Secret Future Ubuntu User Interface Plans Revealed!
Submitted by eco2geek on Saturday 27th of March 2010 07:46:36 PM
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Recently, a really, really long discussion took place on Launchpad, Ubuntu's bug-tracking system, about the Ubuntu user interface design team's sudden and controversial decision to move window buttons from the right-hand side to the left. It's been widely reported that Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's "SABDFL" (a South African word which roughly translates in English to "BADASS"), announced in response to numerous complaints that "Ubuntu is not a democracy."
Mr. Shuttleworth also said that "moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely,and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options there. It's much easier to do that if we make this change now."
But what "innovative options" might he be referring to?
To find out, we contacted Ubuntu's NADOPR (North American Director of Public Relations), Bea Esser, for clarification. Ms. Esser put us in contact with a member of Ubuntu's design team, Drew A. Gooey-Aubergine, who gave us an exclusive look at what innovative new features Ubuntu users might see on the right-hand side of their windows in future releases.
For example, there might be an implementation of a boss key by means of the face icon in the upper right-hand corner. In this use-case scenario, explained Mr. Gooey-Aubergine, when you clicked the icon your screen would immediately display the following:
"There's nothing that will convince your boss you're working," explained Mr. Gooey-Aubergine, "like the familiar sight of a real operating system like Windows XP."
According to Mr. Gooey-Aubergine, Mark Shuttleworth has been asking all Ubuntu teams to come up with possible ways to increase revenue. "That's a real natural for us, as opposed to, say, those eggheads in the kernel team," said Mr. Gooey-Aubergine. "We've been expecting this request for a long time now."
One possible way would be through a PayPal link.
And there's the tried-and-true Google Ads. "These would only be displayed if there was an active Internet connection," explained Mr. Gooey-Aubergine, "making these double as a sort of Network Monitor."
Finally, Mr. Gooey-Aubergine seemed to be the most excited about the possibility of adding an Ubuntu Menu. "Think of all the things we could do with that!" he exclaimed. "We could be the first Linux distribution bundled with a one-click "Upgrade to Debian" feature! Although," he admitted, "we haven't passed that one by Mark yet." Nor. as it turned out, had he asked Mr. Shuttleworth about the "uninstall" option.
We'll have more reporting on this exciting story as it develops. In the meantime, what would you want to see in an Ubuntu window? Feel free to add your comments!
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Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer. So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again. Still the same complaint. Then I deleted some unused VM images. Those would free a few dozen gigabytes, so it should make things work. I even emptied the trash can to make sure nothing lingered around. But even this did not help, I still got the same complaint.
At this point it was time to get serious and launch the terminal. And, true enough, according to df the disk had only 8 gigabytes of free space even though I had just deleted over 40 gigabytes of files from it (using rm, not the GUI, so things really should have been gone). A lot of googling and poking later I discovered that all the deleted files had gone to "reserved space" on the file system. There was no way to access those files or delete them. According to documentation the operating system would delete those files "on demand as more space is needed". This was not very comforting because the system most definitely was not doing that and you'd think that Apple's own software would get this right.
After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode updated.
After my blood pressure dropped to healthier levels I got the strangest feeling of déjà vu. This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s. Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best. Then it hit me.
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Ubuntu has lost touch with reality and is dying
Great satire piece - and as with great satire, there are many grains of truth. And some of your "suggestions" could turn into really useful ideas.
That said, I have been saddened by Ubuntu for the past two releases...and the silliness being displayed by the leadership on this design issue makes me fear for the development of this project. Having used both eeebuntu (EB3) and Ubuntu Eee (easy peasy), I am very excited about eebuntu's move to debian. Ubuntu is getting too large for its own britches...and I truly hope the new version is amazing...but I won't hold my breath.
Haha..I do like the article,
Haha..I do like the article, thanks for that.
However I have to disagree with the poster above. I don't think that Ubuntu has lost touch with reality, I think it's the users and critics that have. The fact is, Ubuntu is NOT democracy, nor' are they bound to the terms/standards handed out by users. Granted, it's nice to listen to the people, and consider their suggestions-- but the fact is, they have to make their own choices. As said by Shuttleworth himself, they are not a democracy..and it's all very true. They've never been a democracy, and they never will be. This goes for all companies..including Novel, KDE, etc. You can't just put out an idea and expect it to always be implemented. It doesn't work that way..unless you own YOUR own company.
I also think, however..that people are seriously over-reacting to the button placing. Who's to say it will be permanent? Maybe they simply want to try it out? Give it a chance maybe? I mean seriously..calm down people
..and if it doesn't work to your liking, and it sucks..and they fail to listen to everyone in the future..move on.
It's Open Source, If You Recall...
Just change the buttons back yourself. See here: www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/
Many a true word spoken in jest...
The notion that good ole 'Bunty may someday become adware - carrying Google adds or links to PayPal - is utterly horrific! Methinks I will be joining lots of folks and hitting the mythical "Upgrade to Debian" button if that ever comes to pass. lol.
Alternatively, "sudo apt-get install adblock-for-ubuntu" anyone?