

Ubuntu devs discuss the change from GNOME Shell to Unity - manvsmachine
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/11/ubuntu-devs-discuss-the-change-from-gnome-shell-to-unity-in-natty-11-04/

======
acabal
I'm still pretty disappointed that instead of focusing on fixing and
preventing bugs and regressions (every release of Ubuntu has featured serious
bugs for features that worked fine on my laptop in previous releases--
hibernate, sound, even keyboard buttons, etc.) they're expending tons of man-
hours to write a new shell that will doubtlessly be riddled with fresh bugs
and incomplete features itself on its first release.

I thought the indicator applets were a bad idea, if tolerable--but after 15
years of using the Win95 desktop paradigm on my work machine, I don't know if
I have the patience or desire to re-learn Canonical's new hotness that really
exists mostly because Shuttleworth wants to pretend he's a one-man Steve Jobs
and Jonathan Ive.

Not to mention poor grandma, who had Ubuntu installed by her grandkid;
eventually she'll get a dialog asking if she wants to upgrade her
"distribution," whatever that is, but hey, upgrading is always good, right?
She'll press OK without thinking twice, and all of a sudden the upgrade will
have given her computer a virus that moved all her icons around and she
doesn't know how to use it anymore, can Johnny stop by run a virus scan and
fix everything?

~~~
regularfry
To be fair, the last LTS was pretty good. The next probably will be, too.
Between now and then, though, we all get to be beta testers.

~~~
acabal
Even Lucid had some problems for me--the system would hang on hibernate 2 out
of 3 times, among various other minor, but honestly very irritating bugs.

My concern for the long-term viability of the entire Ubuntu project is what
happens once a user's system starts notifying them that they should upgrade
their distribution. Not sure if that happens for non-LTS releases or not, but
eventually it'll happen. The user will click 'yes' and then be presented with
an extremely different windowing paradigm without having asked for it. It's
like having clicked 'upgrade' to go to Lucid and finding all my window buttons
on the other side for absolutely no reason. Tech folks like you and I can
adapt, but will Grandma continue using Ubuntu if every 6 months something
crazy changes and she has to re-learn everything? She won't--she'll get fed up
and ask for her "old computer" back, which means formatting and installing
Windows from the rescue CD.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't be both a viable alternative to
Windows and Mac and also be a paradigm-changing evolutionary UI experiment.
The two markets--nerds and grandmas--just don't mix, at least until the next
generation or two.

~~~
sandGorgon
egad - please take a 100 upvotes from me. I have actually offered to pay money
(it's on a bug somewhere on launchpad) for the suspend/hibernate issues.

I'm not sure if Fedora fixes this, but if yes - I'm all over it. I'm HATING
have to shutdown and restart.

~~~
acabal
It's since been fixed in Maverick for me (though who knows if it will
resurface in Natty, as these kinds of bugs are wont to do). You might want to
give Maverick a shot if you haven't already.

I hate shutting down every time too, but since I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram on
my laptop starting from hibernate takes forever, so I shut down by choice now.

------
regularfry
All I know is that Unity was pushed out way earlier than it should have been
in the Netbook edition. I've had it chew resources like crazy, and
unilaterally hijacking the left-hand side of my screen? Not cool.

That's before you get to the utter Fitz-law failure that is buttons animating
out from under your mouse pointer...

------
jnovek
I hope to God that they fix Unity by then -- my non-technical spouse loved
Ubuntu netbook edition, but ultimately dumped Linux when 10.10 came along
because Unity just had too many problems.

~~~
pan69
As I understand it, Unity is only an alternative. You can still use Gnome.

