Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.
I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.
Ads in the OS are awful. If this has to exist, it needs to be off by default with clear, easy-to-find knobs for removing the spyware. Of course, like everything advertising-related, the incentives are to do the opposite.
In this case I personally find it in consequential for myself; I know what I'm doing and can easily remove Ubuntu's garbage. But it is an ugly trend and reduces my trust in their judgement.
Sane defaults mean a single clipboard. If I copy something, it replaces the contents of the single clipboard. If you want to keep track of all the old things you copied, that's fine but all the ways of pasting should always paste the last thing you copied. If we can't agree on something simple as this, we can't agree on defaults (and should give up on computing).
We need to run a browser, a terminal, a file manager, maybe some media apps, and a text editor if you don't do that in the terminal. This is not like a vim config of an industry veteran, it shouldn't require tweaking from the OS. Just get out of the way.
I can tweak the number of workspaces or the colours temperature for day and night. These are matters of personal preferences. But the way to launch apps, connect to wifi, or display a clock should just be ergonomic.
Second, tweaks don't solve this problem.
There's a handful of talented tweakers and power users. They will use Sway or whatever anyway. Everyone else when confronted with lots of knobs ends up with something worse than a competent designer could have provided by default.
That's what Ubuntu gives me, that's why I've used it since replacing Debian testing in 2006.
3,500 servers on 6 contents can't be wrong either, with all our software distributed as debs, it just works.
My customized GUI really needs to be consistent across my machines, and Unity makes this impossible to guarantee and automate. Just give me an .rc file, text-based configuration is my favorite part of Linux.
It's also particularly dangerous, since it leads to the "my way or the highway" GNOME mindset, which, in the extreme cases, entirely removes features without the option to enable them back, because... customization is bad.
When we ask for customization, we're not saying that the default setup can't be usable, or that hours of tweaking should be required before getting started. We're saying that when there is a feature that doesn't behave as desired, we would like the option to modify it. "It works this way and that's final" is already well served by other operating systems, why do you feel Ubuntu should copy this?
The file manager, for a very long time, had a reproducible issue (>20% of the time) where moving a file would cause a crash; based on the Ubuntu bug tracker, took an year and half to fix, and it was (appropriately) marked as critical.
It's clearly lacks development resources (and I also personally question the development quality).
I still use XUbuntu, but I think the future for low-resource machines will be LUbuntu (lowest power) and MATE (low power). MATE is also well funded, well organized, and very configurable.
In the real world it doesn't work like that. Dumb users don't know how to tweak things but they know that they can ask other people to help them.
They are ridiculously happy because: - device drivers actually work - they don't have to worry anymore about viruses - they can use old machines without trouble
So yeah, zero customization - but a way better experience than Windows.
So, your crowd not only exists, but got me a new bicycle!
Buuut so many great bikes (and I ride to work every single day) and it was hard to accept the money.
I joke to people telling I am an addicted doing work for the drug dealer - of course I would receive in drugs, not money!
These days I use Kubuntu, but literally the only configuration thing I change is the desktop wallpaper. Everything else works how I want it out of the box.
I wouldn't even know how to diagnose shit anymore, and I grew up on Slackware. I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work.
That's me exactly. I used to love tweaking Enlightenment(?) into a Hollywood-worthy environment.
These days if I tweak something, it's probably to select a larger font because my eyesight isn't what it used to be.
Also my mother uses ubuntu, and she doesn't customize anything.
You see, the linux user base is more diverse than the way you describe it.