Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon: What's Lame Today
- Alt-Tab is blocked when a window menu is active
- "About" dialogs: "Close" button selected by default, why? If you're using the keyboard, you'll just hit Esc to get rid of the button. (OK, at least they made Esc work at last)
- Nautilus: as useless as usual. A whole two view modes!! "Icons" and "List". Who would ever want, say, "Tiles" a la Redmond?
- NTFS mounts are broken
- Want a shortcut to Home folder on your desktop? What can be easier, just drag the Start->Places->Home Folder icon to the desktop. Oops? No workie?
- For windows without a resize area (how's that called properly) in the bottom-right corner (say, Firefox), it's no easy task to grab the resize-both ways area which is only a couple of pixels across. A popular non-free OS had it right since version 3.1 at least.
- XChat-GNOME IRC Chat: the IRC->Connect dialog fails to remember the server you connected to last time. And in that dialog, the Close button should really be Cancel, right?
- If a drop-down menu doesn't have icons for any item, the items' text starts right from the left border of the widget. Dunno about you, feels wrong to me (too used to Windows I guess).
- Keyboard preferences -> Layouts -> Selected layouts: "Default" radio buttons won't work.
- The idiotic counter-intuitive highlighting of file icons on mouseover is still there, still no way to turn it off.
- Firefox is still version 1.5? You kidding?
- gedit still insists on opening everything in the same window, in tabs. Even if you're on a different virtual desktop at the moment.
- It seems that every dialog that ever comes up has the keyboard selection activated on some widget, even if you can't imagine anyone ever using that widget, even if everyone uses the mouse anyway. This kind of visual garbage annoys me. OK, I'm easy to annoy.
- If you use Alt-Shift (Windows default) as locale switcher, it won't work if you press Shift first. And of course it fucks up Alt-Shift-* shortcuts, as usual.
- Ctrl-* shortcuts don't work when Russian layout is selected. As usual.
- Onboard sound doesn't work on my ASUS P5GPL-X.
- It's 2007, we have Xgl and stuff, but we still haven't learned to draw window decorations simultaneously with drawing new windows.
- In Nautilus, pressing Del moves the file to Trash immediately. I know you love Apple, but can you at least be consistent when you copy them? It's not easy to hit Cmd-Delete accidentally you know.
- Start -> Accessories (etc) -> right-click on any item. The selection on the item disappears? Now try Start -> Places -> right-click on any item. Deliver a speech about how consistency.
- Login window: is it so hard to accept that Microsoft does get some things right? Can we please put TWO edit boxes (for username and password) on the screen simultaneously, rather than show them one at a time? And does the vertical arrangement of the "OK/Cancel" manifest inability to make a decision in which order to place them side by side?
- I have an "Audio Disc" icon on my desktop. Right-clicking it presents, among other things, a choice of two actions: "Open" and "Browse folders". Both start the "Sound Juicer". Which is internationally challenged btw.
- Speaking of internationalization, have we learned yet that people in some countries have a strong preference for expressing things in a different way from U.S? Like dates, you know, or time. Or single-byte encodings where Unicode is not available. (Haven't actually checked this one as I didn't install Gutsy from scratch)
- Open a terminal and start any gtk application. Enjoy a flood of "WARNING" and "error" messages. Free and open source software at its best, no doubt. Is it too much to ask that GUI application fork into background and resist the urge to dump their debug information to stdout unless explicitly asked to?
Good things:
- in "Open File" dialogs, a single click is now sufficient to open an item from "Places" sidebar
- Esc finally works in about dialogs
- In some themes at least, the scroll bars are no longer highlighted on mouseover.
- Totem Movie Player seems to work, sometimes. The progress bar slider must be a joke though.
Overall, Ubuntu (and Linux desktop in general) is showing imrovement. Give it another 10 or 20 years, and I won't be surprised if it approaches Windows XP in usability.
- "About" dialogs: "Close" button selected by default, why? If you're using the keyboard, you'll just hit Esc to get rid of the button. (OK, at least they made Esc work at last)
- Nautilus: as useless as usual. A whole two view modes!! "Icons" and "List". Who would ever want, say, "Tiles" a la Redmond?
- NTFS mounts are broken
- Want a shortcut to Home folder on your desktop? What can be easier, just drag the Start->Places->Home Folder icon to the desktop. Oops? No workie?
- For windows without a resize area (how's that called properly) in the bottom-right corner (say, Firefox), it's no easy task to grab the resize-both ways area which is only a couple of pixels across. A popular non-free OS had it right since version 3.1 at least.
- XChat-GNOME IRC Chat: the IRC->Connect dialog fails to remember the server you connected to last time. And in that dialog, the Close button should really be Cancel, right?
- If a drop-down menu doesn't have icons for any item, the items' text starts right from the left border of the widget. Dunno about you, feels wrong to me (too used to Windows I guess).
- Keyboard preferences -> Layouts -> Selected layouts: "Default" radio buttons won't work.
- The idiotic counter-intuitive highlighting of file icons on mouseover is still there, still no way to turn it off.
- Firefox is still version 1.5? You kidding?
- gedit still insists on opening everything in the same window, in tabs. Even if you're on a different virtual desktop at the moment.
- It seems that every dialog that ever comes up has the keyboard selection activated on some widget, even if you can't imagine anyone ever using that widget, even if everyone uses the mouse anyway. This kind of visual garbage annoys me. OK, I'm easy to annoy.
- If you use Alt-Shift (Windows default) as locale switcher, it won't work if you press Shift first. And of course it fucks up Alt-Shift-* shortcuts, as usual.
- Ctrl-* shortcuts don't work when Russian layout is selected. As usual.
- Onboard sound doesn't work on my ASUS P5GPL-X.
- It's 2007, we have Xgl and stuff, but we still haven't learned to draw window decorations simultaneously with drawing new windows.
- In Nautilus, pressing Del moves the file to Trash immediately. I know you love Apple, but can you at least be consistent when you copy them? It's not easy to hit Cmd-Delete accidentally you know.
- Start -> Accessories (etc) -> right-click on any item. The selection on the item disappears? Now try Start -> Places -> right-click on any item. Deliver a speech about how consistency.
- Login window: is it so hard to accept that Microsoft does get some things right? Can we please put TWO edit boxes (for username and password) on the screen simultaneously, rather than show them one at a time? And does the vertical arrangement of the "OK/Cancel" manifest inability to make a decision in which order to place them side by side?
- I have an "Audio Disc" icon on my desktop. Right-clicking it presents, among other things, a choice of two actions: "Open" and "Browse folders". Both start the "Sound Juicer". Which is internationally challenged btw.
- Speaking of internationalization, have we learned yet that people in some countries have a strong preference for expressing things in a different way from U.S? Like dates, you know, or time. Or single-byte encodings where Unicode is not available. (Haven't actually checked this one as I didn't install Gutsy from scratch)
- Open a terminal and start any gtk application. Enjoy a flood of "WARNING" and "error" messages. Free and open source software at its best, no doubt. Is it too much to ask that GUI application fork into background and resist the urge to dump their debug information to stdout unless explicitly asked to?
Good things:
- in "Open File" dialogs, a single click is now sufficient to open an item from "Places" sidebar
- Esc finally works in about dialogs
- In some themes at least, the scroll bars are no longer highlighted on mouseover.
- Totem Movie Player seems to work, sometimes. The progress bar slider must be a joke though.
Overall, Ubuntu (and Linux desktop in general) is showing imrovement. Give it another 10 or 20 years, and I won't be surprised if it approaches Windows XP in usability.
posted by toneg at 12:51 AM
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