Ubuntu updates Hardy

[chiskop]

Deenem, relax with the attitude. Nobody has called you stupid. You're incorrect in one of your statements, which materially affects your point. A couple of us have pointed that out.

I think if you toned down your responses, you'd find a lot of people here (and on ubuntuforums) who will go out of their way to help new users.

 

[Deenem]

The problem is that you said, as part of your constructive critisism that "It cannot be easily disabled. There is no easy wasy of disabling the updates." to which froot replied "Whoever said you cannot "disable updates" with Ubuntu should wake up and smell the ubuntu beans, or at least install Ubuntu first." and "it should take you no longer than 15 seconds to disable or change updates."

Deenem, relax with the attitude. Nobody has called you stupid. You're incorrect in one of your statements, which materially affects your point. A couple of us have pointed that out.

I think if you toned down your responses, you'd find a lot of people here (and on ubuntuforums) who will go out of their way to help new users.

I didn't state a fact or make a statement, I expressed an opinion.

The opinion being that I could not easily disable the updates because there is nowhere on the Update Manager screen (the screen that comes up when you click the Updates icon) to disable the updates, nor, at anytime during the install are you asked if you want to disable the updates or not.

The updates are on by default, without asking the user if they want updates or not, and the one place that the user interacts with these updates (the screen that comes up when you click the update icon) doesn't have any functionality to disable or change the settings.

It took a trip to Google and a visit to a few pages to find out where to manage the update settings.

So I don't think that expressing the opinion that it's 'difficult to disable the updates' is wrong. It was difficult for me to disable the updates, because none of the places where I expected I could change the settings had the option.

If I found it difficult to change the update settings, so I don't see what was wrong with saying, 'It was difficult to disable the updates"

 

[Abe]

If I found it difficult to change the update settings, so I don't see what was wrong with saying, 'It was difficult to disable the updates"

The same can be said for any system to which one is not accustomed. Most OS's, or even complex software applications for that matter, have a number of different settings. It's worse in that often, Windows users expect the settings to be in the same places for Linux. Doing this would, IMO, raise a number of copyright issues. This whole problem is no better in Vista's case. MS have moved all of the settings for the OS around which is extremely frustrating.

IMO, the best place to find out something is on Google/Yahoo and if someone is not capable of doing that, maybe a granny/grandpa or someone else new to computers, then they are unlikely to be wanting to change these settings in the first place.

On a personal note, I found the settings far more intuitive on Ubuntu then Vista, but thats just me. I also did a google search for "ubuntu disable update" and the first result had a solution to the problem In a "vista disable update" the third result had the solution. Both seemed about as simple as each other to do.

 

[Deenem]

The same can be said for any system to which one is not accustomed. Most OS's, or even complex software applications for that matter, have a number of different settings. It's worse in that often, Windows users expect the settings to be in the same places for Linux. Doing this would, IMO, raise a number of copyright issues. This whole problem is no better in Vista's case. MS have moved all of the settings for the OS around which is extremely frustrating.

IMO, the best place to find out something is on Google/Yahoo and if someone is not capable of doing that, maybe a granny/grandpa or someone else new to computers, then they are unlikely to be wanting to change these settings in the first place.

On a personal note, I found the settings far more intuitive on Ubuntu then Vista, but thats just me. I also did a google search for "ubuntu disable update" and the first result had a solution to the problem In a "vista disable update" the third result had the solution. Both seemed about as simple as each other to do.

I agree with you, I just took offense at being told to "wake up" because I happened to be at a different point in the learning curve to someone else.

For me though, Google is the second best place to find out how to do something. The best place is always within the application itself.

Well designed applications are able to anticipate what I want to do at any given time and make available to me, the functionality that I need at that point in time.

Badly designed application always seem to put the functionality you're looking for very far away from where you're expecting it to be.

In this case, I'd finally had enough of the Update Manager and I wanted to disable it, but the setting to disable it was located in a completely different place.

A good design would have anticipated that I would probably want to disable the updates on the screen that was doing the updates, and would have placed the settings on the screen instead of somewhere else.

 

[Deenem]

I presume from your post that you are into programming. You seem to have quite a handle on some HCI concepts.

Yup, although it's a bit a of a hobby-on-the-side at the moment.

Designing software for banks, usability isn't even on the requirements list yet

 

[milomak]

I've been saying this for ages. The problem is that people get far too defensive about Lunux & UBUNTU almost to the point of mass hysteria. The whole scene is one big experiment, with the difference being that nobody wants to hear that it is deficient in many ways. One of the problems we see with Windows is the automatic update system and the nagging that follows when you turn it off. Why Oh Why do the ubuntu programmers want to emulate that mistake.

I agree that as Linux users we need to be careful not to not appreciate constructive criticsm.

 

[Abe]

For me though, Google is the second best place to find out how to do something. The best place is always within the application itself.

Perhaps it's just me but from an OS point of view, I have given up using the built in help. Windows made sure of that. It just never seemed to find what I was looking for and inevitably there was some sort of internet connection that would take place which I don't like. I find that my first search is always Google. Applications are, however, a different kettle of fish.

 

[Deenem]

Perhaps it's just me but from an OS point of view, I have given up using the built in help. Windows made sure of that. It just never seemed to find what I was looking for and inevitably there was some sort of internet connection that would take place which I don't like. I find that my first search is always Google. Applications are, however, a different kettle of fish.

I'm not really talking about the help file, the help file is always the last place to look for help

I'm talking about the 'intuitiveness' of the application; If I want to perform a particular task, is it reasonably obvious, just by looking at the screen, how to perform that task, or do I need to Google it to find out there how to do it?

It would be unreasonable to expect everything to be so 'intuitive' (at some point everything needs to be learned), but something simple, like changing a setting should not require a trip to Google.

If you were using a word processor and wanted to save changes to your document, you'd expect a 'Save' button or menu item to be readily available from the document. If the developer decided that he wasn't going to put the 'Save' button in the Word Processor application, rather , he put it under an option page somewhere in the Control Panel, then sure, you'd eventually find this out by googling it, but putting the button in the Control Panel rather than in the Word Processing app is completely unintuitive, the Save button should be close to the document (the thing you're trying to save), not in some unrelated location.

Maybe it's a generalisation, but I think Unix has a long history of very unintuitive applications (need I mention vi or emacs?) and it's still the one thing I think which is holding back desktop Linux (server linux has been very successful, because it doesn't need a good user interface). It seems like all the linux apps are trying to outdo emacs in their complexity, rather than trying to simplify (like Apple OSX is doing)

 

[milomak]

Maybe it's a generalisation, but I think Unix has a long history of very unintuitive applications (need I mention vi or emacs?) and it's still the one thing I think which is holding back desktop Linux (server linux has been very successful, because it doesn't need a good user interface). It seems like all the linux apps are trying to outdo emacs in their complexity, rather than trying to simplify (like Apple OSX is doing)

i would say that this is a generalisation with respect to the gui interface of many apps i've used in Linux.