as desktop).
Don’t say folders are not a pain ?
Develop a remote services protocol for ubuntu. SOemthing that could be backwards compatible with RDP. A service that allows concurrent sessions or even just a single session at a time
Perhaps you should spend your time being angry about more important things.
I’d have to agree on the media center feature, that would completely ruin Ubuntu’s image as a fast and light OS.
Well done!
I agree with most of the points you made. Started trying Ubuntu since 6.04 and finally did a complete switch last year. Besides audio configuration problems, it is one of the best OS so far.
Recently, I have a new netbook that came with XP pre-installed and I got Ubuntu 8.10 installed. Interestingly, when I went into XP, it just felt so antiquated, although I must say that XP was as good as it came to a stable enough OS for a long time.
Killer Feature
A killer feature to have for Ubuntu would be to have boot-up reduced to 5 or 10 sec. Better yet, have instant-on.
Palm and Wince pdas appear to have instanton, but in reality, it is mostly on suspend mode. Their boot-up sequence is within 5~10secs and when “powered off”, they switch off the lcd+backlight and powerdown most things including the backlight button, leaving online the interrupt/event handlers to allow resume when a hard-button is pressed.
One of the key speed up to booting for these devices was that they support Execute-In-Place operations which can be found in ARM or embedded cpus. This means that the OS can be executed from the storage device directly instead of loading up from storage to ram and executed form ram. Traditionally, embedded devices have their OS stored in ROM chips, but later devices uses FLASH ROM, meaning OSes can be updated by “flashing” them. These “ROM” chips can be rewritten via updates but the write cycles are too slow for normal R/W cycles.
So why isn’t this happening yet?
Flash ram, SSD drives had been in use in embedded devices for a long time. The recent netbooks may use SSDs, but the true potential of SSDs are not yet harnessed because the OS is not doing In-Place Execution, but loading the OS, kernel, driver, shell from SSD to ram for execution. If embedded version of the OS is used instead, then execution of the OS, say Ubuntu, would start off directly from storage (SSD) without all the loading etc. This would usually either mean that the OS has to be fixed to the physical location of the SSD, or be memory mapped to the physical location.
There are more technicalities regarding the bootup sequence, but the general idea is that.
The thing that is perhaps limiting us is now the CPU and speed of SSDs. If the CPU can somehow be coerced to execute code from storage directly, instead of from ram, then instanton is near. That may require the platform bridge chipset to be modified to work in an embedded-like manner. We would not really need the usual SDRAM anymore, or they can be mapped into a common memory space.
Another way is to have a hybrid mode where Ubuntu, kernel+driver+desktop runs off fast SSD while apps are cached silently into the memory-mapped SDRAM for fast execution. This can mean a faster or instant bootup while apps can run without changes.
Let’s see what the embedded ubuntu guys can do.
I totally agree with you, none of those things are really necessary. The only thing that I love to see in Ubuntu it’s a nice, decent media player. Linux doesn’t have one, we have Banshee, Rhythmbox, Elisa etc, but let’s be honest, none of those compares to WMP.
The one feature I also want to see it’s drag and drop in the menu, I just hate to open the Menu Editor just to move some icons.
Also, some UI consistency between apps would be great, sometimes that makes linux ugly.
Some of those features I like. But the biggest ‘feature’ I would like is for Canonical to break the leash that Microsoft has on the OEM’s.
Lios: “non compares to WMP” – That is a good thing.
How about a tenth feature; Not sucking.
That would have been cool.
I actually liked #4. I know it’s already “implemented” with the tree view on the left panel of nautilus, but if somehow I could make it look like the screenshot that they posted (horizontal and bigger icons), it would make my life easier. I wouldn’t mind that.
#1 and #2 are somewhat related to the theme feature of igoogle which happens to be a killer feature