Ubuntu MATE has by far the best Welcome application of any distribution that I am aware of. Why not step it up. The best way to do so is to get rid of the entire Welcome concept.
I wish for the entire application to be rebranded. First, get rid of the start-up animations. They are neither functional nor beautiful and skipping them is one click too much. Second, get right to the point of what it is designed to do. It helps with post-installation issues. It helps to get started. Call it MATE Start.
The System menu lacks the MATE Tweak item. I added it manually but it would be great to have it included by default.After all, it is one of the cornerstones to tweak the system. It should be right there below MATE Start and above the Control Center. And it needs a beautiful default icon.
This put together sounds very misleading - I entirely disagree the program or idea of welcoming the user should just be abolished, especially as it’s been received quite well… but I don’t understand the point you’re trying to convey?
People like myself like that little bit of polish to the application, so I don’t think that should be scrapped. Sure, the first opening animation should be suppressed to a minimum after the first few openings. 16.10’s version of Welcome features a different animation too, which has less jarring animations then the 16.04 version.
Not exactly, it is ideally suited for new users who have picked up the distro for the first time and want a quick start guide and access to help and support. Think of this as a virtual @Wimpy assistant. Plus it evolved into being a hand picked collection of software.
Definitely not. Ubuntu MATE and MATE are different. One is a desktop environment (available for a wide range of distributions) , the other is a flavour of Ubuntu that beautifully integrates the MATE desktop. Tools like MATE Tweak work on other distributions too, Ubuntu MATE Welcome does not (outside of Ubuntu).
I’m not so sure about adding MATE Tweak to the System menu. Personally it looks like clutter, since it’s not something that ever needs to be accessed regularly.
I admit that my initial statement was perhaps a bit too provocative. To be clear, Ubuntu MATE is an outstanding distribution, and it is especially suitable for beginners like myself because of the Welcome application. I only suggested to abolish the Welcome concept, not the application as such.
Welcome screens/applications have been around for quite a long time and while they sometimes help to get a new user acquainted with their system (or not), they are mostly very boring. Ubuntu MATE has approached the Welcome application differently, and as you said, turned it into something more similar to a Virtual Wimpy Assistant. I like this a lot! It’s brilliant! But with it the Welcome application has matured to a degree where I see it no longer necessary to employ the Welcome concept. In fact, the application has already departed from the concept to evolve into something more bold and innovative. Yet in terms of branding it still sticks to the old Welcome paradigm.
Ideally, a distribution is so easy and intuitive to use that a particular Welcome is not necessary at all. I think this is the approach Solus is taking. It is difficult to imagine an Ubuntu MATE experience without the Welcome application. That is why I didn’t suggest to abolish it but merely to question whether the Welcome concept is any longer applicable. I’d like to see the Welcome application even more closely integrated into the system, to offer more than initial introduction and post-installation support.
The idea of a virtual assistant captures it even better than my initial suggestion of rebranding it as MATE Start. I think it has the potential to become a tool to interact with on a daily basis. Why not develop the Welcome application into a Virtual Assistant, give it a nice name (a Cortana/Siri alternative without the privacy nightmares; who knows maybe voice recognition is something to become more relevant in the future) and leave the Welcome concept behind?[quote=“lah7, post:2, topic:8630”]
People like myself like that little bit of polish to the application, so I don’t think that should be scrapped. Sure, the first opening animation should be suppressed to a minimum after the first few openings.
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The turning of the wheel in the main application window is very beautiful and doesn’t take too much time. I don’t count this as a start-up animation.
Welcome in 17.04 has many improvements on the road map, including how the application greets for the first time and expanding the Software Boutique abilities to access the rest of the archives.
Not as such as virtual assistant like those seen on mobile devices, but there are things planned to further refine the “welcome” (or more so, the out-of-the-box) experience.
MATE Start sounds like what MATE Menu should be called, lol.
Also, MATE Tweak is not lacking in system menu; it’s buried under Preferences / Look and Feel. One could move it via mozy if they really wanted to.
Far as improvements to welcome, I would think it would be be better to abolish mate-tweak altogether and have it in the welcome menu, then make that part of Welcome accessible with ubuntu-mate-welcome --system-tweaks (and custom-alias mate-tweak to open it also) with super in-depth explanations for everything and giving it a GTK3-ified appearance but that’s just me.
One of the first things I do with any Linux fresh install regardless of distribution is stop the welcome Screen from popping up every time I boot. Personally I find them annoying in much the same way that I do having Ubuntu Software Center, Gnome Software Store, App Grid or various other ease of use applications installed.
Here’s something to keep in mind. A lot of these applications are installed to help the new user, or those like my wife who want to use Linux but don’t care to become all that technically familiar with it. These packages are designed to give them a little guidance, assistance, and to insure they have a pleasant experience.
One of the beauties of Linux is it’s modular design. If you don’t like something on your system then then get rid of it or replace it with a preferred application. Remember the devs put the the distribution together to appeal to all from the new user to the advanced. If you are an advanced user then take the time to customize your system to suit your taste. At the same time be thankful for all those little packages that are there helping the not so advanced user. Those packages are fielding the how to’s the less advanced used would have been asking in the past.
The good thing is to play with ideas, put them out there and see what people think. Let’s forget about MATE Start. The Welcome application rebranded as a virtual assistant sounds more reasonable to me.
Buried is the right word. Thanks for pointing this out. I never use the Preferences item as it is just quicker for me to start the Control Center. I still think MATE Tweak should be more prominently placed for a simple reason: to quickly showcase what can be done with Ubuntu MATE. I don’t think it is clutter at all. The About MATE item in the menu is probably used much less.
