Ubuntu 10.04: Usability Shot To Hell... Kindda (At Least For Me)

I had promised myself that I wouldn't post about operating systems or the like again, but the changes made to Ubuntu 10.04 are, to say the least, horrendous. Now, I know I'm very late to complain, but I like to make my upgrades a little late, after I'm sure it won't break my computer in any way. I'm paranoid like that.

But I digress. The upgrade process went smoothly, with everything done as planned. Then I rebooted the computer and, lo and behold, I backed up in horror.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what you're looking at up there is a PURPLE load up screen. It almost gave me an aneurysm as soon as I saw it, and I still haven't been able to change it. So now I just push the power button and go do something else while the system boots. But wait, there's more! You also see it when you shut down the system, the joy! Seriously, if any of you know how to change that screen, let me know, please. PLEASE.

Next on the agenda was the log on screen. I can't complain about that, though, because it really is nice. I even found a few commands to customize the background and theme of the log on screen while on my quest to get rid of the purple load up screen, so that's a plus. In case you're wondering, the commands can be found here.

So now that I was logged in on my computer again I went to surfing some forums, when I saw the first idiotic change of this version: the order of the minimize/maximize/close buttons. You know how in every other version of Ubuntu they were Windows-like, being on the right of the windows? Well, now they threw it to the left. Not only is this a pain since it forces to take new usage habits, but in the time it took me to figure out how to change them back to where they are supposed to be, I accidentally closed 2 windows, one with loss of information (compiler messages on a GNOME terminal window. Easy to recover, yes, but time consuming).

I found out by reading the bug report on Launchpad (which has more than 750 comments and 360 users marked as "affected" at the time of this writing and can be found here) that this change can be worked around by selecting an older theme. So I went to System->Preferences->Appearance and selected New Wave, which seems decent enough and has the buttons on the place I like them to be.

A few minutes later, when I realized I was working WITHOUT music (imagine the shock), I fired up Rhytmbox and let the random number generator pick a song for me. A few songs after that it landed on one I couldn't recognize, so I placed the mouse over the Rhytmbox tray icon, hoping to get the tooltip, and waited. And then waited some more. And then some more. I moved the mouse to the next icon over, the battery level icon, and waited for the tooltip. Nothing. Tried with the volume control. Nothing. Bluetooth? Nothing. Then, suddenly, Network Manager's tooltip DOES work. I thought something was seriously broken, so off to google I was... yet again.

A few clicks later I was on yet another Launchpad bug report, this one with almost 150 comments and more than 160 users marked as "affected" (found here) where I read that I could get my tooltips back... in another life, or something like that. I had to read all of the comments to understand just what the hell was going on, and found something that truly shocked me: both the removal of tooltips and the moving of buttons were decisions taken by Ubuntu's design team (spearheaded by Mark Shuttleworth) without as little as a fine print warning to the community. Yes, there was a wiki, but then again, the decisions of the design team were final, no matter what the users said about them.

Reading about this matter, and the long, long threads and discussions held over the beta period that I completely missed, a question popped into my mind: Where (because we have an idea of when) in the FUCK did Mark Shuttleworth and his design team forget about what Open Source means? Yes, it means you can change stuff to do whatever you want, but you either discuss it with the community or place it as an option in the interface (and that last option is normally done AFTER discussing it with the community). These changes came out of nowhere (at the time) and with no way to revert to the "old way", which in some cases made for horrible regressions (in the case of the tooltips). Now I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I don't think a Long Term Support version of Ubuntu (which the 10.04 version IS) is the place to experiment with the graphical design, breaking it for people that have been using it perfectly for years and that have a deeply set muscle memory. Hell, the reasons Mark Shuttleworth gave in defense of the changes during the discussions weren't even applicable in many of the cases presented, but he seemed to ignore that and mark the bugs "WontFix" anyway.

Well, you know what? FUCK. THAT. SHIT. I'm looking for a different distro at the moment where I can run all the stuff I normally use and need so I can take a break from this broken version that 10.04 turned out to be. I may downgrade to 9.10 instead if I can't find anything to my tastes, though. It's a good thing I only upgraded one of my computers, so I won't have to deal with this thing all the time.

Peace.

Embrace, Assimilate, Destroy

In the past months, Micro$oft as shifted from being extremely hostile to Open Source, to being very friendly to it. At first it came as a surprise, but now I can see the (possible) strategy they are following: embrace, assimilate, destroy. Call me anti-Micro$oft, but I refuse to believe in a company that has, for years, expressed their literal hate towards Open Source. This here is the latest move in that "embrace" part of the plan:

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.
...
Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

The open specification thingie is something that they have been playing with for a while now, but it still doesn't clarifies how future versions of Micro$oft code will be handled. It does cover some of the loopholes it had, so it IS a move in the right direction. The sponsorship to the ASF is less interesting, because it is just one of the many monetary contributions Micro$oft has made to the Open Source movement. One important thing about the contributions to the ASF, however, is the fact that they are doing their best to make Apache (the popular web server, and the flagship product of the ASF) work better in Windows than it does on, surprise, GNU/Linux. And here is where it all starts making sense. The point of all this "flattery" to the Open Source community might as well be only for the sake of establishing Windows as the best platform to work on, to make GNU/Linux lose all the ground it has gained so far. And when they are done with that, the killer blow:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

In other words, their ultimate goal is to make people stop using LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) in favor of WISP stacks (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP). And given their advantage over Open Source in terms of user base and raw amounts of money, I can see it happening in the near future.

Firefox Tablet

The idea is simple: build a light, slim device with an as big as possible touchscreen, half a gigabyte of RAM, 4 Gb solid state hard drive, Wi-Fi, maybe Bluetooth, add some other details and running a Linux core with a Firefox "OS", all of that for US$200. Like the sound of it? Well, TechCrunch wants to build it but needs help to do it. Go ahead, you know you want to. If this goes gold it may easily sell millions. I, for one, would buy a couple.