Less than useful

I use Ubuntu at the office. I started with 10.10 and installed it half a year ago when I was stuck with Windows 2000, and there were not enough Windows 7 licenses being bought. It was a vast improvement.

My work is not really dependent on any proprietary applications. I mostly just need a text editor and FTP client. As well my company subscribes to Google Apps, so I just use that for documentation.

I upgraded to 11.04 when it came out and was greeted with Unity. I was so pissed off by how inflexible it was, I immediately changed to the “classic” environment. I actually replaced the Gnome shell with AWN and was immensely pleased with my new work environment. The aesthetics, functionality and customisation were fantastic.

Now Ubuntu 11.10 is out, and Unity is allegedly better. I have really truly tried to adapt to it, but god damn this thing is so wrong-headed. Why do I have to adapt to my computer?

The single worst feature that I just cannot get over is that the dock is permanently fixed to the left-hand side of the screen. (It hides when a window would be covered by it.)

My work desktop

The Ubuntu and Unity teams seem to spend more time justifying this contentious decision than coding the damn thing at this point. People rationalise it saying stupid things like, “99% of people have widescreen monitors anyway“. In a widescreen environment, yes, it would save more space. You know what are still popular? 17″ 1280×1024 5:4 monitors, which are even taller than traditional 4:3 screens. The fact that the user isn’t given a choice is what baffles me however.

Another oddity is that I cannot seem to have two windows of the same application open at the same time. For example, instead of tabbing, if I wished to work in one browser window while referencing material in another. The workaround is to just run two separate browsers.  (October 29 edit: I don’t know if I uncovered a bug or something, but I cannot reproduce this … multiple windows work fine and as one would expect.)

Not tied to Unity, but another odd Ubuntu decision is to bundle Gwibber as the main Twitter/social networking client in its distribution. The programme is terrible. Why should it take 30 seconds for the damn client running in the background to pop up? Ubuntu is snappy as hell on this office Core2Duo, but that client is ludicrously slow.

All that said, and the left-hand-fixed-launcher will be enough to drive away many users, there are some great design ideas to Unity. First, the overall aesthetics are very nice and pleasing to my eye. I don’t mind the MacOS/OS X window-manager style where all programmes’ menus are located at the top of the screen — it saves some space and can be gotten used to.

I really like the subtle notification system. If you look at the screenshot, there are a few icons sitting in the tray. THEY DON’T EVER FLASH OR STEAL FOCUS! When I get new mail, that envelope turns to a pleasing shade of blue. That is it. I can click on it to check my mail, or I can ignore it and continue my coding. Simple and brilliant.

After a couple of weeks, I am slowly getting used to having the launcher on the left. I still look for the hidden panel at the bottom of the screen half the time though. I do plan on sticking with it for a while to see where Ubuntu goes with it, but I still don’t like it.

Every infrequently updated blog has one last-gasp post explaining why the author has been away, and how he or she promises to write more.

For me, it has really come down to self-censorship. I would love to write about my job, but choose not to overlap work with my personal life. I have previously written about things I feel I can contribute to, like the art of classic shaving, but I reached a point there where I could no longer speak authoritatively.

The next logical post would have covered consumables: shaving creams, soaps, and aftershaves, however I have been using the same tub of shaving cream for over two years. (The product description says it should last close to a year; however much of this time I have only been shaving 2-4 times a week.) It’s great and insanely efficient, but I simply have not had a chance to try a large enough breadth of products to write about their strengths and weaknesses.

I’d like to write about politics, but don’t have the time nor patience for the inevitable arguments or discussions.

I do not like to post unless I feel I have wholly explored something, but often my drafts get too unwieldy. I put them aside, but usually take so long to edit them that the article would no longer be relevant by the time it could be posted.

I actually have that problem with photography too. I got into it in such a big way this year, I was attempting a 365 project where I would take at least a picture a day. After that, several concerts, and a few weddings however, I was so inundated with photos to edit I just had to take a vacation from it.

At once point I gave up on taking a picture a day in favour of concentrating taking what I have, and posting a well processed image a day. Even though I have taken something like two months off now, I probably still have plenty to make up for the lost time. I will post more about photography and what I have learned.

Some other stuff that has come up in this break that I would like to and will write about includes:

• health – illness, training, biking, standing desk
• fountain pens – highly recommended to anyone, but especially lefties
• web programming
• civil service