Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 13:51 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote: > On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 04:18:22PM -0500, Sean McNamara wrote: > > 5. Stability has been poor in my experience; I run into X crashes from > > time to time doing fairly mundane stuff that doesn't trigger a crash > > with Gnome2. > > Can you provide a bug # (with a full backtrace if possible)? I'm > putting a priority on following up on xserver segfaults. > > (Actually there are no public X crash bugs open against natty at the > moment, so I wonder that what you're seeing is not actually an xserver > segfault. Regardless, it should be investigated.) > > > 6. Multi-monitor seems totally broken somehow... on a 1024x768 laptop > > with a 1680x1050 VGA LCD attached, I get no menus and no indication > > that Unity is aware of windows on the large external LCD. And the > > left-side menu doesn't come up at all anymore. It seems like there is > > an empty space above the top of my laptop's screen where my mouse can > > go, but there is nothing up there -- I configured (using the > > xrandr-based Monitors applet) the big monitor to be to the right of > > the laptop LCD. > > The first half of that could be unity's handling of multi-head, which I > agree seems like it needs more QA. > > The second half, regarding blank spaces where the mouse gets lost, is a > long standing known X.org issue (bug #389519). (There's been a patch > proposed but it's not upstream yet.) There's a patch series for this and pointer barriers (which Unity might want to use, too, for the BDB + multihead) on the xorg-devel mailing list. The crtc-clamping works and if we really wanted it the patch is relatively safe and could be FFe'd. The pointer-barriers need protocol changes, and I'd be hesitant to include them before the protocol has been finalised. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Jason Warner wrote: > Hello! > > Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along > closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, complete with > Unity and classic Gnome. > > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty > unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel > about: > > * The look and feel > > * Usability > > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) > > * Highlights and favorite features > > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items > > You can reply to this email if your feedback is general/conversational or > file a bug if you are experiencing a specific issue. Filing a bug with > 'ubuntu-bug unity' command would do the trick and would get seen by the > appropriate people for specific issues. > > It will be fun to hear what everyone thinks! I look forward to seeing the > feedback. > > Cheers, > Jason > > PS. For those that like to navigate via keyboard (and who doesn't!), this > should be helpful > http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/keyboard-shortcuts-in-unity/28087#28087 > Here's my feedback for my Unity experience. I didn't spend as much time as I would have wanted because of the nvidia driver issue but now that things are working again, I can start testing it seriously. Please note that I haven't reported any bugs yet in Unity so consider this an overall summary of the bug hunting that will happen in the next few days. There's 500+ bugs to review before reporting anything new in order to avoid duplicates so it might take some time. ==Home Button== When maximizing the dash the text I typed went invisible but reappeared when adding or deleting a character. Also, I didn't find a way to minimize it once it was in fullscreen mode. I was glad to be able to get the dash with a single press of the key and start typing to filter the results but then I still have to grab my mouse and click on the icon, the tab key doesn't do anything nor does the arrow keys. I found it surprising that left click, middle click, right click, Alt+click, Shift+click, Ctrl+click all did the same thing : launching the document or app. For the documents, a contextual menu would have been nice in order to have basic operations (Open with, Move to trash , Send to, Properties, Remove from history, Open containing folder, etc..) ==Springboard== I have a hard time getting used to it, being used to Docky's behavior. In a lot of ways I find Docky to be more intuitive. I found it weird that it's not possible to show it by pushing the mouse to the left edge of the screen and I have to go in the top-left corner to display it. Creating a new instance of an application is not very intuitive, but once people have figured that they have to press the middle mouse button then it should be ok, yet some people barely use the middle click, so a 'New window' option below the 'Keep in launcher' would be nice to have. I've discovered that it was possible to drag files on a Launcher item and if the associated app supports this filetype, it will open it. Strangely it's not possible to drag files to disk drives. And about these disk shortcuts, there should be a way to identify them more easily, setting a custom icon for example. I've got 5 of these and I got to hover each one of them in order to know what I want to