Windows 8 was a UX disaster - so maybe that's just coloring my judgement. I haven't used Ubuntu on mobile yet so guess I need to try it.
I think the problem with completely different UX experiences is exactly that. People want a similar experience with the same software. Microsoft assumed with Windows 8 that the tablet interface would work on the desktop but people don't want that watered down of an experience. Windows 10 at least lets you use tablet-designed applications on the desktop in a more integrated way.
Wait what? The "Metro" was the combining of the GUI for touch and mouse. I actually prefer the Win 8 UI since it is more of a tiled window manager like I use in Linux. Windows 10 is back to click with a mouse. Windows 8 I never touched the mouse unless I needed it in a program.
> Windows 10, for comparison, more closely combines the tablet and desktop modes
It was a move away from Tablets and back to laptop desktop focus.
The Metro interface was not optimized for mouse operations; it was a touch UI you could "touch" with a mouse. All apps were full screen. UI elements were hidden and meant to be swiped from the sides of the screen. Nothing about Metro seemed to be optimized for the desktop.
But thankfully you could completely switch modes and have a regular Windows 7-like desktop experience. When I ran Windows 8.1 it booted straight to the desktop, I used ClassicShell for the start menu, and I never saw a single metro app.
With Windows 10 can run metro applications in regular desktop windows as well as switch to tablet mode and run regular desktop applications and metro apps full screen or tiled.
Why? I mean, what are the changes that make you say that?
I'm weird I know but I preferred Windows 8.1 and more so on touch devices. I have about 20 touch screens at work and I miss the charms and the swipe in from the right and the easy short cuts. Open a program in Windows 8 was win-enter. Windows 10 it is win-arrow up. silly example but these arguments are usually silly when talking preferences.
Windows 8 on the "desktop" was a carrot for all the computer manufacturers who decided, that year, to put touch screens on everything.
A better strategy for Microsoft would have been to call it Surface OS and release it just for tablets (and phones) and focus on Metro and have the desktop as a cool add-on for their tablet OS. For the desktop, they should have done a Windows 8 that was more like 7 yet still have Metro but more as an add-on. This wouldn't have helped you as much but it would have been better for them overall.
I say open up the ability to run optional desktop environments like we have in Linux. I can have my tiled window manager (I am sure 2% of users would LOVE it and 98% would HATE it) and then others could use one of the official desktop environments. No need for a whole OS version. Its bad enough we have Pro and non-Pro Windows 10.
Although my suggestion sounds like two different operating systems, it's really just about how it's marketed. Fundamentally the technology doesn't have to be any different.
Of course, if your OS is flexible enough things like tiling can be done as add on: http://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap
It can be done without repeating the Windows 8 fiasco - which seemed to be tailored for touch-input devices, leading to clunky experience on a regular PC.
Eg. see Remix OS, or Android for desktop: http://www.jide.com/remixos
It's Android, but from the look of it, it's adapted nicely: https://youtu.be/TjAxCWO84L4 (I admit I haven't used it myself, but even if there are some quirks not visible at first glance, my point is not that Remix OS hit the sweet spot, only that it can be done in principle).
But well, that wasn't continuity between phone and desktop. It was continuity between GUI and CLI (openSUSE's YaST).
Whether it really makes sense trying to find a compromise between [mouse&keyboard + big screen] and [touch + small screen] is then again an entirely different question. And in my opinion, this isn't happening until we have a good generic solution for projecting the vast number of different screens that you need on a phone UI to one big, densely-settled screen as is necessary for a good desktop UI.
Gee, not only is it not bad it seems like it's really good. The context seems so different as to necessitate different UX.
I personally used it the whole time it was available. Despite the fact that it was unfinished, it was still vastly superior in many ways to other desktop systems. So, I'm quite certain that I don't know what you mean at all when you say "UX disaster".
And if you look at the marketshare of Windows 7 vs. Windows 8/8.1, you see a pretty big difference.
StatCounter (includes mobile): 20.36% vs. 5.64%
netmarketshare.com: 48.27% vs. 9.61%
Steam Hardware Survey: 36.38% vs. 10,78%
Now, you might respond with Windows 7 simply having more adoption, because it has been around longer, which is a valid point. I can only really refute that with the anecdotal evidence, that Windows 7 is currently seeing more growth off of the people moving away from XP and Windows 10, than Windows 8 is seeing.
Personally, I still think the lack of a start menu is very disruptive - and since Microsoft re-introduced it in Windows 10 makes me think I was not alone in thinking so.
Come 8.1 and this was partially reversed, with Metro apps being possible to manage much like Win32 programs (showing up on taskbar, could be closed or minimized via icons top right).
And i must say i kinda like using the start page concept for launching programs once i have things set so i go right to the "list" rather than dealing with the live tiles.
I have been contemplating getting a smaller Windows based tablet as an alternative to my existing Android one.
Hah. The first time I played a music file in Win8, the application took over my screen, and I had 50 Cent glaring at me (almost larger than life) while my song was playing. I guess he though my music was inadequate, and thought I should buy his stuff instead.
Also, just going to the program tiles screen was just a wall of visual noise. All these tiles were animated, it was hard to focus on what was there with all that going on. You can (and I did) turn off animations for them (or just delete them from the shortcut list), which helped a lot. So yeah, that was not a great first experience.
I'm totally fine with Windows 10 these days, at least as far as UI goes.
