Comment 31 for bug 748739

To the Unity developers ...

I applaud your attempt to create a zero configuration desktop UI. I am sorry to say that my past experience tells me that you have undertaken to do something which is both impractical and impossible. I will try to explain as best I can why I hold this view.

About ten years ago I worked for a major business software developer and amongst the other things I did was to define the architecture which allowed a set of independently developed applications to be slammed together into a suite. This involved creating an application deployment manager, an installation manager and a unified configuration manager. As this work was in progress, another team was busy creating a successor product which was intentionally integrated and which they anticipated delivering with a zero configuration requirement (although not a zero installation configuration requirement). I attempted in vain to point out to them that they were mistaken in their optimism and that I could offer them appropriate configuration tools.

At the end of the day, experienced proved me to be correct. Why? I will explain in terms of the configuration issues which Unity will ultimately have to address.

All users have a relationship with the system on which they work which is intensely personal. This is because they use the system for the achievement of personal goals and this entails the use of individual varieties of data and in turn an individual set of computational capabilities. Moreover, for idiosyncratic reasons, where a computational goals may be achieved using any one of a set of similarly capable pieces of software (e.g. browsers), individual experience and personal taste will lead to specific preferences. Finally, there is the inescapable fact that few users will come to Unity without a past. They will encounter Unity, as I did, as a result of upgrading a system which they had tailored to respect their personal mental models and individual aesthetics.

I am sorry to say Unity's lack of configurability violates almost every consideration which makes a system a personally effective tool.

As regards data, this is the place in which it is least bad. The "Favourites" part of the menu launched by the F&F button at least honours my bookmarks selections (as best I can tell) but the drop down list appears to be unrelated and idiosyncratic. As near as I can tell, it is based on a history of recently accessed folders.

The "Applications" button launches a window which is sadly defective.

The notion of "Most Frequently Used" is based on the assumption that what I have done in the past is what I will do in the future. Wrong! The past does not define the future. If it did, VM paging systems would never encounter a page fault. I am the best judge of those things which I have done often in the past and which I expect to do equally often in the future. That is why I want to be able to pin apps to the launch bar. Let me be the judge but just make it dead easy to decide that I should pin an app to the launch bar.

The "Installed" area is even more problematic. On my system it is full of garbage. This garbage is mostly the result of the fact that I have installed -- or attempted to install -- Windows apps using Wine. Windows apps generate launch items at a frightening pace. When I have done installs under Wine, I have turned off the vast majority of the launch items. Unfortunately, Unity picks up all the potential launch items. This means that when I invoke "See ? more results", I am hosed with items I disabled during the Wine based install. There are a few other problems which I have encountered related to Windows based S/W which does not follow the Windows rules. I have been able to work around them in Gnome but Unity hits me with them without an identifiable workaround.

Then there is the dubious "Apps available ..." field. Forget it. This appears just to be a ransom selection from the Synaptic database. This is truly bad. At least synaptic lets me learn more about the items it displays.

Another defect of this dialog is that it has only two sizes. It would be more useful if it could be more smoothly resized.

Finally, there is the drop down list of all applications. Where did this set of categories come from and on what basis does an app get assigned to one of the categories? It does not match (or import) the old Gnome menu categories not does it match the synaptic categories. Certainly it does not match my personal categories and the only way I can see many apps which matter to me is to ask to see all apps (see comments on "Apps available ...").

My last concern regarding Unity is that it does not respect the configuration decisions I have made in past. I have established apps in the system bar. I have customized the menus. I have indicated preferred apps. Unity mostly ignores this. However much I might want the space saving and aesthetic features of Unity, this slap in the face guarantees that I will seek an alternative. One of my product managers told me more years ago than I will admit that the last thing you want your product to do is to consider changing suppliers. By ignoring the configuration decisions users have made is past, Unity will make them reconsider the wisdom of using Ubuntu. That is not a wise thing to so.

That said, I consider Unity to be an admirable effort to move the UI to a more effective model. Please consider my remarks as feedback intended to help you achieve your goal.