11.04

[Paul Gear]

On 08/04/11 12:01, Daniel Jitnah wrote:
> ...
> I am back to using 11.04 with Gnome and I think it is great.  Yes I think there will be a lot of disatisfied
> users.  But they will always be able to go back to Gnome.  But 11.10 will be the issue when Gnome will not be
> availale. 

If that is the case, 11.10 will probably the release where i leave
Ubuntu for a distribution which offers more choice (in my case Debian). 
I think this is an indicator of the difference in philosophy between
Debian and Ubuntu.  Debian's priorities are the principles of Free
Software and its users [1].  It seems that Ubuntu's priority is solving
bug #1.  Much as i agree that bug #1 needs solving, and that Ubuntu must
outdo Windows and Mac in order to win market share (although i remain
sceptical about whether Unity will make any appreciable difference to
this), my computer is a productivity tool for /me/, not for all those
people who don't yet use Linux.

By saying that it will drop support for my existing (working!) desktop
environment, Canonical is showing that they're more interested in their
future users than their current ones.  I can understand this, because
i've never given them any money (and even when i tried i couldn't manage
to do it), but it just seems to me that there must be a way to serve the
interests of both sets of users without causing instability and without
deprecating desktop environments that are suitable for more advanced
users (more on these points at [2]).

Paul

[1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract
[2] http://libertysys.com.au/node/101

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