Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?

I think the biggest value in unity is experience. Canonical and the linux community in general are gaining a lot of UI research experience with unity. An area of linux often left un-experimented. It might not be everyone's favorite and it's certainly still under development, but at least Canonical is trying to do something genuinely difficult.

Who is it for? It's for everyone to try, and then try to improve. It's open source. It's changing constantly, and you can help. Don't let your human desire to stick it to people for doing something you don't like get in your way of helping make a difference.

I personally think unity is great. More screen real estate, feels more organized, less UI cluttering my experience. Most importantly it's a step forward into the unknown. Trying to bring a modern UI to an operating system that is more than ready for some mass appeal.

It's for people who like Macs. A Mac is my main machine, and I can see all kinds of parallels, down to the "disk utility" for formatting drives. I'm feeling right at home with Unity, with the menus at the top, the Dock (excuse me, Launcher), etc.

As for Ubuntu installations being "flawless and drama-free", he should go back and read about the nightmare issues people had with 9.10, most of which were fixed by 10.04, and 10.04 has been a rock-solid LTS. The next LTS is when I'll most likely start switching my machines, it will be the 3rd iteration of Unity and the Canonical team appears to try to really get things right on the LTS releases.

Not for me.

I've already gone to Lubuntu, and I'm starting the thought process of moving to Mint or Debian.

My thirteen year old has asked to go to Mint, we'll probably do that next weekend. "Dad, you can't even change the panel." The "teachable moment" will end up being about re-partitioning his Linux partition (it's all root at the moment), not about learning Unity. He just wants to GSD.

I dont think unity is for developers. I was using maverick and now thinking of moving back to debian. Sure its a nightmare to transform back.