find. A network shares icon would also be nice. ==Panel & application menu== On a dual screen setup, it feels tedious to travel the whole desktop in order to select a menu item. I didn't understand with the menu was hidden, how are people supposed to know it's there ? If the application menu is here to stay then future applications will probably have a different design. Developers will put everything in toolbars and avoid menus as much as possible (or they'll put menus in the toolbar). ==General issues & experience== When locking the screen or coming out from suspend, the unity panel still shows on screen but that's nothing compared to video playback with totem or any other video player (actually, I only tried smplayer in addition to totem), the panel is displayed at all times and the springboard is shown at awkward times. Here's a screenshot of the panel ruining at good movie about Ubuntu Development featuring a cool guy: http://strycore.com/images/fullscreen-totem-with-panel-showing.jpg Also notice how the springboard appears when I press PrintScreen. On several occasions everything would freeze for a few second before back to normal. This seems to happen more when resizing a window, dragging stuff, and quitting games. I've had a lot of compiz crashes, some minor ones where only the window decorators disappeared and where I could fix the situation by running compiz --replace and some real crashes where I loose all keyboard input and where I'm forced to Alt-SysRq-K or if I'm lucky enough to have a nautilus window open, browse to /usr/bin and click on compiz. This k
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 06:28 +1030, Jason Warner wrote: > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be > pretty unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how > people feel about: So, now that the binary nVidia driver is working in Natty, I was able to try Unity out. I've been playing with it for about 45 minutes now, and here are my observations: I like the overall look of things. The Unity launcher on the left is neat. Not having menus in applications is weird at first glance, especially when you don't see them by default in the top bar. I thought the menus were broken until I put my mouse at the top of the screen and they appeared. Discoverability is a little odd until you know about it, and then it's fine. Having the menu appear half way over the name of the applications looks bad though. It kind of looks like it's broken. I haven't discovered where my applications are yet. I clicked on the big button on the top left hand corner, which popped up a nice looking dialog. Unfortunately the search bar doesn't seem to find anything, and the find icons don't do anything when I click on them. I assume this is unfinished, and is a known issue so I won't file a bug unless otherwise told to. Since that wasn't working, I tried hitting Alt-F2 to start an application, but that doesn't seem to work either. For now, I'll just start my apps using the command line. So, starting a terminal, the first thing I notice is it puts the terminal underneath the launcher, and the launcher goes away. The only way I've figured to get the launcher back is to move the terminal away from the edge of the screen. This is kind of irritating. New windows shouldn't get placed underneath the launcher, and there has to be some way of getting the launcher back without moving stuff out of the way. Second thing I notice, is there doesn't seem to be a way to start an application more than once. How do I open more than one terminal? How do I open more than one text editor? I seriously hope this will be possible. I can understand that certain applications, such as Evolution, should only be started once, but surely the terminal and the text editor are exceptions to this. Especially when using multiple workspaces. I am a heavy workspace user, and have been for years. Using multiple workspaces is the way I deal with doing more than one task at a time. A workspace for email and communications, a workspace for something I'm working on, a workspace for another task, etc. I want to check something out? Switch to an unused workspace and open a new browser. I used to think only power-users used workspaces, but to my surprise, family members who I've converted to Ubuntu have discovered workspaces by themselves and use them regularly. Unfortunately, workspaces are hard to use under Natty. The workspace switcher icon doesn't have previews, so it's hard to figure out where my stuff is. Clicking on the icon reveals a seasickness-inducing animation of all my workspaces entering the screen. But, I can't select any. At least, I _though_ I couldn't select any, until I finally noticed that I need to click _once_ on the icon, and then _double-click_ on the window I want to select. Switching between windows in a current workspace is hard also, as the launcher displays arrows beside applications that reside on different workspaces. When I click on the Firefox launcher that has an arrow, am I bringing up a firefox from this task, or will the launcher catapult me into another workspace altogether and try and make me guess where I've ended up? In all, I really like Unity and am looking forward to the bugs and usability issues to be cleared up. Marc. