I'm still very worried about this. This new concept essentially admits
defeat that new users do not know about the dash. This started last
cycle with moving the control-center icon into the launcher (thereby
making it overflow on netbook screens), which already spawned a large
discussion. Now this proposes to throw all limits over board and add
tons of new icons to the launcher; NB that we make it very easy to
install lots of new apps, and we go through great lengths to make it
possible to create, find, and install third-party apps even post-
release.
Now, this approach works around a temporary 5 minute question ("where
does that app go"?), not by giving a 5-minute answer (quick tutorial or
hint application which opens up the first couple of times), but by
essentially redefining what the launcher is: a place where all
applications go. This has several problems:
* Our launcher just isn't built for that -- it's efficient and useful
for up to 10 to 20 icons, depending on your screen size. But after that
it folds, and exponentially gets harder to use. It doesn't have text to
describe the applications, does not have a stable order, and is just
one-dimensional.
* It does not have most of the applications that are installed by
default -- how do people find that?
* It drives people further away from the dash, thereby aggravating the
learning problem instead of solving it.
* It optimizes a thing which represents 0.00005% of the workload [1] at
the expense of making the other 99.99995% much worse.
So I have some questions about the user testing:
* Did you test scenarios where Ubuntu has been preconfigured with 20 or
more extra apps, a number which is certainly realistic? On a laptop with
only a touchpad or a trackpoint? How did users respond to using the
launcher like this?
* How many users are able to find the app they want in an icon list of
30 or more, without complaining?
* How many users who have not been able to find out how to keep an app
in the launcher found out how to remove it from there again? (I would be
very surprised if that was more than 5%, given that it goes through the
exact same path: right-click on the icon in the launcher)
Using your line of argument that you used for the autohide changes:
The app went into the launcher by installing it in software-center, thus
it goes out of the launcher by uninstalling it again.
* With this change, how many more users still don't use the dash and
thus never find pre-installed applications?
* How many users found out how to disable this behaviour?
If that bug hadn't told me, I wouldn't know how to disable it.
software-center neither needs menus nor encourages to look into them in
any way, and they are not even visible by default. At best I had looked
in the control-center's Unity settings where all the other launcher
prefs are. Also, I seriously doubt that an user who doesn't dare to
click on the big Ubuntu icon in the launcher to open the dash and
doesn't play with it for a minute or two to discover how that works will
have the creativity and guts to find and try this option in software-
center.
So in summary, this turns the launcher into something like the app
launcher that e. g. Android has -- place for all application. But as
it's not built for this and there are no improvements for at least
mitigating the effects of this change.
Making the launcher useful to hold an arbitrary number of apps requires
it to become two-dimensional, sorted, searchable, and touch friendly. We
already have that -- the dash. So if we want to go that direction, could
we just not use the dash as we have it, and instead change how to invoke
it?
[1] Assuming a very pessimistic scenario: using Ubuntu for two hours a day for
a year, and not finding out how the dash works in 5 minutes.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/955147
Title:
[FFe, UIFe] Automatically add launchers for newly installed
applications
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