Ubuntu: Dashed and Trashed

I used Ubuntu 10.04 full time for about a year or so. It's been very good. It had a lot of usability features which served me well. Window scaling, good hot key use, simple effective toolbars, ease of installation, simple to find and use applications, automatically maintained menus, quite reliable update regimen, simple reliable multiple desktop support and support for the hardware I needed. The only real criticism (which isn't even a fair criticism) was a lack of built-in driver support for Sandy Bridge.

A colleague told me about Unity, and I got to see it in action. It looked very sweet with lots of features that I might use. Improved use of horizontal real estate, dock based application icons, simple and effective menu system and looking very sharp to the eye.

When the LTS was released, I migrated up to it. After several months of use, I can categorically say that this was a mistake. Compiz integration is buggy to the point of being irrevocably broken, window scaling is a massive fail, there's too many bugs in the dock to list, no way to add simple toolbars, lack of ability to manipulate (almost any) Unity settings, global menus are annoying / broken / pointless, my middle mouse button is broken by default, window scroll bars aren't responsive enough to be usable, code is required to add applications to the system tray and finally .. the dash is possibly the worst invention / design I've ever seen on a desktop operating system.

Let's start with the Dash. Keyboard search support for window menus is an entirely stupid idea. 90% of commonly used menu options already have hotkey support and these are consistent hotkeys I'm familiar with and have been using since I started using my first computer. If I'm looking for a menu option which I'm not familiar with, then trying to find it via search is a thorough disaster. It takes in excess of 5 times as long to use, and it's also incredibly frustrating.

Dash application activation is pointless. Any application which I use regularly is going to appear on a common menu (eg. the Dock) and any application I don't use regularly I don't generally know the name of anyway. Sure, the old application menus were a SOB to find applications in but at least there was a way to actually find the application. Now, I'm just totally lost. Google is a better tool for identifying applications than the Dash.

Onto the Dock. The position is obviously wrong. The Dock needs to be horizontal on the screen. This is fundamental to modern computers. Computers come with wide screens because horizontal screen real estate is far more important than vertical real estate. This is because in the English language, we read from left to right, not top to bottom. Nobody (anywhere ... ever .. under any circumstances) reads multiple lines of code / text / document simultaneously. Cannibalizing horizontal screen real estate for the purpose of displaying something as simple as application icons is counter productive. Yes the dock can be hidden, and no matter how careful the developers have been, you are frequently going to accidentally activate the dock when attempting other actions. Not to mention the counter intuitive behavior of the dock. When I click on an application icon, I want to start that application, not display a list of windows or minimize the existing window .. and the default behaviour can't be set. Adding applications into the dock is practially impossible. What's wrong with simply dragging the application I want onto the dock? Why didn't anyone figure in this feature? Seems like a glaringly obvious omission to make. And why, oh why, would anyone want an application level menu which expand from the dock? Do I really want a Wine icon with a menu for my Wine applications? No. I want them integrated into the operating system (their own icons) .. which is entirely the point. And what's with the collapsed icons I can't see? Let me guess, having the Dock sitting vertically makes it impossible to fit the required number of applications on the screen? Oh, and what's with the permanent Dash and Trash icons? Is this a metaphor for Unity? 'Ubuntu: Dashed and Trashed'.

Next topic, application switching. Why would I want a more complex application switcher? Holding down multiple keys whilst pressing other keys in order to switch between applications? It's slow, complex and not the sort of activity which results in intuitive understanding because there's no pattern to the behaviour and no visual cues for the results. The Unity window switcher is slow to cue, ineffective for efficient use and just plain silly. It lacks any sort of forthought of design, and it's relationship to the application window switching (ala the Dock click mechanism) is thoroughly inane. If I'm using a dozen applications, I don't want to 1. display the dock, 2. identify my desired application, 3. click on the application, 4. identify the target window, 5. activate the window. I want to switch from application window to application window (and between applications) with a single action. It doesn't matter what that action is, just make it a single action. Hotkey, mouse gesture, combination of buttons, full screen display and window click (aka Scale or Mac Expose) .. anything, but make it simple, efficient and intuitive.

Notification area applications. There's actually no way for me to add a toolbar to Ubuntu Unity. How is that unification? Show me a modern operating system, any modern operating system (on a smart phone, tablet, pc, television etc.) which you can't have a quick launch toolbar.. it's only Ubuntu Unity. Why must I activate all applications slowly using the (hidden .. see above) Dock or the impossibly slow Dash? What's wrong with me deciding that I really do need to have a toolbar? Same for the main menu. What's one of the first notification area applications to come out? The full 10.04 Ubuntu menu. Hey canonical, take a hint .. you've dropped a duce. People want the menu, people want the toolbars, people need the indicator applications from previous distributions.

This page could include a description of the unbelievable plethora of bugs I've encountered in Unity to date. Everything from the dock not working, applications not starting, the entire gui crashing, the gui simply locking up and becoming inaccessible, desktop switching breaking down, icons disappearing from the dock, mouse settings not saving, third party settings application having unbelievably random effects etc. etc. etc. There's also other things which are annoying by design, but I'll also forcibly forgoe bothering to mention these Canonical miss-steps here.

This isn't a rant on how Canonical shouldn't have changed everything. It's a statement about how Ubuntu (as of 12.04) is no longer fit as a desktop operating system. Yes, it's going to meet the needs of a handful of power users ... probably the same small group of power users who designed it. Yes, it's going to work in the tiny niche tablet market. It's not going to work for anyone else.


It's DOA. It's lacking forthought, a failure of design, unstable, unrecognisable, uncustomizable, unconfigurable, unwarranted and generally unusable. How much of this relates to Gnome 3 and how much relates to Unity, I really can't say. Probably more the former and less the latter. Regardless of the root cause, this is the killer Ubuntu operating system. If Canonical doesn't dump (or dramatically overhall) this POS, 12.04 will go down in history as the release which killed Ubuntu ... and perhaps, the entire Linux desktop experiment.

I'm back to MATE which Unity / Gnome 3 has also managed to somewhat trash. But even though it's relatively unstable (compared to 10.04 .. or any other distro), doing my day to day work doesn't frustrate me to despair. One day soon I'll migrate to Mint, and have no more concerns for Ubuntu. Until then, at least I'll not be wrestling with inane explanations and ill-considered design choices.