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"However, another fiasco like the one with Ubuntu 11.04 will make 200 million users a distant dream." What is this fiasco that he is talking about? not includi

"However, another fiasco like the one with Ubuntu 11.04 will make 200 million users a distant dream." What is this fiasco that he is talking about? not including wayland on 11.04? talk about confusing writing. I do think 11.04 is immature compared to previous versions, but is in line to what you should expect with such a radical change as Unity.

acabal 15y ago
I'm going to guess that surprising users with a buggy, incomplete, and arguably poorly designed rewrite of the desktop experience they've been using for years is the fiasco he's talking about. And yes, only geeks keep up with Ubuntu news--everyone else just clicked upgrade and then stared blankly at their weird new desktop. He's not going to keep regular users around for long if he keeps pulling that kind of crap--and he's done it twice already, with window buttons in the past.
- jshen 15y ago
  It's always surprising to me that smart people end up learning this lesson the hard way. Users want stability and slow evolutionary change the vast majority of the time. But, I think the motivation here was a bit different, canonical had less control and influence over the desktop than they felt they needed.
- ilcavero 15y ago
  I would agree with you if it wasn't the case that you can easily switch to "ubuntu classic" which is very similar to previous desktop experiences. Also I'm not sure if upgrading from 10.xx to 11.04 takes you unity or to ubuntu classic, it should be to classic in my opinion. full disclosure: I'm a 10.04 user and plan to stay that way until the next LTS.
  - acabal 15y ago
    But "easy" is relative. To geeks like us who know to search Google with "how to replace Unity" (a phrase that would never, ever come to mind to Grandma) and know that we just have to change a dropdown setting, it's easy. If you tell a "regular Joe" user that by clicking a dropdown you can change how the operating system fundamentally works, they'd probably think you were lying--the thought is that alien to them. There's a slim to none chance they'd discover that option on their own (not in small part because they wouldn't even know the option existed), and an equally slim chance that they'd know how to search for it. To you and me, "Unity" is the "well, duh" search term. To regular people, it's tech gibberish. So again it all comes down to the average user--they don't like change, they don't keep up with Ubuntu news, and they aren't interested in fiddling with configuration options to have a usable desktop. I don't think that you can have both fundamentals-shattering releases and also a ppa-based/milestone-release distro at the same time.

acabal 15y ago

I'm going to guess that surprising users with a buggy, incomplete, and arguably poorly designed rewrite of the desktop experience they've been using for years is the fiasco he's talking about. And yes, only geeks keep up with Ubuntu news--everyone else just clicked upgrade and then stared blankly at their weird new desktop. He's not going to keep regular users around for long if he keeps pulling that kind of crap--and he's done it twice already, with window buttons in the past.

jshen 15y ago
It's always surprising to me that smart people end up learning this lesson the hard way. Users want stability and slow evolutionary change the vast majority of the time. But, I think the motivation here was a bit different, canonical had less control and influence over the desktop than they felt they needed.
ilcavero 15y ago
I would agree with you if it wasn't the case that you can easily switch to "ubuntu classic" which is very similar to previous desktop experiences. Also I'm not sure if upgrading from 10.xx to 11.04 takes you unity or to ubuntu classic, it should be to classic in my opinion. full disclosure: I'm a 10.04 user and plan to stay that way until the next LTS.
- acabal 15y ago
  But "easy" is relative. To geeks like us who know to search Google with "how to replace Unity" (a phrase that would never, ever come to mind to Grandma) and know that we just have to change a dropdown setting, it's easy. If you tell a "regular Joe" user that by clicking a dropdown you can change how the operating system fundamentally works, they'd probably think you were lying--the thought is that alien to them. There's a slim to none chance they'd discover that option on their own (not in small part because they wouldn't even know the option existed), and an equally slim chance that they'd know how to search for it. To you and me, "Unity" is the "well, duh" search term. To regular people, it's tech gibberish. So again it all comes down to the average user--they don't like change, they don't keep up with Ubuntu news, and they aren't interested in fiddling with configuration options to have a usable desktop. I don't think that you can have both fundamentals-shattering releases and also a ppa-based/milestone-release distro at the same time.