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> If you really care, get involved.

There's little chance to get involved with Unity. Shuttleworth has made it clear that he's playing his benevolent dictator card.

> Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption.

Maybe. Unity is probably great for touch screen interfaces. Similar layouts have been tried on small screens - netbooks for example.

I guess the people with 2 huge monitors (and all the Linux tinkering that involves) aren't the people who need Unity; and they're probably already using something else. (Something entirely keyboard driven or minimal or whatever.)

> Write some code.

Yes, "show me the code" is a powerful message. Even if there's little room for involvement in Unity there are many other window managers and desktop environments that'd welcome people getting involved; whether that's with bug-fixing or feature implementing or language translations or documentation.

The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can fix it. Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds more indirection on top of the Debian indirection.

Needing to download 5GB of intermediate packages to go from karmic -> oneiric one release at a time (way to ruin apt-get, guys), a weekend fighting remotely with what turned out to be nouveau (which given its hard locking a fresh install, shouldn't even be enabled by default), and Unity tonedeafness have signalled to me that it's time to move on.

I'm giving Arch a try, and it's refreshing that I can just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst without having to figure out the abstraction built on top to do things the "right way" (and avoid being overwritten). However, if Arch doesn't work out, I'm settled on straight up Debian. At least with Debian, the indirections actually get me something.

I've been running Arch on a vps for a few months and I really like it. It feels like a more modern slackware + good package management. Very solid, and it doesn't pointlessly deviate from the standard way of doing things.

Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.

So Ubuntu is for people who aren't willing to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, but are willing to edit /etc/default/grub ? I've run (K)Ubuntu for six years, coming from Debian, and Slack before that. I don't want to tinker, and I'm not even that picky on my desktop environment as long as it looks reasonably good and I can setup some hotkeys. But any distribution has to be serviceable, or you wind up with MS Windows where the fix for all problems is forum folklore, and failing that, reinstall.

And furthermore, why would I recommend Ubuntu to new users knowing that I'm not going to be able to help them as easily? A bit of an exaggeration right now, but an inevitable result of the path Ubuntu is on. A user friendly distribution should work with existing conventions, not discard them by creating a whole new layer on top.

The advantage of using Ubuntu even for "power users" is the level of support available.

Since it has such a large share of the Linux desktop market it's easy to find solutions for most of your common Ubuntu problems.

I don't really want to go back to the days when everyone used a different distribution where if you had an obscure problem and used google for a solution you would come to a page describing how to fix it in another distro with a completely different package management system and where the contents of /etc were completely different.

I remember posting questions on the forums of various distributions relating to problems I was having just seeing them go unreplied to in perpetuity.

How long will Ubuntu have this user base if they keep pissing people off? Is it that hard to give the users who want the old shell in its usable form what they want?

Benevolent Dictator is what Bill Gates somewhat pretended to be for years.

I'm not sure of Shuttleworth's credentials as the benevolent dictator/UI designer.

He made his money selling SSL certificates in large quantities, I don't really think he is a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

He reminds me more of the type of entrepreneur who makes his money then decides to buy an English Football club and run it into the ground.

That's possibly unkind though, there was enough good work going into Ubuntu providing good support and sorting out allot of the common Linux Desktop issues to award him some credit, but I don't really see Ubuntu as any kind of creative juggernaut.

Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop. Windows 8 is doing the same, and MS's TV ads trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.

Maybe they are right, and the future of mass computing is in entertainment consumption and not productive work. Maybe the dream of a popular powerful OS is dead. Maybe it's time for power users to return to being a.nich

Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop. Windows 8 is doing the same, and trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.

The Bill Gates comparison was meant to illustrate the perception people had of him. Originally, (after his rant about people stealing his Basic for the... IMSI? Name escapes me) he was perceived as trying to do the things that the common man wanted. Remember the "Information at your fingertips" marketing crap?

Shuttleworth started out the same way, except with Linux instead of DOS/Windows, and now he's insisting on making unpopular changes because he thinks he can see the future. Remember when Gates believed there was no future in the Internet?

Anyway, I'm rambling so I'll stop here.

All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity.

If it were this easy, nobody would be complaining. But as far as I can tell, Gnome Classic (without HW accel) is broken by default on Ubuntu 11.10, with the default Gnome Panel being entirely messed up.

