My request to ubuntu developer team

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Sun Nov 20 17:27:46 UTC 2011


On 20 November 2011 16:03, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Pongo A. Pan <pongo_pan at fastmail.us> wrote:
>> unity, which is about what I expected.  There's always fierce opposition
>> to change and those are the people we hear from.
>
> I'm fine with change as long as it is change for the better.

Ah, but, *whose* better?

Unity is, apparently, so far, distinctly better for novice users. It
may not be better for all migrants from GNOME - although personally I
really like it - but if it is better for a billion former Windows
users, but worse for 10 or 20 million former GNOME 2 users, then
overall, that's an improvement.

>   Change
> for the sake of change on the other hand is foolish, and that seems to
> me to be what is driving this move.

It is not always foolish. In this instance, Microsoft is threatening
litigation and saying that it has "about 235" (a suspiciously precise
estimate) patents that cover the Linux desktop. That is an /excellent/
reason for sweeping change.

This is something that the KDE project appears not to have grasped yet.

>  And it looks to me like everyone
> is rushing to try to copy Apple.

Unity is. Android is. Others, e.g., GNOME 3, are not.

>  Well, I have the pleasure of using a
> Mac now for the first time in 15 years - at my new job.  It ain't all
> it is cracked up to be, to be honest.  It has its good points, but it
> has a lot of bad ones too.

If you don't like Unity, you won't like Mac OS X - they are very alike.

>   The biggest problem is that Apple gives
> you "the apple way" and you take their way or the highway.

Not really. I run several Macs and I barely run any Apple apps on
them. I don't use Apple's browser, email client, address book, chat
program, text editor, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation
program, photo management tools, video player and indeed almost no
Apple apps.

And what I /do/ use are almost entirely FOSS apps.

> Traditionally one of the strong points of Open Source software has
> been that it is highly configurable so you can have it any way you
> want, as long as you can do the config.  Well, that long tradition of
> Open Source seems to be on its death bed right now because now even
> here, the developers are saying "our way, or the highway"

Can you give some examples to support your argument?

In the case of Ubuntu 11.10, for instance, the *officially-sanctioned*
choices are:
* Unity
* Unity-2D
* Xfce
* KDE
* LXDE

And GNOME 3 in the repos.

Also in the repos are /dozens/ of other desktops and window managers
from FVWM to Icewm to Fluxbox. I run WindowMaker on one of my machines
and Openbox on another.

Unity is no more "enforced" than GNOME 2 was.

> I'm not just mourning change.  I'm mourning the death of an entire philosophy.

I would agree, but I don't think it is. It's just a change of desktop
that some people don't like, and they are making a drama out of it.

-- 
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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