10.04: min/max/close buttons

[J]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 16:01, Brian McKee <brian.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:
> reasons I started using linux way back when. Why lately does everybody
> have this 'there's only one true way to do things' attitude going?

Because the number of people adopting Linux who are of the "let me
configure everthing under the sun" persuasion are becomming fewer and
fewer, and honestly, don't pay the bills.

The target is shifting from hobbyist to "Your Mom" and "Your Company"
because that's where the money is.

the vast majority of potential new end-users (those who may one day be
willing to buy a support contract, or buy a system with Linux on it
instead of Windows) are mostly of the "Just give me something that
works when I click the mouse" and the vast majority (read nearly 100%)
of potential corporate customers do not care either, beyond their test
labs and tinkerers in house.  They want, without exception, "Stable,
un-changing, 100% uptime, low training and maintenance cost" and could
care less about where the Close, Min and Max buttons are.

That's not just a Ubuntu thing, that's Linux in general, which is why
you're also seeing Fedora and to some extent so far, OpenSuSE moving
in the same kind of direction (notice that Fedora also no longer
enables root login? and that has even found its way into RHEL).

I'm not saying that's the only reason, nor am I speaking for any of
the vendors out there, but that's the general reason behind most
things...  For us (and people like us) the Linux world is fairly well
saturated, and in order to grow, focus has to shift to impressing and
bringing in people from other demographics, for good or ill...

The same thoughts were uttered a LOT back just before and just after
AOL came about, when the group of "those of us who can configure a
winsock and connect to the internet and use UseNet, Gopher and Archie"
had to move over for the 95% of the remaining population who were
enamored with blink tags, animated gifs, and insisted on everything
being point-click-dumb.