** Changed in: unity
Status: Incomplete => Won't Fix
** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu)
Status: Triaged => Invalid
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/960048
Title:
automatically adding newly installed applications makes the launcher
unusable
Status in Ayatana Design:
New
Status in Unity:
Won't Fix
Status in “unity” package in Ubuntu:
Invalid
Bug description:
This got spawned from bug 955147.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter/LaunchingApplications decided
to add newly installed applications to the launcher by default.
This new concept essentially admits defeat that new users do not know
about the dash. This started last cycle with moving the control-center
icon into the launcher (thereby making it overflow on netbook
screens), which already spawned a large discussion. Now this proposes
to throw all limits over board and add tons of new icons to the
launcher; NB that we make it very easy to install lots of new apps,
and we go through great lengths to make it possible to create, find,
and install third-party apps even post-release.
Now, this approach works around a temporary 5 minute question ("where
does that app go"?), not by giving a 5-minute answer (quick tutorial
or hint application which opens up the first couple of times), but by
essentially redefining what the launcher is: a place where all
applications go. This has several problems:
* Our launcher just isn't built for that -- it's efficient and useful
for up to 10 to 20 icons, depending on your screen size. But after
that it folds, and exponentially gets harder to use. It doesn't have
text to describe the applications, does not have a stable order, and
is just one-dimensional.
* It does not have most of the applications that are installed by
default -- how do people find that?
* It teachs the wrong thing -- that the launcher is the place for all
apps. It drives people further away from the dash, thereby aggravating
the learning problem instead of solving it.
* It optimizes a thing which represents 0.00005% of the workload [1]
at the expense of making the other 99.99995% much worse.
The spec itself points out that this "relies on heavy users removing
unwanted launchers". Given how the launcher works, anyone who installs
more than ~ 10 apps is a "heavy user", i. e. quite a large part of
users.
The flaw in that spec is the conclusion it draws from the fact that
users are not able to figure out how the dash works: You rely on users
being able to remove apps again, but then they would again need to use
the dash to start these applications, a capability you just denied
them.
So in summary, this turns the launcher into something like the app launcher
that e. g. Android has -- place for all application. But as it's not built for
this and there are no improvements for at least mitigating the effects of this
change.
Making the launcher useful to hold an arbitrary number of apps
requires it to become two-dimensional, sorted, searchable, and touch
friendly. We already have that -- the dash. So if we want to go that
direction, could we just not use the dash as we have it, and instead
change how to invoke it?
[1] Assuming a very pessimistic scenario: using Ubuntu for two hours a day
for a year, and 50% not finding out how the dash works in 5 minutes.
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