Posts by Plutocrat

China offering ten nations help to run their cyber-defenses and networks

And while we're helping you, can we just park a couple of our ships here ...

Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars

First of all, great article. It was a nice summary of the landscape.

I don't think I have much to add, just a general agreement. Moving to Unity was a terrible thing which alienated users. I have yet to see a single survey in which more people like Unity than Gnome 2 -- do a couple of searches on Google and see for yourself. If Mark Shuttleworth had bothered to do any sort of market research then he would never have made the decision to do this. Instead he was too busy playing the 'visionary leader'. Steve Jobs is probably the only guy who actually got this role right.

So to summarise. I don't like Unity because

- It doesn't work on 3 out of the 4 computers I installed it on as the hardware is 'not good enough'

- It takes me longer to accomplish every task. I tried for a week.

- Lack of configuration options. Still. Even in the 11.10 release.

- My taskbar applets I set up in Gnome 2 aren't supported. So I have to change my time tracking application for eg. More work.

- There is no choice.

I've looked at Xubuntu and still find that a bit irritating. Lubuntu is actually a little better for me. I saw the Mint blog post yesterday and believe that these guys actually seem to understand what they're doing better than Ubuntu. They see that KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity are all making things more difficult for users, so they've written bridging software to make it easier. Did you hear that Ubuntu? No, I don't guess you did.

So for me, I'll just move on to another one. I'll also, with a sense of embarassment for having recommended Ubuntu in the first place, help my clients to find an alternative. This makes me look unprofessional, but I'll live. The real tragedy here is that the momentum of Ubuntu has been lost, and a real challenger to Windows / Mac has been neutered.