Dead List Walking

[David Sanders]

> We were very surprised that no one showed up at the meeting to defend Sounder or give any possible alternatives. As this being emotionally driven by popey, it was not. Sounder has been an issue on the CC radar for some time, popey just saw that thing were not improving.

Whatever the reasoning, it's disappointing for those Ubuntu users who
found this list useful for general chit-chat.

For the last few years I've been a near-evangelist for how great
Ubuntu is, not just as an OS, but as an example of free and
non-corporate development. Mark Shuttleworth has always seemed to
take a real interest in running the show and being approachable. This
is what originally gave me the impression that Ubuntu was a "friendly"
project which could contain real people. If we're to see a corporate
lock-down on communications a la Apple or Microsoft (or Oracle, or
Cisco etc ad infinitum) then I really forces to me to re-evaluate what
the project stands for.

If it was originally intended to put better software than Windows in
the hands of the masses then it's currently failing, as Unity is
frankly far worse than the windowing system in Windows 7 (and yes I
have been using it - it's basically a worse version of Gnome 2.x +
Global Menu + AWN, thanks for ignoring these other excellent
projects), and it is literally light-years behind OS X, despite
stealing the ideas. The Windows 7 quicklaunch dock-ripoff is a much
better implementation than the default left-bar in Unity in terms of
dragging, dropping and clicking. as is AWN.

If Ubuntu was also intended as a way of breaking a dull, corporate
hegemony in software then the project should also be careful that this
isn't what it turns itself into.

So the software has now become rather poor and the structure seems to
be getting worse by the day, and I seriously think it's time to
change. With that in mind, I'm off to use Debian unstable, like I used
to. My commercial work is Ubuntu-based (and indeed gets quite a few
Ubu-based boxen out into the wild) so it'll be a bit of a switch, but
if you're not listening to users then you're on a path to nowhere.

It's been a ride Ubuntu.

David