This wasn't the case in 11.04, which had a great fallback that I still use daily, and I think it's the reason the Unity complaints are getting louder: there's no longer a real alternative to it in 11.10. At least not from Canonical.

If you install gnome-shell, everything works quite well.

Not even close. I forgot which one gnome-shell is exactly, but the GNOME 3 fallback is broken with VirtualBox seamless mode, and the GNOME 2 (or was it GNOME3-pretending-to-be-GNOME2?) fallback has by default an entirely messed up panel.

It's easy to waste a day trying all these alternatives to get something that works. I don't call that an easy-to-use distro. Particularly as it's a regression.

That's the fallback from GNOME.

The old "classic" panel look has been deprecated upstream, it doesn't really exist any more so I don't know what you're expecting Ubuntu to do in this case.

I'd suggest 'panel people' have a look at Xubuntu.

I don't expect Canonical to do anything, but I'd like them to include the Xubuntu desktop packages in the long term release support cycle as an option for users.

Xubuntu and Xfce is fine, but it's still a regression from gnome2 in allot of ways.

It doesn't group windows on the panel as well as gnome 2 does.

You lose allot of the nice easy features from gnome2 for doing things like using shared files or printers from windows computers.

The panel is allot less flexible and harder to configure. There are also less panel applets available.

Mouse-button back doesn't work in several parts of the interface.

I'm sure there are workarounds for many of these issues but for an out of the box experience it is still a regression.

Ever since I switched to xfce, I've got some really annoying bugs too:

* Key bindings for switching keyboard layouts don't persist, I have to reconfigure them every time I reboot or X restarts

* Auto-suspend when lid is closed no longer works reliably. I sometimes find a really hot laptop in my bag after a while.

That said, XFce is much nicer than Unity.

It is, no doubt but it's not really something you can switch to to get your gnome2 back.

If I had more free time I would love to contribute to something like Xfce (or E17) and turn them into a first class Desktop Environment.

That's the spirit. I suspect that the XFCE project will get far more support now if only from individuals scratching their itches.

I tried to use gnome-shell for a few days and my experience was not quite this.

The task switching interface is very much inferior to gnome2. In gnome2 I can setup some panels which span the bottom of both my monitors , giving me loads of space to switch tasks conveniently and have the panel group together similar apps to save space. I then have another panel with a set of shortcuts that I can use to launch my most common apps.

With gnome-shell you are stuck with having 1 "dock" panel on the far left of 1 monitor to switch apps, even though apps are grouped this makes it far less convenient to switch between them. Instead of 1 click to switch, it's press a button , scan the mouse to the far left then click and then usually click again for the window I want.

The big problem however is this, some of the apps I use are launched from shell scripts which will do something and then run some Java or python app. This is the way with many apps that are not installable through apt-get. IntelliJ IDEA is an example of this.

What I do in gnome2 is just create a new launcher that points to the script and add it to the panel, problem solved.

Now with gnome shell or unity , I can run my script from the terminal which will then cause the app to launch. However now when I want to dock the app for easy launch later it just won't let me.

This is probably because it doesn't understand the relationship between the shell script I ran and what it sees as the "application" and since there is nowhere else I can really put the app I am now relegated to having to launch some of my apps through the terminal each time because they cannot be docked into the main dock with the rest of my apps.

New users aren't going to switch to ubuntu because there's a start(or applications) menu.

Perhaps, but one of the traditional excuses new users have given for not switching, or switching back after trying, is that Linux desktops are too different, even though they've traditionally not been all that different. Creating something unique, compared to tools users have used in the past, like Windows, isn't going to make people immediately productive. And being immediately productive is how the desktop UI/UX enters the background and becomes a facilitator rather than something that the user struggles with.

"being immediately productive is how the desktop UI/UX enters the background and becomes a facilitator rather than something that the user struggles with."

Yes, exactly. I want my interaction with the desktop to be like that with a prostitute: minimal, direct, clear, and without my having to know much at all about the other party. I don't want to have to beg and plead for the ability to alter the panel once a year on special occasions.

