It runs a slow and ugly UI, comes with built-in Amazon ads and privacy concerns, and will drain battery rapidly when using as a desktop, so you won't be able to make a call when your car breaks down on the way home.
If this is the future, count me out.
I'm running Ubuntu right now and love it. I do wish that it didn't come with Amazon by default, but as a free OS, I accept that there's going to be some of that sort of thing happening.
Regarding battery, I was under the impression that it would charge when being used as a desktop. Is this not correct?
It's not even implemented in an intuitive or user-friendly way. When you search your computer, you don't expect Amazon search results to randomly appear.
Compare the Ubuntu dash search to Spotlight on OSX, it looks very amateurish. Instead of improving it, their developers have to waste their time fudging Amazon search results in.
Why so particular with Ubuntu, do you e.g. distrust (and stop using) Google for displaying ads? What about Windows/OSX which are orders of magnitude less trust-able than an open source OS. If you don't like a more mainstream consumer Linux then why not install Arch or Debian or Bodhi and refrain from badmouthing?
There's a missing apostrophe there. It's "free" in that it doesn't come with a price-tag. It's being paid for, just in other ways. It might seem nit-picky, but to me, at least, it's an important distinction. Facebook is "free" also, but you're paying for it by looking at ads. Google search/email is "free", but you pay for it with ads.
I personally hate the idea that something is "free" but you pay for it with your time/eyeballs. In some regards (like this) I am old-school. I like the simple model of I pay $X for Y product, done.
I don't really agree with the mentality of "ad-supported is not free". It's one thing if you're giving up your data (as in the case of Facebook), it's another if it's limited to glancing at an ad (in the case of a blog or newspaper). I don't know the details of where Ubuntu would fall, but if you define merely "looking at something" as payment, you should be asking for refunds from any man or woman you've ever "paid".
The vast majority of Linux distributions are free and include none of this sort of things, with some of them (e.g. Debian) having been in continuous existence for about 20 years. Whatever your opinion about this move by Ubuntu, you can't say that it's something that has to happen with free OSes and that you have to accept.
I don't think the people working there are incompetent, more likely overstretched to breaking point.
Even some of their ubuntu one storage engineers know graphics programming well enough to win game programming competitions. They're good, and have copious free time to make this perfect.
Unity on desktop is very, very good.
Unity on the phone (running on my nexus 4) is blazingly fast. I mean, stupidly fast. Android and iOS feel super laggy compared to it. Particularly Android.
Just seems like you are trolling.
They are not using Python for the phone version, but something coming from QT that runs at native speed.
I used to subscribe to the linux sub-reddit but left because of all the Canonical apologists, "But they're nowhere near as bad as Microsoft/Apple/Google" and "They've got to make money somehow, what's wrong with anonymous search statistics being sent to Amazon?" etc etc.
Seriously, working on something for a while until you get it into a state where you're happy releasing it to the world isn't an attack on Freedom. Especially when you GPL it once you do release it.
The built-in Amazon ads are enough for me to not use it, however.
Canonicals downfall has been long and well-documented. Try to keep up.
When in desktop mode, you will be plugged into A/C power.