Ubuntu Unity — Worst GUI Evar?

There’s only one thing that can get me blogging again, and that’s an opportunity to rant on a terrible distribution of Ubuntu.  And boy howdy, is Ubuntu 11.04 bad.  I suppose we should have seen this coming; I mean, this is the same company that, for no damn good reason, put the window buttons on the wrong side in version 10.10.  It was like the CEO of Ubuntu Inc was saying, “I’m Mark F—ing Shuttlesworth — what are you going to do?  Try Red Hat?  Pffft.  Good luck with that, suckers.  We started out by making Ubuntu the people’s distribution, and now we’re taking it back.”

So yeah, 11.04 has way worse problems than bad window button positioning.  You see, they moved from their old boring, functional, customizable “Gnome 2″ GUI to a new one, (ominously) called Unity.  Sure, Gnome is a dumb name, but it works, and it feels kinda like Windows, and I can get to my files and applications as if I were, you know, sitting at an actual computer.  In that, it performs its primary function well.  Gnome 2 might be boring, and “Gnome” might be a stupid name for anything except a small guy who sits on your lawn, but it was literally the only Linux desktop that really made sense.

The problem came when Gnome version 3 came out, and it was radically and awe-fully different than the reliable, computer-like Gnome 2.  This apparently drove the people behind Ubuntu so crazy that they were inspired to created something to compete with Gnome 3 (and KDE 4, that other Linux GUI overreach) in the category of awfulness.  So, in the bowels of Mount Doom, a GUI named Unity was forged.

What wrong with Unity, you ask?  Well:

1) It has a dock, a la OS X, that doesn’t do anything you want it to.  First of all, it’s on the left side, where Ubuntu apparently puts everything now.  You can’t move it from the left side, either.  Also, it’s default behavior is to hide behind open windows until you hold your mouse at the left edge of the screen for almost a second.  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself…

1)  There is no bar at the bottom that holds your open application windows.  There is no way to GET a bar at the bottom that holds your application windows.  Because reclaiming that half-inch of real estate at the bottom of you monitor screen is more important than being able to switch between application windows in one click.  You see, with the combo of the hidden Dock of Death on the left side and the lack of a way to click on open windows, there is no way to go from window to window via mouse.  You have to move your mouse to the left side of the screen, wait for the Dock of Death to reappear, then click on the application you want to switch to.  And if that application happens to have more than one window open (like if you were –gasp — trying to edit two spreadsheets at the same time), then you have to click one more time on the actual window you want to see.  And you have to do that every time you switch windows.

2) There is no actual menu in Unity, and no way to get one.  I want to be very clear on this point:  There is no nested list of installed software to click on (and therefore run) with your mouse.  Now, I understand that some people hate menus, but they’re wrong.  A menu is the single simplest and most efficient way to organize a given computer’s entire set of installed applications.  Period.  If you don’t think so, you’re fooling yourself.  For the makers of Ubuntu, every day is apparently April Fools Day.

3) When you click on what you think is the menu (it’s in the top left corner instead of the bottom left one, but Ubuntu’s been that way for a while now — wait, that’s where it started!), you get what can only be described as the single most frustrating and counter-intuitive thing I’ve seen in a GUI since KDE’s plasma desktop.  Instead of a menu, you are greeted with a giant black window that somehow eats up your whole screen yet shows you virtually nothing.  There are three lists — one for your supposedly “favorite” apps, one for some of your installed apps, and one for random apps you don’t have installed.  There are only 5 of each application listed, with a tiny yet helpful-looking “see more results” to click on for each category.  Clicking on that will give you an alphabetical list of favorite, installed, or random apps, but the list is limited by the fact that only so many giant app icons can fit in the black window (even though it takes up the whole screen).  Let me say that again:  you’re 3 clicks in, and all you’ve managed to do is pull up an alphabetical list of your apps.

Now, there is a “menu” of sorts where you can filter the results by category, but that’s yet another click, and you still might not find what you want (especially if it starts with a “z”).  I found that the most efficient way in Unity of finding apps is searching for their name in the giant search bar at the top of the black Window.  That’s right, I have to f***ing use my keyboard to find my apps.  What is this, DOS 6.0?

I want to make this perfectly clear — I’m the laziest person I know.  This makes me a pretty good judge of efficiency in operating systems and user interfaces, because I can smell unnecessary effort a mile away.  And the last thing I want to do when sitting at my computer is click in a search box, take my hand off the mouse, type in words I have to think about, and hit enter.  If I have to search for something by name, you have failed as a GUI.  You have my apps.  Please give them back.

What they were trying to do is emulate your average smart phone’s screen (with the apps and the black Window), and they failed so miserably that you can hardly recognize what they were aiming for.   My iPhone shows me all my apps on the screen, and I can organize them in whatever way I choose.  Unity does the opposite of that — only showing a few apps, and not allowing me to organize them at all.

4)  It has become apparent that the only reason Ubuntu exists is to sell people on Ubuntu products, such as (the again ominous-sounding) Ubuntu One.  What does One do?  Well, for $3.99 a month you can store a bunch of data in their (presumably totally secure) cloud, and even stream stored music to a variety of devices.  Because using up bandwidth streaming stuff to your smartphone is better than just putting the actual songs on your phone, apparently. That’s why it costs money.

What Ubuntu Inc doesn’t understand is that I use Linux to get away from being sold things by the software that runs my computer.  That’s the whole point of open source and free software, right?

Finally, a serious point:  All the Linux GUIs seem to be hopelessly broken right now, and it’s put the whole idea of Linux in jeopardy, at least for me.  I’m using Linux Mint right now, but there’s talk of them switching to Gnome 3 next year.  Maybe Gnome 3 will improve enough to be usable next year, but I doubt it.  So my choices seem to boil down to:  Using Mint 11 for the next 10 years, or giving up on Linux entirely.  Maybe I should just get a Mac.