A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point to an extent), that found it to be half-baked and offering little more (if anything) over the classic desktop and a couple of additional programs (e.g. a Dock, a launcher etc.) while much slower and kludgey (a totally valid point, but it’s a 1.0), Unity is here to stay.

It is true that, despite Shuttleworth’s ramblings on his blog, most of Unity is hardly innovative. Most useful things in there can already be found in most modern desktop environments (including some linux desktops) while Unity’s implementation of those very features is hardly the best. But there are also some unique offerings that are different, such as lenses and the proposed (but not yet included, thankfully) windicators. The question there is: are those features really useful? Are they well thought-out?

I think not. Take for example desktop search, a hot subject in mid 2000s desktops that’s been largely solved in an exemplary way in OS X by Apple’s Spotlight and a number of third party tools on that platform (LaunchBar and then Quicksilver are prime examples of early game changers), and even Windows 7 to some extent through the built-in search field in the start menu. Then, with five years of hindsight, Canonical decides to make things somewhat harder for users by exposing the search context to the user in the form of completely separate ‘lenses’ as opposed to keeping the distinction internal (in the same way OS X does) and presenting filtering options in an innovative way. Put it simply: I’d much rather have a single search field, ala Mac OS X’s Spotlight that searches for my input text across ‘data domains’ and contexts and returns useful, filterable lists of data, than the frustratingly badly designed ‘lens’ concept that forces a clear separation of searches while taking up screen real estate and wasting the users’ time with additional clicks and keystrokes.

Which begs the question: why on earth did the fine people at Canonical make such a bad design decision, when the stated mission of Unity was to streamline the desktop while taking less space etc. and at the same time there are numerous implementations of search/launch applications (even in linux) that work significantly better than Unity? Were they afraid of being labelled copycats? Is that worse than been called bad designers?

The same can be said about the new ‘global menu’ and AppIndicators that replace Gnome panel in Unity. Having few replacements for the staple Gnome Panel widgets of yesteryear is fine, given it’s a 1.0. Having botched the whole concept of a global menu through inconsistencies when windows are maximised and in multi-display scenarios betrays a badly designed (viz. not just incompletely implemented) system that shouldn’t have been out in the first place.

Unity has divided the GNOME community by introducing a new shell on the world’s most popular linux distribution. While it’s true that the state of linux desktop has been moving frustratingly slow for a number of years and that a quasi-open project, funded by a commercial entity with a focus on usabilty and æsthetics — exactly like Unity is on paper — could help accelerate its development and help reach parity with the two main desktops in some of the more difficult areas where linux has been falling back over the years. Still, Unity is largely incomplete, it’s missing many of the configuration options and functionality that linux users are used to — nay, demand — and, sadly, what’s there betrays a rushed, badly designed feature set that should never have gone past alpha inside Canonical, let alone be part of the world’s most popular distribution.

If anything the sudden appearance of Moblin 2.0 Beta and its excellent User Interface has proven, beyond any doubt, that corporate support is essential if linux — and the open source community — is going to survive beyond a very very small niche.

Linux on the server has been doing well despite Microsoft’s pretty good record with Windows Server in the past few years (and contrary to its failings with Vista), its dominant position on the desktop and its proven marketing muscle and the reason for this has been that Linux on the server has had the support of many large corporations living off it.

This has not been the case on the linux desktop, and it is probably the reason why so little has been achieved in the past seven or so years in that field. On one hand, the stagnant Gnome 2 platform barely kept alive primarily by Redhat and Novell that depend on it and on the other the interesting and fresh KDE4 platform that’s extremely immature and incomplete and leaves thousands of everyday use cases unsupported.
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I recently tried Ximian Gnome 2. What do I think? Well, it is definitely a good try, but it is very similar to the Gnome desktop I had on my machine more than 18 months ago. I don’t know whether it is me or it is really happening, but I find the Linux Desktop developments slowing down in the past year or so.

I have been privileged with a ‘switch’ to Macintosh computers, thus making my interaction with Linux boxes more infrequent, and even then from a server administration point of view which is not really focused on getting fancy desktop environments, but — really — has there been much happening on the linux front (at least from a Desktop/HCI/User Experience point of view) in the past 18 months? I don’t think so.

Ximian Gnome is very nice, very polished (although I did find several bugs here and there) and definitely a product I would choose over Windows for Enterprise use, considering the costs involved. But where is the Linux Desktop scene going? With both MacOS X and Windows evolving into composite-based desktops, and the industry slowly adding those same human-centric features that they claimed they would add ten or fifteen years ago (think Object orientation, the Cairo OS, the Taligent OS et al), such as file meta-data and associations, increased integration between applications etc., how is linux going to compete?
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It was in 1990 that Microsoft released Windows 3.0, making the PC the dominant platform as it is today, by providing a cheap, easy to use environment for people to use and developers to program (without the horrible Apple royalties that had to be paid for Macintosh development at the time). Windows 3.0, as other graphical desktops before it (Atari, AmigaOS, GEM Desktop etc.) all borrowed from Xerox’ innovation which was commercially introduced to the world with the Macintosh in 1984. But all of those technologies, the concept of a file and a folder represented by a 2D rectangular entity on the screen and the hierarchies that emerge from it are 30 year old ideas that have been proven not to be sufficient for the complex interactions between pieces of information of our times. Computers have grown from (solely) scientific, military, research and statistical instruments to everyday companions in all aspects of modern life: music, cinema, communication, entertainment, task assistance, education; I am sure there are much more.

For those interactions, the leading desktop companies of the early 90s — namely Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corporation — were considering object-oriented desktops with much increased capabilities and a completely departure from the archaic model even ‘advanced’ modern desktop environments (such as those offered by MacOS X and modern Windows as well as all Linux desktops). Projects such as the much-awaited Cairo operating system from Microsoft or the sophisticated Copland successor to MacOS from Apple, gave me, and I am sure millions of others hope for a better future; a time when interacting with your computer, even with the limited CPU power of the mid-90s would be much more sophisticated than the poor experience of Windows or MacOS. Unfortunately, such technologies were never realised in a commercial form. Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, but is still based on 30 year old concepts. Apple Computer, although it provides by far the most well-done integration of UNIX with a graphical, polished environment, offers eye candy and object-orientation which is skin deep. Be Inc., perhaps the only true innovator in terms of desktop innovation of the last decade, is now defunct.
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