If Canonical had its way, OEMs would make sure Ubuntu ran well on their hardware before shipping it. But most OEMs don’t, so Ubuntu developers have resorted to the next best thing: crowd-sourcing hardware validation to users via the Ubuntu Friendly program, which is almost ready for prime time. Here’s the scoop.
We first covered Ubuntu Friendly when it was announced in June 2011. The project, envisioned as a community-based complement to the certification program Canonical already maintains, stood to broaden the hardware profiles on which Ubuntu was known to run well and make the lives of users easier.
Fast forward three months and Ubuntu Friendly is almost mature and ready for action, as Canonical employee Ara Pulido noted on her blog. The software tool that runs the hardware tests is available in a Launchpad PPA, and an alpha version of the site (now moved to this link) where results are reported is up and running. (When I visited the site the database seemed to be down, but Pulido’s blog post includes a screenshot showing what it should look like.)
Testing Ubuntu Friendly
Ubuntu Friendly is pretty user-friendly itself. Running it on an Ubuntu 11.10 system is as easy as following these instructions (provided by Pulido):
- Add our PPA to your software sources
- Run “System Testing” on your system and submit to Launchpad
- Install the latest version of checkbox
For kicks, I decided to give the tool a try myself (inside a KVM virtual machine, just to see if it would work there as well) and found that it is indeed pretty straightforward to use. You start the program, answer a few questions about which tests you want to run and then respond one-by-one to each test.
There are still some kinks to be worked out. For instance, the tool asked me whether my system was a laptop or desktop, but my only options for a response were “Yes,” “No,” or “Skip this test.” Overall, however, the tool ran solidly.
The program also demands some basic geek skills on the part of the user, since it asks questions that require knowing how much RAM is installed in the system or whether it has VGA and HDMI ports. My mom wouldn’t know what those words mean, but they should be familiar enough to many people.
Making Ubuntu Friendlier
The Ubuntu Friendly project itself won’t revolutionize Ubuntu, but it does represent a smart investment on Canonical’s part.
With minimal effort, Canonical now has a way to see how well Ubuntu works on many more systems and types of hardware than the company’s employees could ever test personally. At the same time, users are exposed to a novel means of engaging with Ubuntu and feeling like part of the community by offering valuable contributions to Ubuntu developers. It’s a win-win.
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As regards hardware Ubuntu will run on virtually anything. Not great on oldest GMA or legacy ATI, but it works there as well. Remember the Kno single/dual screen pad? It had a Ubuntu base. It’s still the most sensible pad solution i’ve seen – when it’s not just about consuming content. Now, they’ve converted their software for iPad usage.
That’s the backdraw of Android – It kills more alternatives than Microsoft or Apple ever could possibly manage. (Kno, Meego, WebOS++)
Back to Ubuntu they are (in my view) making a conceptual mistake just as Gnome does. There’s no such thing as one user interface fits all. Microsoft is having a go at it with Metro, but it just isn’t providing benefits for laptops and desktops. They are all making the same mistake. A touch interface on a keyboard-based computer is just not efficient. It’s cluttering.
Apple provided at test-balloon with Lion – and the response from users is not extremely positive. Pads, Phones and laptop/desktop need different user interfaces.
I keep reading this type of criticism regarding Unity. But what exactly is it that makes people consider Unity a touch interface? What I like the most about it, is that it focuses on keyboard use. It also works well with a mouse, but I can’t find any features that make it particularly suitable for touch devices. I haven’t seen anything that says that’s a goal either.
Jack, perhaps you can elaborate?
Jo-Erlend Schinstad: Unity certainly isn’t only about touch, but Canonical has suggested at various points that touch is an important consideration for Unity development; cf. http://blog.canonical.com/2010/10/14/%EF%BB%BFunity-and-utouch/: “Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them…”; and http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scrollbars-in-unity/, on scrollbars for Unity, which “[have] to work well both on cursor driven UI and on touch ones: this is a prerequisite of any Unity solution.”
Thanks for the links. I had actually read those before, but they were useful reminders all the same. And I strongly agree that scrolling with the mouse should be done using a scroll wheel whenever possible instead of dragging the scrollbar. As they write under “Prioritization”:
1) Scrolling via mouse wheel (or dragging content on touch devices)
2) Scrolling via thumb
3) Page up/down
4) Jump to position via bar
5) Line up/down
Touch clearly isn’t the top priority, but it does make sense to not exclude it as a possibility. The touch features are simply not present when you don’t have touch capabilities. Minimizing the scrollbars make sense in any case, I think. The last ten years, I think they’ve only served the purpose of seeing how far down a page I’ve come. The new scrollbars suits that purpose nicely.
