unity-design team mailing list archive

[Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

This is just something that I've noticed recently, if it wasn't so tricky to
fix it would definitely belong in the "papercut" category as one of those
things you learn to live with / stop noticing.

I've had a Vista install alongside my Ubuntu install for some time, but
never really used it. Recently I've had some Flash issues in Ubuntu so it
was easier just to reboot in to Vista to watch some online video. One thing
I noticed was how much more "solid" Vista *felt*. For a while I couldn't
figure out why this was, something just gave the illusion of being more
robust than Ubuntu.

Just now I figured out what it is, I've just logged into my work PC, and
fired up Thunderbird, Netbeans, Firefox etc. and I sat and watched a desktop
that appeared to be doing nothing.

There are really two issues here, one is feedback to the user after starting
an application. When you start an application from the menu, there is no
indication that anything actually happened (aside from the menu vanishing),
there's no "I'm thinking about it, one second..." indicator. In Windows of
course there is the little busy cursor, our busy cursor doesn't seem to
trigger in this situation. I'm not saying that a busy cursor is a good
solution to this, but we could do with some kind of "The application is
launching" indication.

The other issue is that if some app starts accessing the hard disc / use
some CPU, everything seems to stop completely. Just now I ran some updates
while trying to type this email and Firefox started "grey screening" me
every few seconds. Why? The updates seem to use all the CPU and leave the
applications struggling to even refresh. I'm not saying this is an Ubuntu
specific thing, obviously we've all seen Window's "The application is not
responding" dialog, but I know that I see the greyed window on Ubuntu far
more than that dialog on Windows. And in my experience, the Windows dialog
actually appears when that program is hanging, not because another program
is busy.

I don't know the solution, (better CPU scheduling? Prioritizing of GUI
threads? CPU limiting the update manager?), but we should really try to do
something to improve this.

Luke.

P.S.

Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks so too:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/85/