My request to ubuntu developer team

[Liam Proven]

On 20 November 2011 15:36, Pongo A. Pan <pongo_pan at fastmail.us> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-11-20 at 14:55 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
>
>> ITYM Mint *13.* Mint 12 uses GNOME 2.32. It is, AFAIK, the *only*
>> Debian-based distro that does; Debian itself skipped from 2.30 to
>> including packages from 3, e.g. the terminal.
>>
> Nope, Mint 12 is the one that is still in the Release Candidate stage.

Apologies. I'm getting confused with the LTS version. Sorry.

> All Gnome 3.2 with the MATE option.  MATE didn't give me anything like
> a usable desktop in limited testing.  There are still some glitches in
> their interesting take on gnome-shell too.  Every once in a while all
> my desktops get reshuffled and some applications become unresponsive to
> the point of having to open a console to kill them.  Clearly a work in
> progress. I'm not using Mint 12 RC for anything important right now.

I tend not to use betas much, myself. FOSS is often in "beta" - I
think several version of Ubuntu have shipped with GRUB at version
(x).99~(x+1)RC(y) which I do not find a reassuring thing to read on my
boot screen! Ditto for (one of) the fsck program(s), IIRC.

>> > 4. Gnome 2 was abandoned by its developers because it was growing
>> > unwieldy and hard to maintain.  It is effectively dead.  In less than 18
>> > months the last Ubuntu and Mint LTS versions which used gnome 2 will
>> > fall off maintenance.  Nothing new will be developed for gnome 2, and
>> > applications aimed at gnome 3 will not work on it because of naming
>> > conflicts.
>> >
>> > 5. Michael Jackson and gnome 2 are still dead, and pretty soon the
>> > traditional desktop computer will be too for most users.  Get over it.
>> > Use XFCE, KDE or LXDE, all of which are old fashioned desktops during
>> > the transition if you must: stop whining.
>>
>> Excellent post, excellent comment. I wholeheartedly agree.
>>
> Tks.
>
> OMG Ubuntu has the result of their (admittedly unscientific) poll on
> desktop use up this morning (afternoon to you guys).  About 50% using
> unity, which is about what I expected.  There's always fierce opposition
> to change and those are the people we hear from.
>
> The deeply conservative streak in human nature has always amazed me.  A
> simple example: this country would save $5.5 (american) billion over the
> next 30 years if we withdrew all the dollar banknotes and substituted
> coins, mostly because coins last longer.  Admittedly, this would cause
> some initial problems with cash drawers and the like but nothing like
> the difficulties with decimal conversion from LSD in the UK or to the
> Euro in Europe.  Innate conservative dislike of change prevents it.

American currency is very odd, to me as an occasionally-visiting Brit.

All the banknotes are the same size, which is downright hostile to
blind people. The coins also sometimes bear officially-sanctioned
nicknames which give the foreigner no clue as to their denomination.
E.g. I have no idea how much a "nickel" is worth - that's a metal to
me - or a "dime". (10¢? 50¢?) At least a "quarter" is relatively
guessable.

It is ripe for a complete redesign. It's easy - in Britain we do this
every decade or so. It's not traumatic or difficult at all.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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