Well I did also say that I was whining like an indulgent nerd about an OS I got given for free. Which pretty much sums up the characterisation you've given here

Well I did also say that I was whining like an indulgent nerd about an OS I got given for free. Which pretty much sums up the characterisation you've given here, as well. ;) I do see your point, I really do. My concern, and the part that I specifically labelled hubris - which in hindsight is a regrettable term - was neither the desire to make changes nor the desire to not maintain old configurations. Those things are understandable. When I tried Unity in 11.04 I was impressed that Canonical were working to advance the state of the art. The part that irks me is when I try to imagine the assumptions behind the choices for the upgrade behaviour in 11.10. Users are proactively prompted to make that upgrade, and I perceive a disconnect between their expectations of a simple upgrade and the resulting user experience. In the post above I mentioned some ways in which this could have been made much smoother (simply warning users that their entire desktop environment was about to change, for instance.) Canonical doesn't have to answer a single thing to me for the operating system they worked hard to give me for free, but I still wonder why they chose that path.