The indicators are now menus and you can move between the menus by moving the cursor between them without having to click more than once. This is how menus have worked on all desktop systems for decades and I see nothing particularly touch-based in that.
The launcher entries are now square icons instead of text labels and windows are grouped by applications. I don’t see that as a particular touch interface either.
The lenses uses rather large icons, and I can see how that would be particularly useful on a touch device. Still, it’s very useful on desktop systems as well, since you’re supposed to provide a few keystrokes to limit the selection to a few icons.
In summary, I can see how Unity is not completely useless on touch devices. What I don’t understand, is the criticism for it being too focused on touch. I see nothing really radical about Unity as a desktop system. It is a nice implementation and hiding unnecessary widgets makes the system clean and, I think, more user friendly since there’s less things to distract the user.
What I like the most about it, is the focus on keyboard interaction. I’ve never tried a desktop system that’s comfortably controlled using only the keyboard and this is a very good thing. It also makes it puzzling to me why people talk about Unity as a touch interface.
I would like to understand what Jack is talking about when he writes this: «Back to Ubuntu they are (in my view) making a conceptual mistake just as Gnome does. There’s no such thing as one user interface fits all. Microsoft is having a go at it with Metro, but it just isn’t providing benefits for laptops and desktops. They are all making the same mistake. A touch interface on a keyboard-based computer is just not efficient. It’s cluttering.»
First of all, I’m for the most part a laptop user – thus I basicly view and comment from a laptop perspective. Secondly – I’m not presenting the facts – just my opinion.
There’s a coupple of things that is pretty clear wrt touch:
- It’s here to stay and will become increasingly important.
- Everyone is working on some sort of alternative on various formfactors.
- It is rather tricky to combine with ordinary keyboard usage on the same formfactor and with a single UX.
Now, it is still early days for Unity and I’m certain it will provide a far better experience in future versions, but I’ll have to consider what I’ve used, not what may or may not arrive in future versions.
What’s uncertain to me is how they are going to solve keyboard/pad/mouse navigation/usage while improving touch capabilities. It’s not only the desktop itself, but a vast number of applications.
Unity just don’t make quite sense to me and I wanted to point out that a model with “one size fits all” is very difficult to achieve.
I do not believe that challenge has been nailed by anyone including Unity. When using Unity I don’t get that “ah – thats logical, that make sense” experience. I get the “why did they make it like that?” sense.
In my view W8 is far from being the formula. Metro might be fine wrt WP 7, but I’m not convinced wrt pads. I ‘m not at all impressed with it on regular laptops, where there actually are not much of an improvement wrt Aero either. Using it for a while it’s just as awkward as W7 and Vista.
Now, I do not mind the move to Unity and Gnome 3 at all, although I would have preferred 2 to be 1. Hopefully both of them will evolve into something cracking the formula. I’d prefer my concerns to be unjustified, thus me being wrong wrt Unity (and Gnome 3).
I DO belive it is necessary to move on from Gnome 2.XX.
In my opinion, this is extremely stupid. It should be linux friendly and not ubuntu friendly. Ubuntu uses a linux kernel.
Jack: it’s no wonder that Unity doesn’t make sense to you if you believe it to be a touch interface primarily. It is primarily a keyboard interface, with the mouse as a secondary controller and touch as an option. You didn’t answer my question, but perhaps I didn’t ask it properly, so let me rephrase it: what exactly is it that makes Unity less suitable for a desktop than Windows 7 or OS X? Or what is it that makes it more suitable as a touch interface? Because you don’t seem to be calling them touch interfaces, even if both of them have onboard keyboards available and supports touch screens. I’m not trying to create a discussion, I just want to understand, because I see it as a huge improvement for keyboard users, but I don’t see any touch-specific benefits.
Hussam Al-Tayeb: yes, Ubuntu uses a Linux kernel, and lots of the drivers that are necessary to run Ubuntu properly is not in the Linux kernel, but is in Ubuntu. So, it would not be applicable to Debian and Fedora, for instance, even if they too use Linux. As far as I’m aware, neither Fedora or Debian is planning on using Unity as a default interface either. Unity is much tougher on the VGA than, say, LXDE, so even if a computer would be perfectly suitable for Lubuntu, it might not at all be suitable to run Ubuntu.
