Review of UX changes of the basic functions of the new Astra Linux 1.8 in comparison with 1.7
The long-awaited public release of Astra Linux 1.8 has recently taken place. The new version has received many useful and important changes under the hood, which will definitely make life easier for system administrators, engineers and information security specialists.
However, I was surprised that many articles began to appear on the Internet (including on Habr), where all the innovations are mentioned in passing. And if about the changes in the internals it is clear why – it is difficult to tell in a popular scientific way, then the articles about “New wallpapers from Roscosmos” and “New light theme” personally surprised me by the lack of immersion in the changes in the user experience.
Having used the new version of Astra for several weeks, I decided to write my review, where I will tell you about important changes in the UX of the basic functions of the OS for all categories of users (that is, not even for super-admins).
Menu “Star”.
Perhaps the most important function of the OS for the user is launching applications. Like Windows, Astra has its own “Start” button with a star icon, from now on I will call it “Star”. This menu has really undergone serious changes, in some ways good, and in some ways there are disadvantages:
The first thing that caught my eye was that the menu became more functional, since now you can not only launch applications directly from here, but also go to almost any system setting without unnecessary windows.
The “Recent” section (previously “Latest”) has also been improved. In version 1.7, this menu section showed the most recently launched applications. In version 1.8, the documents the user has worked with are now also displayed. It is very similar to what Windows used to have, but given the mix of applications and documents, it looks more interesting:
However, the downside of such enriched functionality is the loss of the simplicity that used to be there. Plus, the new categorization of applications is a bit confusing for the user accustomed to 1.7. Interestingly, the old application rubricator can be seen through “Run command”, where there is a button with a list in the old style:
To sum up the work with the main menu of the system, I think the changes were generally beneficial. Well, the fact that the old experience broke a little is the norm for “breaking” changes in major versions. As they say, I suffered for a week and got used to it, but now life has become qualitatively better.
File manager.
At first glance, the explorer has undergone a minimal number of changes, because really, what can you come up with when working with files?
But in fact there are changes. They may be small, but for professionals they are significant, and will definitely save not minutes, but hours:
Ability to customize what to display on the toolbar. For example, this may be useful for those who do not want advanced buttons for working with panels, they can now be disabled
Ability to customize the display of elements in the Tree. Also a convenient function for customizing the workspaces of inexperienced users, so that they are not tempted to accidentally open an unnecessary location:
When working in a single file manager with two panels, the address bar is now displayed for both tabs. In 1.7, there was a single address bar that displayed the address of the panel where the file was selected. It might seem like a small thing, but it really made the experience easier:
Display the address bar on panels in the file manager.
Control Panel => System Preferences.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for users and field support engineers is the change in approach to settings. There are several breaking changes here.
As you can see from the title of this section, “Control Panel” is now called “System Settings”. But this is not just a change of the window title, the application itself has been changed.
I assume that the application was rewritten from scratch. The command to launch it via the terminal speaks in favor of this theory. In Astra Linux 1.7, the “Control Panel” was opened by the command fly-admin-center. When trying to run this command in Astra Linux 1.8, the user will get an error:
fly-admin-center: command not found.
In Astra Linux 1.8, “System Settings” is opened with the command astra-systemsettings . After launch, the old and new implementations look different:
What immediately catches your eye:
Now, instead of tiles by category, a list of all items is displayed on the left
One of the items opens immediately.
The list looks nice at first glance and seems to solve the problem of finding elements. But an attentive reader may notice that in the new version, some parameters are missing from the list. For example, in the “Control Panel” there is a “Mouse” item, but in “System Settings” it is not visible.
The thing is that some of the settings are grouped. You can tell where the group is in the list by the right arrow icon. The desired “Mouse” is located inside the “Input devices” group. That is, you first need to open the group, and then the target element:
So it turns out that the seemingly convenient list becomes a little harmful. Of course, the search function can save the day, thanks to which I found that “Mouse” is located inside the “Input devices” group, but I would like to find everything faster.
Good advice to designers – it seems that groups should not be made as a slider, as they are now, but should be implemented as a tree structure, like in the file manager.
Among other things, the user can open the burger menu and enable the icon mode:
However, this does not solve the problem of grouping items, the “Mouse” is still hidden:
Summing up the settings section, I would like to praise the designers and developers of Astra – it turned out quite decently. Well, and the grouping, I believe, will be refined.
Notifications.
When I first used Astra Linux 1.8, I saw notifications and the Mandela effect worked for me. For some reason, it seemed to me that exactly the same notifications were in Astra Linux 1.7. Having tried to compare, I was surprised that none of my stands with Astra 1.7 had them! Perhaps I saw them somewhere on other stands at customers, perhaps someone installed something additionally, or perhaps I am simply confusing them with other distributions.
Nevertheless, one way or another, in Astra Linux 1.8, a notification system is available right out of the box after installation, which is good news. When you receive notifications, they are displayed in the corner, but you can open a panel that is very similar to the one in Windows. It is nice that notifications can be customized, and the settings are opened directly from the panel (the button at the bottom right):
What else?
In fact, I personally did not see any other innovations or radical changes in terms of the overall user experience. Of course, I do not consider changes in color schemes, the location of buttons and text on familiar screens.
If you think that I missed some important change for user experience in this article, write to me, if possible I will make a comparison with 1.7 and if it is clearly important I will add a mention of your account as a co-author of the changes.