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Jason Warner wrote: > Hello! > Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along > closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, complete with > Unity and classic Gnome. > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty > unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel > about: > * The look and feel I like that this is somewhat consistent with the look and feel we have in Maverick, which should really help with upgrades. As far as prettiness, I don't know if I am looking at the final art assets or if a big change is still coming; that makes it a little difficult to comment. I think it's fairly pretty in general, though the dash obviously is still a WIP in that regard. I'm a little bothered by our half title bar / half top panel. We can end up with some really ugly visuals with maximised windows that are completely inconsistent with unmaximized windows. (Especially with themes that don't style the panel like a title bar, which is most themes because styling the panel like a title bar is a weird thing to do). The merging itself is quite natural, but the visuals hurt it for me. Alas, that one is a tough nut to crack so I can probably live with it for now, but is there any ongoing work in that direction? The glowy backgrounds on icons are interesting. Has anyone else noticed a strange tendency towards a really ugly, greenish yellow? I think that particular design is actually a little tired; everyone has been doing it since Windows 7 did it. (And Windows 7 still does the best job with it). > * Usability There are always little bugs to report, but it's coming along. I LOVE the stuff with holding Super to launch things in the panel, especially how that works with Places. A visual representation of the common keyboard shortcuts is something I have wanted for a long time. The arrows in the launcher! I don't think we are doing our users a favour when their applications start looking like pin-cushions. Lots of things are being presented by that one idea. I had a bit of muttering here about the widgets in the dash, but I filed a bug report on the text field (http://launchpad.net/bugs/727295). These have really been changing a lot so I'm sure it will be quite a bit better soon :) Configuration stuff is really weird to get to now. (Though it can be a little easier depending on how the search stuff looks in the end). I know we can't have Gnome 3's Control Centre yet (*sad face*), but maybe there could be a nice launcher that brings up the Application place pointing at the System category. That could also smooth the upgrade to 11.10, where I assume we will want to stick the Control Centre somewhere ;) > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) It's seems to be getting there with the latest update. I have my reservations about the global menu being implemented over dbus — it sounds like a weird, roundabout route for that window-specific data to take — but it is being much more reliable lately so I guess I don't need to worry about that hitting actual users. > * Highlights and favorite features Dragging a file to the launcher is really cool. We've had the ability to drag and drop to applications for a long time and this actually makes it useful. It's neat what a little thing like that can do, and it's wonderful when such things can plug in to existing standards so they already work to their fullest. This is particularly useful with an open application. I frequently want to drag and drop a file to an entry in the window list, and finally I can! > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items That dash feels a little netbook-ish. Some of the strings on it feel awkward — very specific and task-oriented. To me, that projects a feeling of the system itself being limited. Lots of comments people write about the dash seem to imply the same thing. This probably has a different effect on simpler users who really do want to just “browse the web,” “view photos,” “check email” and “listen to music,” but I wonder if this could use less loaded descriptions, and maybe just application names to communicate that these are regular application launchers. (Of course, I'm assuming by the “Shortcuts” heading that the eventual goal is for these to be user-configured). Finally, and I know I already filed a bug report on this but it's my favourite wishlist item: Quit does not actually quit applications; it closes windows and hopes that means quitting applications. Given Ayatana has been working on that relationship, this feels distinctly unhappy to me. For example, music players don't HAVE Quit anymore; you close the player's main window, and the application stays running if it needs to. Bamf does pretty well, but I think Unity is trying to present a knowledge of applications (as opposed to windows) that it simply does not have at the moment, and cannot have without a prope
