[imchillyb]

IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche.

This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.

All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.

I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this.

FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!

[freehunter]

Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly the same as they've always been.

This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true.

How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.

[mbell]

> This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want.

Who do you think the Ubuntu user base is? I'm willing to bet the vast majority are not developers locked into the gnome 2 style desktop environment as you appear to be claiming.

> His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind.

How dare he make choices he believes will benefit the company he has personally dumped massive piles of cash into. Really, what an asshole. </sarcasm>

> That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.

The gnome dev process was a train wreck, KDE is a bloated mess, and xfce is devoted to being minimalist. His only choices were forking gnome 2 or building their own DE. I really can't blame him for not wanting to take over a massive existing code base. Particularly one that is locked into a desktop metaphor that doesn't have a long term future for the masses.

> All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.

What makes you think people like you (developers, presumably) are the target market for Ubuntu? They aren't, they never were, ubuntu has always had the goal of being a distro for non linux geeks. Its pretty clear looking at the mass market that the standard desktop metaphor is on its way out for general purpose computing needs.

[1SaltwaterC]

You still have Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc. So, why the fuss?