It's about time that there was an Ubuntu thread in this forum.

I'm really impressed at the steps that Ubuntu is taking (controversy aside) to aggressively improve the user experience.

The latest post on Mark Shuttleworth's blog shows the team experimenting with doing away with the scrollbar of old:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/615

VIDEO:
VIDEO:

This is very interesting, and professed to be inspired by mobile phones -- likely iOS, though Symbian was first with this type of a UI.

The goal is simple, to maximize the task at hand, and minimize the UI clutter.

It's nice to see Ubuntu not just settling for the status-quo, but actually forging forward to vastly improve the UX of desktop linux!

o_O

So long as I can still click it, it still bugs me that pretty much every Linux distro has one pixel wide clickable areas for window resizing. I'm not -quite- all that optimistic about Unity and the unified menubar, having tried it out on my netbook.

But yes, at least Ubuntu is pursuing usability concepts in Linux

Yes, having tried unity as well, I've been somewhat disappointed by the launcher/menu, but I can see things improving on this front. I'll be interested to see what Wayland brings over traditional X, as well as continued improvements to the UI.

This scrollbar, while thin, actually expands to a standard width as you hover near or click on it. So basically just looks small to provide more usable screen space. I really like the concept, as it is a waste of 30pix to be constantly taken up on the right of the screen.

I like the diminutive menu borders, but I'm with you: resizing windows can be really annoying. They should do something similar to the menu, where the target is larger than the graphical representation on the screen.

Did I miss something? Why do we "need" a Ubuntu thread here? It's not like a competitor to Maemo...

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big Ubuntu user, but missing the point of this.

The best thing I ever did with the Dell Latitude D400 I bought nearly ten years ago in Moscow was put Ubuntu on it. Running XP it was getting creaky, uncooperative and slow, but now it is reborn even in preference to my modern netbook. I had been dual-booting Linux for years, but tossing Windows entirely was a great step. I have used Ubuntu to hook up to the N900 via usb cable quite a bit lately.

I think that a Ubuntu thread is technically out of line here, but in practice it's a great idea. Users frequently convert to Linux because of their tablets and have questions. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are probably the best newbie Linux solutions.

The dark side clouds your judgement....

Here's my rational[ization].

Of late, Ubuntu has been aggressively pushing into the mobile world taking aim mainly at tablets and smaller computers. This is evidenced by strong touchscreen support, a revised interface to handle lower resolutions, and the direct proclamations of one Mr. Shuttleworth: Canonical mage.

Since it's a different system, it is a competitor to MeeGo, though perhaps not a bitter rival in the scrutinous eyes of the community.

Here are a few interesting posts worthy of consideration:
Linaro at work: porting, testing, and Android
Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10
Canonical making full-fledged Ubuntu tablet push in early 2011

I ll be glad to have a phone running on ubuntu.

I'd use Ubuntu more, also at home, if it would have LSB-standard rpm-package management instead of deb and if it would use SELinux by default. As it isn't, I rather use more secure Fedora.

In Xterm, auto hiding scroll bar is not necessary a good thing, if you keep width of the window to have exact 80 chars and want to scroll back, the scroll bar will cover the 1 - 3 last chars on the lines. But surely good as an option for other windows.

But you dont care about the scroll bar because you use shft+pg up, right?