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 04:18:22PM -0500, Sean McNamara wrote: > 5. Stability has been poor in my experience; I run into X crashes from > time to time doing fairly mundane stuff that doesn't trigger a crash > with Gnome2. Can you provide a bug # (with a full backtrace if possible)? I'm putting a priority on following up on xserver segfaults. (Actually there are no public X crash bugs open against natty at the moment, so I wonder that what you're seeing is not actually an xserver segfault. Regardless, it should be investigated.) > 6. Multi-monitor seems totally broken somehow... on a 1024x768 laptop > with a 1680x1050 VGA LCD attached, I get no menus and no indication > that Unity is aware of windows on the large external LCD. And the > left-side menu doesn't come up at all anymore. It seems like there is > an empty space above the top of my laptop's screen where my mouse can > go, but there is nothing up there -- I configured (using the > xrandr-based Monitors applet) the big monitor to be to the right of > the laptop LCD. The first half of that could be unity's handling of multi-head, which I agree seems like it needs more QA. The second half, regarding blank spaces where the mouse gets lost, is a long standing known X.org issue (bug #389519). (There's been a patch proposed but it's not upstream yet.) Bryce -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
Hi, On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Jason Warner wrote: > Hello! > Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along > closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, complete with > Unity and classic Gnome. > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty > unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel > about: > * The look and feel > * Usability > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) > * Highlights and favorite features > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items > You can reply to this email if your feedback is general/conversational or > file a bug if you are experiencing a specific issue. Filing a bug with > 'ubuntu-bug unity' command would do the trick and would get seen by the > appropriate people for specific issues. > It will be fun to hear what everyone thinks! I look forward to seeing the > feedback. > Cheers, > Jason > PS. For those that like to navigate via keyboard (and who doesn't!), this > should be > helpful http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/keyboard-shortcuts-in-unity/28087#28087 > -- > ubuntu-desktop mailing list > ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop > > I'll gladly offer my feedback. I've been using (or trying to use) Unity since about Alpha 1 until the present. My overall experience with Unity is that it's too much, too soon. It doesn't feel ready. It isn't streamlined. Here are a few targeted examples. 1. It's too difficult to get the menu along the left to appear when I want it to, but it's all too easy to get it to stay when I want it to go away. I'm always fighting with it: sometimes I want to do something and it disappears for a reason I can't really understand. Other times I have done what I want to do, and it just stays on the screen until I actually left-click on the ubuntu symbol in the top left. Sometimes I have to click it multiple times. 2. Performance impact of using Unity vs. GNOME 2+Compiz is visibly measurable with Intel 965GM graphics. Now, 965GM isn't exactly the fastest chipset on the planet, but in a "full fat" laptop with 4GB of 800MHz memory and a Core 2 Duo, the plain old browsing/email/IM experience shouldn't lag. At all. But with Unity, I get substantial performance problems, especially scrolling the browser and task switching -- it's "jittery". Compiz seems fine when running with gnome2. 3. Many applications (especially Qt/KDE4 apps such as Quassel) have their menus stripped out by the global menus feature, but the menu doesn't appear at the top, either. IMHO this is unacceptable: there should be a strictly tested and enforced disjunction that if the menu cannot be rendered at the top for whatever reason, then it should be left alone in the app. Having the menu fail to appear at all is a showstopper, and asking all applications to change to be compatible is simply not going to be a solution. 4. Scrolling in the Applications overlay (the translucent one that is black and takes up most of the entire screen) is painfully slow, even slower than web browsing. Brings me back to 2007 when you could get about 1 FPS browser scrolling with EXA on the Intel drivers :) 5. Stability has been poor in my experience; I run into X crashes from time to time doing fairly mundane stuff that doesn't trigger a crash with Gnome2. 6. Multi-monitor seems totally broken somehow... on a 1024x768 laptop with a 1680x1050 VGA LCD attached, I get no menus and no indication that Unity is aware of windows on the large external LCD. And the left-side menu doesn't come up at all anymore. It seems like there is an empty space above the top of my laptop's screen where my mouse can go, but there is nothing up there -- I configured (using the xrandr-based Monitors applet) the big monitor to be to the right of the laptop LCD. 7. It isn't clear to me upon visual inspection as to how I can pull up a window that's open using the unity bar on the left. With Windows 7 or Mac OS X, there is a dedicated place and visual style to indicate that there's a window open and you can click it to get to that window. I don't see enough contrast (or something) for it to be obvious to my eyes which icons are "launch this application!" and which are "click me to get this application's window back!". So I end up using alt-tab a lot, which is slower than clicking a button. I really miss the Gnome2 window selector. I think I'd like Unity if it were much more polished, the bugs were fixed, robust support for multi-monitor, and less "fiddly" menu on the left. I think it needs at least another 6 months of development and testing. I have recently (in the past 2 days) reverted to Gnome 2 and uninstalled the indicator global menu stuff. I may try Unity and global menus again as things get more polished and bugs get fixed, but for now, it is not really usable, and causes too much frustration for me to even test it. I am much happi
