I agree that the way it was presented to the community was a big issue. Plus, when people bring genuine complaints to the table, a lot of geekier open-source a

I agree that the way it was presented to the community was a big issue. Plus, when people bring genuine complaints to the table, a lot of geekier open-source advocates say, "hey, it's open source, fix it yourself instead of complaining." (Though that's not an Ubuntu-specific problem.) Well, tearing open the guts of something as complex as a DE just to fix, say, the launcher position is just not something I'm going to do. If a distro's attitude is going to be, "if you don't like our half-baked product don't use it, because we're not going to listen to you," then yup, I'm going to go use something else and not recommend that distro any more. All they succeed in doing with that attitude is alienating a former advocate. That's not the way to approach Shuttleworth's goal of X million users by 20-whatever.