I don’t understand why it is “extremely stupid” to avoid confusion.
@Jo: My comments about Unity are deliberately vague. The reason for that is that I don’t use Unity on a regular basis and have not done any deep digging. I prefer not to present “absolutes” and “conclusions”. I comment about my impression of Unity, and I’ve got mixed feelings.
As regards touch I do not believe Unity is a touch environment. If I should pin it somewhere it would be ” based upon many of the netbook UX variations deviating from Gnome” – “influenced by the touch trend”, and “by that, attempting to improve the UX for keyboard/mouse devices”.
I have never seen a good netbook UX on any platform. Unity does probably improve the experience on a Netbook compared to the older netbook UX (hence importance of keyboards), but that’s not where the future is, at least in the “developed countries”.
Well, I’m using Unity on a 11″ subnotebook and on a desktop with one 24″ and one 23″, both running in 1920×1080. It is nice that it saves space on the smaller screen, but I appreciate it on the desktop too. I think there are far better alternatives for touch devices, though.
But the vast improvements are in the efficiency. I can always launch any application in less than three seconds. (That is the time I spend asking for it, not how long the computer takes to actually run it). I can switch to any application in less than one second, no matter which workspace it’s own. I’ll hardly ever spend as much as ten seconds to locate and open any given file or folder.
Lots of people haven’t taken the time to really discover the power of these technologies and think it’s just a fancy replacement. It really is a drastic improvement in terms of efficiency. As we get more scopes and lenses, this will only improve. Having a desktop system that actually _learns_ from your behavior in context, really is quite a radical improvement. But the project is still young and there are lots of things to improve. It still doesn’t use GPS and Bluetooth to understand who you are with, when, where and why, for instance. But the infrastructure for it is in place, so it should be fairly easy to implement.
Good for you and Unity!
I’ve used it with a business laptop and 27″/2560×1440 (single and combined).
No matter what UX one can improve efficiency by learning the ropes and I’m sure that’s the case with Unity too. But is it intuitive? Does people “get it” straight away? I don’t think so actually. If you have a (in-depth) look at KDE 4 you’ll see that it got a pile of functions that would improve how users perform, but getting there is hardly intuitive.
I like “new stuff”. Fancy features might not be a virtue as in own capacity, but tend to bring some really useful stuff along. I believe e.g Compiz contained a lot of features less than useful, but it did propell Ubuntu popularity partly because Ubuntu was the easiest way to get the fun stuff (7.04) and 7.10 as standard. I can’t think of anything recruiting more Linux users than easy installation + compiz in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is still profiting from that fun, and Compiz has made a huge impact on how we use anything electronic with a screen. That includes iOS, OSX, MeeGO (harmattan), WebOS, Metro, Android, Kde and Gnome. I dare say the usability of touch-screens is dependent on all the smart things from Compiz.
Fancy is not the meaning of life, but there’s just no way around the fact that “good looks” and “fun perks” is important to customers. I tend to keep bling at a low level and only use stuff that I find useful.
A “Intelligent UX” learing from user’s behaviour is neat, but It will learn the bad habits too (joke).
Anyway, I’m glad Unity, KDE and Gnome have parted with the strategy of making Windows users able to discover that their bad habits will work in Linux too. More time spent on innovation and usability. Less time spent on making Windows users feel immediately at home.
Is it intuitive in that it understands what you want and makes that very easy to do. For instance, I can now press super, p, enter when I want to play poker. When I want up upgrade my software, I do super, up, enter. If I want to open the document where I wrote about Unity, then I press super, uni, enter. If I’m on my desktop and I want to connect to ssh on my laptop and access my files, then I press super, lap, enter.
Of course, those are for the less common functions. The others are much faster, using super+num to switch to or launch an application. In other words; yes, I think it’s very intuitive and the people I’ve tested it on are very surprised by how easy it is. Casual users seem to get along with it very easily. It’s much more difficult for geeks, who are accustomed to telling the computer exactly _how_ to do things, instead of _what_ to do.
Might be that the UX sorts out stuff for the user – but is that really obvious straight away to the (fresh) user? It’s that kind of intuity I’m questioning.
I’m not really after the nitty gritty stuff in a debate like this and it is no point trying to convince me that I’m wrong. Because I might actually be wrong. That’s why I am vague. Unity just doesn’t grow on me.
I do however wish Unity and you all the best.
Hi,
the alpha site, being alpha has moved to http://107.20.216.30/
Enjoy!
victor: many thanks for the update.