Mark Shuttleworth Explains Smarter Notifications for Ubuntu

My guess is 'no'. If he does, then how can he justify the myriad changes that obstruct user productivity and restrict user preferences rather than enhance the user experience? I'd seriously like to know.

Well, if Shuttleworth's involved in the process by which all these changes are made, perhaps they are basically the same for him, as anyone else's tweaking their own desktop to suit their own ideas of how it should be set up and work. And they certainly don't come as a surprise or for "no apparent reason". So for Shuttleworth, it's not a matter of having to adjust to someone else's seemingly arbitrary or unsatisfying changes.

I don't know about the notifications, but the global menus -- especially the way they disappear until you mouse over the top panel -- are annoying (at least GNOME 3 doesn't do this), and I've got to be honest with you, I couldn't get HUD to do anything for me, no matter what I typed in.

Unity probably works just fine for him, since 1) he designed it himself, so it suits his workflow, and 2) he's probably not a programmer, who have very different needs than people who just use a web browser and maybe an office application and that's it. If all he's doing is using LibreOffice Impress and Firefox, Unity probably works ok for that since he knows how to use it, it being his brainchild. For someone with more demanding needs, or someone who didn't design Unity and doesn't know all its ins and outs, it's not going to work very well.

It's kinda like someone building their own car, and putting all the controls in weird and different locations and making them work differently. Instead of our standard car controls, they have a steering wheel in the center console, and turning it CW turns the car left, CCW right. The accelerator is a slide control on the dash, the turn signals are foot-press buttons, the brakes are controlled by a big handheld knob, etc. The guy who dreamed up this crazy system would think it's great and have little trouble adapting to it for his daily transportation, but everyone else (except a few vocal sycophants) would think it's idiotic.

Or making really big knobs for the climate control. It sure sounds loopy, like fat pencils and crayons, until you ponder that people need to manipulate the controls while wearing thick gloves...

You really shouldn't need to wear thick gloves inside a car; most cars have very effective heaters, and they should since most of the energy in the gasoline they burn for fuel is wasted in the form of heat. Of course, for the first few minutes after starting, it might be cold, but after that if there isn't warm air blowing out your vents, there's something very wrong.

However, if people start moving to electric cars, this may very well change (electric resistance heating ruins your EV range) and bigger controls may become more popular.

Khamul wrote:most cars have very effective heaters

But my car isn't "most cars". At zero degrees Fahrenheit (that's about -15 C), my car takes a good fifteen minutes to warm up. It doesn't run hot as these things go, even when the engine is at normal operating temperature.

Quoting:Of course, for the first few minutes after starting, it might be cold

and during that time, the gloves are on and the blower fan is off. Once the engine warms up, the ability to manipulate the controls becomes everything. Should I have to take off a glove, to be able to turn on the fan? And then keep it off while I drive, hoping that the fan will warm things up before my fingers go numb?

This is what "unforeseen consequences" are all about. It is foolishness at best, to insist that these unforeseen consequences are merely "something you should learn to live with."