During the Apple dark years , OS 8 till OS X, I was a Linux and Windows user. Mainly Linux. Upon the arrival of OS 10.2 I gratefully came back into the fold. So it has been about five or so years since I have messed about with Linux. On the whole the experience was not bad. That said I could not see myself using it on a daily basis. This is due to any number of small issues that cropped up in just the few minutes that I was using it. Here is my stream of consciousness UI critique.
- Resizing windows is an unholy pain. Grabbing the edge of a window is very difficult. I am guessing that the designers are expecting users to maximize all windows.
- Alt tabbing through open windows can not be reversed. Meaning the user has to cycle all the way though the list if a mistake is made.
- No exposé equivalent.
- Dragging a file into a window without releasing does not make that window active.
- I was prompted to re-insert the install CD to install apps. This really bothered me.
- Dragging around a window causes visible onscreen artifacting.
- Various things that the community docs said would work out of the box did not do so. Such as plugging in a Wacom tablet and multi-button emulation with a synaptix touch pad.
EDIT: This needed to be configured. Got it working. Not sure why it was not configured to allow reversing direction by default.
EDIT: Definitely not true. If anything there are too many exposé alternatives.
EDIT: The CD was not required. Another case of crappy initial defaults. The package manager did not check the online repositories by default.
EDIT: Got the touch-pad working, but it required that I edit a text configuration file.
Anyway there are quite a few other things that bothered me but I can’t recall them. I guess this is just a reminder to me that it is the small stuff that makes or breaks an interface for most users.
Much better now especially since I now have an exposé clone