<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> On 08/04/11 12:01, Daniel Jitnah wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:20110408120131.18a29375@git-kub1010" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">... 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. </pre> </blockquote> 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] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.debian.org/social_contract">http://www.debian.org/social_contract</a> [2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://libertysys.com.au/node/101">http://libertysys.com.au/node/101</a> </body> </html>