5 ms·

This is a gigantic step... sideways. Big clunky fonts and an excessive amount of blank space. It's like the American car of UIs.

by thejake 17y ago

dmaz 17y ago
I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font. Regarding spacing, the space in the toolbar and status bar is being used a bit more efficiently than before, but cutting off the status bar skews the balance, and overall, the layout looks a little haphazard.
- mgunes 17y ago
  I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font. Here's a good argument as to why it shouldn't: http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answer.html http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answ...
  - thristian 17y ago
    I'll grant that Droid has a number of typographical problems outlined nicely in that article (although I suspect his complains about kerning and colour might well be addressed by careful choice of GNOME's font-rendering options), but nevertheless I find Droid to be the most pleasant-to-read Free-as-in-speech font I know of. It's certainly slicker than the slow-moving and clumsy Vera/DejaVu, and the less said about the Liberation the better. You could probably tempt me with Lucida Sans, if B&H ever released outline versions to go with the X11 bitmap fonts, but until another giant corporation shells out for a new custom typeface or FontForge becomes usable by designers, Droid is where it's at.
    - sandGorgon 17y ago
      I used Droid for a long time and now am using Cantarell (another GPL font) for my interface... along with Inconsolata for monospace.
      - thristian 17y ago
        Huh, I hadn't heard of Cantarell before. At first glance, the hinting and so forth isn't quite as polished as Droid, but I'll use it for while and see if it grows on me.
potatolicious 17y ago
I like it - Ubuntu is supposed to be the "consumer" flavor of Linux, so why should it concentrate on information density over usability? My mother is the type that would start panicking if her computer looked like Mission Control in Houston, so I think it's great that Ubuntu is freeing up some space and paying real attention to layout, and this includes proper use of whitespace.
- prog 17y ago
  While we are on the topic of mothers :-) I recently moved my moms PC from Windows to Ubuntu. I stay in a different city and it was too much of a pain to support Windows. Its been a real relief. She is 66 years of age and doesn't know know much about computers. She started learning to use it a few years back to keep in touch with me over email. Her use case is primarily email, google, bank accounts and sometimes facebook. I think Ubuntu UI is nice and clean. It doesn't confuses someone like her. Updates also work very well. It also work quite well for a command line user like me :-)
  - sandGorgon 17y ago
    same here - I just wish skype (with webcams) was better supported. For a lot of people (and businesses), that is a blocker. I managed to get a UVC webcam, but still had to get a PPA v4l repository and build some drivers. I think it is good that ipods will be supported out-of-the-box in Lucid (Rhythmbox). The same should happen for Skype. On that front, one should get rid of all the useless games and instead have : 1. a nice Twitter app 2.Scrivener-like app These are killer apps for a lot of people who use a Mac - especially the young student demographic.
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      How long ago was this? uvcvideo was merged into mainline quite a while back, so almost all [recent] webcams should work pretty well now.
  - rdtsc 17y ago
    My mom is over 2000 miles away and she's had Ubuntu for over 3 years now. It has been really easy to administer and help her use it. Every time I visit I upgrade the version of Ubuntu and make sure that networking works reliably, after that anything can be done remotely. She is quite comfortable with it. What was interesting is that this is the first computer she has really used. Most people I know started on Mac or Windows then saw Linux. She is the only person I know that started on Ubuntu. For emergencies I keep extra boot-able OS partitions including the original Windows XP that came with the machine. When I show it to her she thinks Windows is not very easy to use and looks clunky. That always make me laugh.

This is a gigantic step... sideways. Big clunky fonts and an excessive amount of blank space. It's like the American car of UIs.

by thejake 17y ago

This is a gigantic step... sideways. Big clunky fonts and an excessive amount of blank space. It's like the American car of UIs.

dmaz 17y ago

I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font. Regarding spacing, the space in the toolbar and status bar is being used a bit more efficiently than before, but cutting off the status bar skews the balance, and overall, the layout looks a little haphazard.

mgunes 17y ago
I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font. Here's a good argument as to why it shouldn't: http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answer.html http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answ...
- thristian 17y ago
  I'll grant that Droid has a number of typographical problems outlined nicely in that article (although I suspect his complains about kerning and colour might well be addressed by careful choice of GNOME's font-rendering options), but nevertheless I find Droid to be the most pleasant-to-read Free-as-in-speech font I know of. It's certainly slicker than the slow-moving and clumsy Vera/DejaVu, and the less said about the Liberation the better. You could probably tempt me with Lucida Sans, if B&H ever released outline versions to go with the X11 bitmap fonts, but until another giant corporation shells out for a new custom typeface or FontForge becomes usable by designers, Droid is where it's at.
  - sandGorgon 17y ago
    I used Droid for a long time and now am using Cantarell (another GPL font) for my interface... along with Inconsolata for monospace.
    - thristian 17y ago
      Huh, I hadn't heard of Cantarell before. At first glance, the hinting and so forth isn't quite as polished as Droid, but I'll use it for while and see if it grows on me.

potatolicious 17y ago

I like it - Ubuntu is supposed to be the "consumer" flavor of Linux, so why should it concentrate on information density over usability? My mother is the type that would start panicking if her computer looked like Mission Control in Houston, so I think it's great that Ubuntu is freeing up some space and paying real attention to layout, and this includes proper use of whitespace.

prog 17y ago
While we are on the topic of mothers :-) I recently moved my moms PC from Windows to Ubuntu. I stay in a different city and it was too much of a pain to support Windows. Its been a real relief. She is 66 years of age and doesn't know know much about computers. She started learning to use it a few years back to keep in touch with me over email. Her use case is primarily email, google, bank accounts and sometimes facebook. I think Ubuntu UI is nice and clean. It doesn't confuses someone like her. Updates also work very well. It also work quite well for a command line user like me :-)
- sandGorgon 17y ago
  same here - I just wish skype (with webcams) was better supported. For a lot of people (and businesses), that is a blocker. I managed to get a UVC webcam, but still had to get a PPA v4l repository and build some drivers. I think it is good that ipods will be supported out-of-the-box in Lucid (Rhythmbox). The same should happen for Skype. On that front, one should get rid of all the useless games and instead have : 1. a nice Twitter app 2.Scrivener-like app These are killer apps for a lot of people who use a Mac - especially the young student demographic.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    How long ago was this? uvcvideo was merged into mainline quite a while back, so almost all [recent] webcams should work pretty well now.
- rdtsc 17y ago
  My mom is over 2000 miles away and she's had Ubuntu for over 3 years now. It has been really easy to administer and help her use it. Every time I visit I upgrade the version of Ubuntu and make sure that networking works reliably, after that anything can be done remotely. She is quite comfortable with it. What was interesting is that this is the first computer she has really used. Most people I know started on Mac or Windows then saw Linux. She is the only person I know that started on Ubuntu. For emergencies I keep extra boot-able OS partitions including the original Windows XP that came with the machine. When I show it to her she thinks Windows is not very easy to use and looks clunky. That always make me laugh.