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The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu
jammag writes "According to this article, 'Whether Ubuntu is declining is still debatable. However, in the last couple of months, one thing is clear: internally and externally, its commercial arm Canonical appears to be throwing the idea of community overboard as though it was ballast in a balloon about to crash.' The author points out instances of community discontent and apparent ham-handedness on Mark Shuttleworth's part. Yet isn't this just routine kvetching in the open source community?"
Have you ever tried to use modern GNOME, i.e. version 3.x? It's an abomination! completely unworkable desktop environment. Every app takes over the entire screen, can't minimize/maximize etc. It tries to implement mobile "dekstop" features (as the aforementioned fullscreen apps), but this just doesn't work in a workstation environment. Or am I the only one these days who wants multiple windows open (and visible!) at the same time, so I can do terminal stuff simultaneously while writing a document and browsing the web? Unity, on the other hand, is quite usable, even if it makes some rather odd design choices. Yes, it takes some getting used to, and it's not perfect, but it's a gazillion times better than default GNOME 3.x. I have tried GNOME fallback mode (basically gnome 3.x trying to impersonate its older self), but this has some serious features lacking (can't alt-tab for instance). Personally, I would now prefer something that combines GNOME 2.x with Unity. I do really like the unity dash for quick finding of files, but prefer to have an applications overview a la GNOME 2.