Well to be frank, the GNOME menu sucked donkey anyway. It’s great for people who are accustomed to that workflow, but the moment I saw Mint Menu I felt like I needed to have that in my life.
Now, what really needs to happen is for MATE Menu to have a lot of the same functionality as Synapse, so Synapse is not necessary and MATE Menu can spread its wings, rather than being bounded by whatever changes Clem does for it.
My preference has been to use base distributions. So I would use Debian avoiding next step distributions like Ubuntu as well as Mint. Mint to me seems to me to be the apple that fell to far from the tree, and always 2 steps behind on updates. What updates it does get are not necessarily improve security, stability, or the functionality of the system. They are to improve Clem’s vision of a distribution, and to make him and his team look good. I would guess part of the reason Mint’s boot and shut down processes are slower, and the systems are on the little on the laggy side of things compared to other distributions running the same DEs.
There is not much about the current incarnation of Gnome I like. I can almost throttle it back to a traditional environment by installing about a half dozen extensions as well and replacing Nautilus with Thunar. Anyone who has played this game for any length of time knows that once you start replacing default packages in Gnome 3 you are asking for the DE to crash, not to mention an upgrade to Gnome can cause part of the extensions to become incompatible and stop working. There is also the overhead needlessly placed on the system resources by gnome.
The better choice in my book is to install XFCE which takes a minimal amount of tweaking, is low overhead, and is less likely to break when adding and removing default applications that come with a particular distribution.
A bit of a long post. Sorry, but in the words of Blaise Pascal I lacked the time to make it shorter.
@maro
I think you are approaching this the wrong way. Changes to a piece of software are important when they can clearly convey an advantage. When you can’t do that, you need to reevaluate if your vision is actually right. A feeling is not a reason. In fact doing things because you have a feeling, is behind many bad decisions on the software industry. Pragmatism, practicality and clear reasoning are what should drive us when approaching the task of making suggestions.
You must understand that changing the name of an application is boring minutae, compared to the grand scheme of providing a working operating system. And you won’t simply be able to provide a compelling argument for it in any way imaginable in a world where you have graphics applications named after debilitating conditions, or browsers named after burning animals.
That is definitely not the approach Solus is taking. But if it was, it would fail miserably. Because you cannot completely abstract the complexity of modern computing and reach some sort of easy-of-use nirvana, without it compromising the operating system features. That’s the Microsoft Windows approach and look where that brought you and most of us.
No. The wrong notion has ever been present that easy-of-use is the result of some combination of desktop environment and applications. When in fact, easy-of-use can only be the result of the user willingness to study and learn. It’s not an automatic and instant process, it’s a road that you take. Long, and bumpy. It doesn’t depend on the system, it depends on you.
Sure we should balance it out with some dosage of thought that must go into those applications and desktop environments to facilitate this process. But within sane limits. The Linux contract has always been the ability to delve deep into the operating system and provide powerful tools. It’s never been “easy-of-use”.
[quote=“maro, post:3, topic:8630”]
The idea of a virtual assistant captures it even better than my initial suggestion of rebranding it as MATE Start. I think it has the potential to become a tool to interact with on a daily basis.[/quote]
I don’t want such a tool. In fact, I would leave Ubuntu-MATE the day such a tool was developed. Because I just know where that eventually leads to. Always does. What I want is a stable system that I can use and learn from. Not a kindergarten operating system that tries to teach me about itself. For that we have Windows.
The reason many of us are on these forums and not on the Ubuntu forums is exactly because of stunts like that. Don’t you forget it.
You could argue that just because such a tool existed it didn’t mean that I couldn’t use the core tools of the OS, or other applications. But the “easy-of-use” mentality is what I am arguing against here. It takes a certain frame of mind, a certain set of goals and a certain philosophy, to invest time and energy on those type of tools. Those goals and that philosophy will eventually extend well beyond the initial application, because it is inevitable your magical tool didn’t make life any easier after all. You will just keep on trying to improve it and extend its reach and capabilities and in your good intentions, before you know it, you developed Microsoft Windows on a Linux kernel.
And that’s not what Ubuntu-MATE is about. You are here aren’t you? Is this been such a difficult road to you? I’m here too. All of us are here. We are all on different stages of our learning experience. Some have in fact learned Linux in a time much more difficult for the newcomer when everything was much harder and information less available. They don’t suffer from some form of disease over it. So, let’s just keep the Welcome application as an application you want to use for a couple of months and then just forget about it.
For that, we have built-in help and man for a lot of tools. But consider the budding Linux user who wants to try going away from Windows; Ubuntu MATE may be the easy-to-use experience that most people were looking for (read: Windows-like), but I would love a tool for such people that would get to know the user and act not based on some online algorithm, but upon what is defined in a local script to set up the system the way a particular user wants it.
I am not asking for this in Welcome, I am suggesting a program that can hold a new Linux user’s hand in some circumstances so that the system (through local scripts) understand what the user wants, which would make users from different systems comfortable in something that looks familiar, so in due course, and while exercising some of their old workflow, they can discover for themselves what they want from the system.
Not everybody has the time, nor the mental capacity to use anything outside of Windows first-thing. I know as a first-time Linux user I was testing the waters for months on end before I felt like I got this, and could commit to an install, and that took me a few days to figure out. It could be I am a bit slow, and a touch stupid, but compared to a lot of my peers I try to introduce anything other than Windows to, I’m a genius. I feel a little sad about that, but that’s the reality. Newbies do need to be treated as children every once in awhile, with nurturing attention that the user can eventually grow out of.
- I entirely disagree the program or idea of welcoming the user should just be abolished, especially as it’s been received quite well… but I don’t understand the point you’re trying to convey?
Plus it evolved into being a hand picked collection of software.