Saturday, December 06, 2008

Reflections on Ubuntu Usability & Appearance

So, i have had my desktop running Ubuntu for a while now and I'd though I'd share some reflections. I'm pretty happy with it as a whole but here is some things which need work

  1. Nvida TV out support is good, but the UI still as brain dead as windows is. Save to Xconf doesn't work and something that common shouldn't require googling
  2. Still ugly, if you compare an XP desktop running Firefox and an Ubuntu Desktop running Firefox, XP wins hands down for appearance.
  3. File Management is visually horrible, compared to Windows Explorer, out of the box it feels like I am back in the 800x600 days, whilst being on a big screen
  4. Compbiz Fusion is cool, but still waaaaaaay to geeky, who wants to remember x million keys strokes and the Control Panel doesn't even explain what the features are
  5. Installing desktop themes is a total usability disaster for the average user, Gnome Art manager feels very 1990's.
  6. Packaged Applications are great, anything which falls outside that is still way to painful
  7. Mirror Selection, I live in Australia and my ISP iiNet has a free mirror, except sometimes it's not up to date. There needs to be an option to select a favourite mirror with fallback to others when that one isn't up to date
These things aside, it's starting to show a lot of promise

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah. I guess I over look a lot of stuff. I've been using Gnome for years and it's improved so much from the early days. After the first of the year I think I'm going to switch to KDE 4 for awhile just to give it a try...