[ubuntu-us-ut] Airing of grievances (was Meerkat Ditching 'aptitude')

Aaron Toponce aaron.toponce at gmail.com
Sun Sep 12 18:40:37 BST 2010


While I'm not using Ubuntu any longer, I'll address the points you've
brought up.

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 11:01:48AM -0600, Christer Edwards wrote:
> 1) window buttons belong on the right!

Mark Shuttleworth has been making Ubuntu a Mac OS X competitor since day
one, and he has been very vocal about it. In his mind's eye, if
GNU/Linux is to compete with the Big Dogs on the desktop, it needs to
act like one. Because GNOME was primarily inspired by Mac OS Classic (9
and earlier), it makes sense to design it further to behave like it. If
this bothers you, KDE was designed to be a Windows killer, so that might
be more your route to take.

BUt, the buttons moving to the left, the indicators, the "Me Menu", the
task bar, the themes, everything under GNOME from Canonical is designed
to compete directly with OS X, not Windows. While it's not my
preferrence, they've done more for the look and feel of a desktop than
any other vendor.

> 2) poop brown theme turned into "OMG Purple Ponies!1!!" theme

I don't like the theme personally, but the themes they have created are
light years ahead of what anyone else has put together. The widgets are
smooth, the font looks great, and the exhaustive, seamless integration
they've built into everything GNOME is fantastic. Finally, Clearlooks
has competition.

With that said, I find the color palatte a bit quirky, and think they
could have done better.

> 3) aptitude removed to make room for who-knows-what "social" application

Ubuntu is about your mom and pop, not about your system administrator.
The world is "social" right now, and frankly, 15MB for aptitude is
ridiculous. I don't blame them for removing it. Why provide both apt-get
and aptitude? After all, it is quite redundant. And, the world wants a
desktop, not power-hungry-system-admin tools. Removing GIMP from the
default install also made sense, as the vast majority of the users
likely aren't Photoshop wannabes. A simple crop here, resize there, and
users are happy.

> 4) ...

Ubuntu is making solid decisions. They've brought the GNU/Linux desktop
to many who would have never thought about using it in the past. How
long did we stagnate as a "hobbyist" operating system? 10, 15 years?
Now, someone comes along, shakes things up, and success is on the
horizon. If you want to keep the hobbyist structure of the operating
system, then Ubuntu is not for you. They're specifically and
deliberately targeting everyone except power-users, system admins,
programmers, etc. So, maybe LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, or even BSD might be
a better fit for you. You could even give Plan9 or Haiku a go.

I chose Debian, because I don't care for those things, and want a solid,
structured, universal operating system that I can use as a server,
firewall, desktop, etc. And Debian is making the changes necessary to
fit their goals. I would say Canonical is doing the same with Ubuntu.

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