I know the argument about Fitt's law and having the menu up on the top (as was the custom since the first Macintosh). That was in the 1980s, with tiny monitors and usually only running one single window application at a time. When you have larger monitors and multiple windows open, a single menu bar runs into two new usability problems, one being mode errors. Is that menu for the application I am trying to use it for? What mode is the menu bar in right now? (vi/vim users know this one, too) The other issue is that with large monitors it takes more effort to reach the menu bar with your mouse. It's not a simple quick flick of the mouse up to the top like before with small screens.

This is part of a larger class of problems I see with open source in particular. They copy some feature that made perfect sense in the time, context, and constraints under which it was designed, but don't factor in how things have changed or they don't have knowledge of the original problem that feature was designed to solve (which may no longer apply). I'm thinking of common programming language features in particular.

That said, the spike in usability and stability and compatibility problems of Ubuntu (like not being able to even see the last item in a list of files because the bottom status bar was removed and replaced with a floating box) just finally pushed me off Ubuntu as my primary OS this past fall, after using it as my primary OS for 7 years. I know it's free and a lot of the compatibility problems are more the fault of Microsoft/Nvidia (dual graphics, uefi, etc.), I shouldn't complain, but to me it's not a good sign when you won't even use something that's free. But maybe this article is a sign that Ubuntu will improve in the future.