<story><title>Ubuntu ported to the Nexus 7</title><url>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=MTIxMTA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtgx</author><text>This is my problem with Ubuntu and Unity, and why I much prefer Linux Mint as a &quot;Windows replacement&quot; OS. They say they made that side bar to &quot;work well with touchscreen devices, too&quot;, but as we can see Unity on a touchscreen devices offers a pretty poor experience, and the sidebar is just about the only thing that is meant for touchscreens in Ubuntu. The global menu and everything else is clearly meant for a PC and a mouse.&lt;p&gt;So why annoy the PC users with the sidebar, when it&apos;s not even that good of a UI for tablets? They&apos;re much better off designing a tablet-first UI for tablets, if they want to get into that, and stick with designing a well optimized PC UI for PC&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve never been a believer of one UI for all form factors and sizes, because you usually end up with the UI being optimized just for one form factor and size, and mediocre or downright terrible for others. You need to optimize the UI for its own form factor and size. It&apos;s the only way to make it work well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggy2011</author><text>Unity is a long way from perfect on tablet or PC. Having said that the sidebar has grown on me. Since almost every monitor out there is 16:9; vertical space is precious and another 50 pixels gives me another 2-3 lines of code on the screen.&lt;p&gt;The best way to use the sidebar is to put your most commonly used program at the top and then launch them with Logo+&amp;#60;Number&amp;#62;.&lt;p&gt;If you spend some time setting up your shortcut keys you can actually use much of your system mouse free.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;m not really sure that it is targeted towards tablets. It could however be adapted to be tablet friendly a lot more easily than the MS Windows interface or older Window managers could be.&lt;p&gt;So rather than having this jarring difference between Metro and Desktop like you do in Windows 8 they could have a much more subtle transition of the same interface depending on whether a mouse/keyboard was plugged in or not.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ubuntu ported to the Nexus 7</title><url>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=MTIxMTA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtgx</author><text>This is my problem with Ubuntu and Unity, and why I much prefer Linux Mint as a &quot;Windows replacement&quot; OS. They say they made that side bar to &quot;work well with touchscreen devices, too&quot;, but as we can see Unity on a touchscreen devices offers a pretty poor experience, and the sidebar is just about the only thing that is meant for touchscreens in Ubuntu. The global menu and everything else is clearly meant for a PC and a mouse.&lt;p&gt;So why annoy the PC users with the sidebar, when it&apos;s not even that good of a UI for tablets? They&apos;re much better off designing a tablet-first UI for tablets, if they want to get into that, and stick with designing a well optimized PC UI for PC&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve never been a believer of one UI for all form factors and sizes, because you usually end up with the UI being optimized just for one form factor and size, and mediocre or downright terrible for others. You need to optimize the UI for its own form factor and size. It&apos;s the only way to make it work well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itry</author><text>I was an Ubuntu user for years. When tablets became famous, I was thinking: Wow, if I only could have Ubuntu on these devices. Then they lost me because of Unity. I tried several days, but it was simply not geared toward my workflow. Thank God I discovered Mint. Mint is awesome.&lt;p&gt;Then they introduced this new find-something-thing that sends everything you type to their servers. A privacy nightmare. And a usability nightmare. Thats just the wrong philosophy. So I also dont want them on my tablets.&lt;p&gt;Its surprising, how quick things can change. I was a huge Ubuntu supporter from 2005 to 2012. And now I warn people to not use it.</text></comment>