Seconded. I showed a guy Ubuntu a bit back and it is now on his map and being used (not as primary, but it may be heading that way) because it has a start menu. He knows a tiny bit of linux (more like generic nix) and has interacted with various server solutions for fifteen years or so, but it's kind of "that thing you have to deal with" and most of the interaction involves calling me. That's ok, I'm mostly in charge of that. But Ubuntu now.. it has a start menu. And, like, through it you can find things. And they look familiar. Not all the way, but kinda. You can click them and they do stuff. He's actually finally getting into it a bit. He really, absurd as it may sound, would never have gotten anywhere if it looked exactly* like now, except with no start menu.

All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity.

Or, even more simply, we can install Mint. :)

I felt that Mint's defaults were the problem rather than the solution, but personal tastes do vary.

Is it really that hard to run 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop'? Am I missing something here?

xubuntu isn't really a perfect replacement for gnome2 for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere here.

After installing Ubuntu 11.10 I spent the best part of a day setting up my desktop and getting it to a stage with Xfce which I felt was 'only slightly more crap than my experience with 10.10'

You think people will not switch to ubuntu because there is a "start" menu? Something that has been present in windows since 1995?

I've said this before, but there are bigger problems than the UI of the main desktop. I think gnome2 is a surprisingly usable desktop , I remember when it was an infact that it was slow and buggy but the hard work has paid off and overall it's one of my favorite UIs on any platform due to it's speed and flexibility.

I don't think learning gnome2 would be a big put off for many people anyway, since it's similar enough to Windows XP which more people have experience with than newer UIs anyway.

Imagine if the time and resources spent developing Unity had been spent instead on more thorough hardware testing, fixing remaining issues in gnome2 or creating new applications for users that would make a Linux desktop a compelling choice.

I don't see what unity does that helps me be able to recommend Ubuntu it to less technical family & friends.

Yep, for example my wife is a WinXP kind of girl and GNOME 2 is not a problem at all for her. Unity? That's a different thing altogether.

I would like to add. It's not only those who are not so tech savy that have problems. I DO NOT WANT to spend time learning how a desktop UI works. I have more interesting things to do than getting used to new UIs and whatnot when the ones I use already allow me as productive as I can with a UI.

Personally all I want is a taskbar, and an application launcher. I like the combination of openbox+tint but I a lot of the application I use depend on gnome libraries anyway.

Glossy chrome elements and wobbly windows are meaningless in terms of usability, that's my opinion. Why would we want to break something that works fine? Why trashing old but reliable technology?

I would guess it's more about shipping a fancy glossy looking product than anything else.

Agreed but I don't think Unity is particularly pretty anyway. Big ugly text and too much purple in the default Ubuntu setup.

If bling is your thing then you can do enough with compiz and desktop themes to make pretty much any desktop look however you like.

I think making the compiz settings manager more visible and easier to use would be quite a big win here, as it's often not obvious what most of the plugins do until you activate them and the whole "resolve conflicts" thing is a total mess that needs simplifying.

I think that Canonical don't have the competence/resources to innovate a new GUI that is better than the existing ones.

The result is something that people hate, not because it is different, but because it is truly sub-par.

> Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly

Either you, Canonical, or both are on drugs.

> There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome.

If the options are "stagnating" with Gnome, or going over 9000 steps backwards with Unity, I'm choosing to stagnate.

> If you really care, get involved.

Why? What's the incentive for me? Canonical has continuously proven to not care about it's current users.

> Write some code. Ubuntu is foss.

FFS, this is the same old tired propaganda of FOSS-apologists, aren't you ashamed of regurgitating it?

FOSS is doomed since it doesn't match the economic realities of producing high-quality end-user software.

> FOSS is doomed since it doesn't match the economic realities of producing high-quality end-user software.

Doomed how? There are more and more high-quality, end-user FOSS apps. The world does not revolve around Canonical and Ubuntu. Simply change distros, problem solved.

Agreed. I'd say most regular folk will just get used to it and enjoy it like they do any other system they use.

For the rest of us (power users and coders) we're fortunate enough to know how to replace Unity or improve it. Canonical has a plan and they're sticking to it. They probably know that the value these changes will make in the future are worth disappointing the people complaining. You have to make choices as a developer and sometimes it's better to make a chunk of people unhappy than to bend to their will and dilute the value of your product's future. If they didn't stand strong on this they may very well end up stuck working on these little complaints instead of focusing on the bigger picture and making the system far better, far faster.