Am depressed that the Ubuntu12 UI’s default assumption is that people still use wordprocessors.

What’s more depressing is the thought: perhaps they do?

But…

We have all this free-form text.

We have file formats oozing out of our ears.

We have content creation tools inconceivable in the 1970s.

We even argue about the best formats for e-books.

And yet what are the big icons in the Ubuntu Launcher?

Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, Presentation.

Why don’t Canonical just fucking sell typewriters?

At least there’s Firefox.

Comments

6 responses to “Am depressed that the Ubuntu12 UI’s default assumption is that people still use wordprocessors.”

  1. > Why don’t Canonical just fucking sell typewriters?

    Had a nice long chuckle to this line 🙂

  2. Dave Walker

    I assume this is just an artifact of the “Linux isn’t just for geeks” charm offensive. I’d lay decent odds on there being a “geek-optimised desktop, please” option lurking (possibly hidden) in the installer, though.

    I just see a wordprocessor as a text editor with a different set of features, these days; I’ve edited StarOffice Writer documents in vi and Alteon configs in StarOffice Writer before now, and while neither was the actual right tool for each of those particular jobs, they got the job done.

    Right now, though, I admit I could do with a folding editor that knows where XML is coming from – folding is something that not many editors (of any kind) do, sadly. Paying for oXygen just feels *wrong*…

  3. Dave Walker

    Also (thinking “you can’t please all of the people…”) I saw the last line and thought “Humph – not Chrome, then”.

  4. Darren Moffat

    Emacs and vim can both do some form of folding – I’ve seen people do code folding with bot, not sure about XML

  5. Stephen Smoogen

    I am wondering what they should have? Or what they should call it instead?

    [In my dealings outside the Geek world, most of the documents I deal with are Word, XLS, or PDF.

    1. Actually I’d be really really surprised if the format you deal with most day-to-day is not HTML.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *