full circle magazine #65

34

MY STORY

distribute it. To beat Windows,

Ubuntu can not afford to be less

than perfect.” Then the

“liboverlay_scrollbar”. Lazarus was

not adapted to it yet, and I got all

kinds of crazy errors. Thanks to the

Lazarus forum it was fixed within a

day (tr y that on Win d ows!!!!), but it

shows that new things are

introduced not as an option, but

obligatory. That is “not done” in an

open software environment.

Did they forget that the USER

has to be in control? Change the

desktop to his needs and taste,

and get things done without

looking for hours for a way to do it

or having to type commands in a

terminal, or even change settings

in system files with great risk of

breaking his system. As a system

designer (I have created a lot of

human-machine interfaces, drivers

and applications), and end-user at

the same time, it is my opinion that

the look and feel of a desktop

should be adjustable and not

depend on the “engine” that is

used to activate/display it. It

should be intuitive, so I can use it

without having to read manuals.

For example: If I want to change

the background, I must be able to

simply right-click on an empty part

of the screen and get an interface

to specify my wishes (like on

Windows). In Ubuntu, I have to

browse through tons of programs

to find an application that is

capable of doing many different

things, among them the

adjustment of the screen. A very

annoying behaviour I came across

is the fact that the border of a

window is by default only one pixel

wide. Just try to click on it with

your mouse to grab it and move it

to resize the window! On average

that takes me three tries, with (if

you “miss-click” outside the

window) the chance of the

unwanted effect of the window

below it popping up (or even doing

something unwillingly if a button

was in that place). There are

themes with thicker border lines,

but there are only a few available

after installation, and finding a

suitable one on the Internet is very

hard, because of the choices,

choices, CHOICES you get. It may

be an advantage of open software

that you have so much to choose

from, but too many choices is

equally as bad as only a few

choices.

But everything is not lost yet.

Once the people behind Ubuntu

give us back the choice of the look

and feel of the desktop, we can

start again telling people who use

Windows how great Ubuntu is, and

offer them a stable and reliable

platform that looks and feels like

Windows, but is not. In the

meantime I will use Gnome classic.