True! OTOH, I have never seen one of our users use a Metro App intentionally. At most they would run into the builtin PDF viewer if no other viewer was installed or registered to open PDFs.
One of my coworkers has a Windows phone, and he tells me on the phone the interface is very nice. But I still cannot imagine what the people at Microsoft must have been thinking...
On the other hand, I don't think they will ever get completely rid of that thanks to the huge, huge body of existing third-party apps.
How about a citation?
I'm not happy to say this but free software consistently fumbles usability
So, no. It's not going to work for all of them
A major difference between ubuntu and every other os is ubuntu is open source with a rich enough history to show it has staying power. Worse comes to worse another fork happens. But the OS UX paradigm has a huge opportunity to evolve with this kind of focus
All the others (KDE) are trying too hard while simultaneously not being truly interesting. Or they're stultifyingly boring (cinnamon - why?) without being resource cheap. On this front, xfce on armbian is a beaut. Cinnamon without the weight. I also give i3 a big thumbs up btw but I just can't live without the tray icon conveniences for bluetooth, dropbox, power down etc.
What do you mean? i3bar supports tray icons just fine...
The idea behind Ubuntu tablets is that it imports the security model of the Debian Linux trust chain to the user, and so worries of serial numbers and the typical 'link-ability' one finds in proprietary iOS devices are vanished.
Whatever else you might say about Canonical, at least they're doing the whole 'convergence' thing in a pretty open and responsible manner.
Convergence to a user interface that provides the crutches for these limits of mobile platforms neccessarily gimps the desktop UI too.
I'd have to test it of course. One thing that MS has not managed is make a UI that works well for high resolution screens (for legacy applications, that is). But I guess one of the reasons I'm positive to the use of "convergence" buzz word, is that it could mean that all GUI-frameworks are expected to scale in a sane manner. I absolutely understand the skepticism that it will end up being "a worst of all worlds" UI.
Why the hell do they worry about UX convergence yet I can't put the dock on the right side of the screen?! (and only just got the ability to put it on the bottom earlier this year!)
Why was Microsoft's attempt pathetic?
This is something that can be done and done well, and if so I'd love to have a phone with the power and software of a full desktop device, expressed in a phone-oriented UI.
The trick is that there's a matrix of several features that have to be considered:
1) Tiny screens means that multiple visible applications is not useful, and that all OS UI needs to be auto-hidden (something users want to be able to do anyways). Font sizes may need to be scaled up (that's something you need to be supporting anyways for older folks).
2) Touch means adding new ways to interact with existing widgets (drag scroll, for ex) and buttons need to be scaled up to have a larger hit-area (and you alreayd have to deal with scaling up fonts, so fixed-size UI elements already went out the window).
To me, the important thing is that 1 and 2 are not duct-taped together. If I have a phone and a stylus or I plug in a keyboard and mouse, I want 1 but not 2.
On the other hand, if I have a 20" touch-screen, I want 2 but not 1.
Maybe it's a great idea hidden as a bad one- I'm for exploration as long as they're not dragging software contributed to by others coughgnomecough.
You can safely try it out and see whether it works for your hardware.
It worked well on my Windows tablets (Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, Dell Venue 8 Pro).
It worked well on my gaming PC, my dev workstation and my hyper-v server.
On desktops without a touch screen, I found it annoying and still do. Of course, one can still get work done using the new interface, but I still don't understand how they got the crazy idea of throwing out the start menu.
It's been tried over and over again for a decade now, and keeps running very hard onto the rocks of "users really, really don't want that".
I get why devs want it: it's a single codebase for everything. But nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to use a desktop computer the way they use a tablet or a phone. There's a reason people tend to disable computer touchscreens.
That's not quite what's on offer. It's more like the ability to plug your phone into a monitor and carry on working. No longer carrying a laptop around (once tablets/phones are at CPU horsepower parity for office work).
So yeah, it's not working backwards like you suggest, it's making the phone/tablet more like a desktop (add mice, keyboards, screens etc.) One mobile device is quite likely all we'll need in the near future, not three separates.
2-in-1 laptops are already selling quite well as MS gets its own convergence efforts underway. Apple are actually lagging in this field and kudos to Ubuntu for steering the ship in an innovative/inevitable direction.
Do I really need a phone to do this ? As long as I can reach the same data I don't really care if I'm on the same device where I started working on it.
In fact the software I want to use when I am in front of a monitor is much different than the one I have on my phone, and I am not talking only about user interface, but also features.
Cpu power is getting cheaper and in smaller form factors. I suspect that instead of connecting our phones to the display devices, those devices will be powerful enough that we won't need any integration. And if I really want something portable, I will be able to "add a cpu" with an external stick (like Intel Compute Stick, but cheaper e/o smaller).
I'd say it's even more likely that anything computationally expensive won't be done in the same room with you to begin with 10 years from now, but will be done by an anonymous compute node in a datacenter that you're leasing for the 5 seconds you're using it.
It also doesn't work well with tasks involving non-trivial datasets. If you've got say 20GB of video from a Gopro you want to transcode, shipping it out to a datacenter is going to be really painful.
They do? I've disabled the touchpad on my surface pro 4 (and have been known to toggle it and the nub on my thinkpad) - but the touchscreen actually works great, I think. So much so, that I'm now touching all screens everywhere, like a three year old that's been given a tablet as her first computer.
I've actually thought that a good touch screen and perhaps stylus, would be the perfect environment for something like the ACME editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M as a new power-user editor.
Am I the only one that thinks this is a terrible idea?