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 06:28:24AM +1030, Jason Warner wrote: > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty > unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel > about: > > * The look and feel > > * Usability > > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) > > * Highlights and favorite features > > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items I have it installed on a bunch of systems and have been messing with it quite a bit. Stabilitywise, I need to use 'unity --reset' still quite a bit, but otherwise once it's up and running it seems solid. (From working on a lot of bug reports, I know others are running into various crashes/lockups/corruptions/etc., but I just don't run into them much myself. Still, I think there's more than plenty of bug reports to keep us all busy this last remaining month.) On my laptops and especially my netbook I am finding it works well. The menus take a bit of getting used to (I end up mostly launching apps via ctrl+alt+t but that's probably just proof I've turned into an old codger.) On my desktop (dual head) I find the conciseness of interface actually tends to work against the interface a bit for me in this case. At 3840x1200 there is ample screen real estate, so having menus battened down seems to add extra mousework to find apps and get them launched, and switch/select them once they're up. I'd love for there to be an "unfurled" state where the UI displays more stuff when the desktop has a bigger resolution to work in. Currently, I get by with manually launching gnome-panel. I also find myself missing being able to put shortcuts on the menubar. (I know this all adds back cluttery junk to my desktop, but I'm yet learn the new organizational schemes. Okay yeah this removes all doubt as to my old codger status.) Bryce -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Call for Natty Feedback!
On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 06:28 +1030, Jason Warner wrote: > Hello! > > > Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along > closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, > complete with Unity and classic Gnome. > > > I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be > pretty unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how > people feel about: > > > * The look and feel > > > * Usability > > > * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) > > > * Highlights and favorite features > > > * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items > > > You can reply to this email if your feedback is general/conversational > or file a bug if you are experiencing a specific issue. Filing a bug > with 'ubuntu-bug unity' command would do the trick and would get seen > by the appropriate people for specific issues. > > > It will be fun to hear what everyone thinks! I look forward to seeing > the feedback. > > > Cheers, > Jason > > > PS. For those that like to navigate via keyboard (and who doesn't!), > this should be > helpful > http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/keyboard-shortcuts-in-unity/28087#28087 Hi, Perhaps we should have something like http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/beta/feedback for Unity? Regards Chris signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Call for Natty Feedback!
Hello! Natty Feature Freeze is here and A3 is upon us! Anyone following along closely should see and feel a fairly stable and usable system, complete with Unity and classic Gnome. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on Unity...and I'd like it to be pretty unfiltered and raw. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how people feel about: * The look and feel * Usability * Stability (knowing that we are entering a heavy bug fixing time!) * Highlights and favorite features * Perceived shortcomings and/or "wishlist" items You can reply to this email if your feedback is general/conversational or file a bug if you are experiencing a specific issue. Filing a bug with 'ubuntu-bug unity' command would do the trick and would get seen by the appropriate people for specific issues. It will be fun to hear what everyone thinks! I look forward to seeing the feedback. Cheers, Jason PS. For those that like to navigate via keyboard (and who doesn't!), this should be helpful http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/keyboard-shortcuts-in-unity/28087#28087 -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
