> While Canonical is happy to accept thousands of hours of free work in bug fixes and quality assurance of their code, they are not interested in letting the co

> While Canonical is happy to accept thousands of hours of free work in bug fixes and quality assurance of their code, they are not interested in letting the community have a meaningful say in its conception. Which solves the problem of design by committee and results in a great desktop experience. I love how Unity is preserving space on my 13.3" screen and how Ubuntu team made all the choices for me and then made it all work together -- I don't have to customize a thing (I use all the default applications and don't even change the background). I remember the times when it took a day or more to install an operating system, all the necessary applications, and move your data and settings. With Ubuntu nowadays it takes less than an hour (including some hacks around the still rough edges, like reducing power usage) to have a completely up and running Linux installation. Hopefully, Mark Shuttleworth will stay on that course, because it's working great. Disclaimer: I'm not a core member of any team, I filed two bugs overs years of using Ubuntu. Everything above and below is written from my very subjective perspective and it's entirely possible that I'm just not a very sophisticated user -- give me a browser, a terminal, hide all that other stuff and I'll be happy. Though Unity did convince me to start using Gwibber, Empathy and some other apps from their integrated tray. > Gnome is a community-driven project through-and-though, yet it has recently come under fire for the way it has developed the latest incarnation of their desktop. Yes, because their community-driven approach to design led them down the path of reinventing the wheel: > Instead of picking existing components and giving them the final polish like Ubuntu did before, the GNOME project started developing things from scratch without any apparent reason to do so. And even worse: incompatible to existing solutions. It started with the rejection of the appindicator specification implemented by Ubuntu and KDE. At that point it was not clear to me whether the specification was broken or whether the responsible people at GNOME were just ignorant. > Then came systemd. And it started to be apparent that unfortunately it was the latter. http://www.rojtberg.net/457/gnome-project-suffering-the-nih-disease/ http://www.rojtberg.net/457/gnome-project-suffering-the-nih-... And if that's what developers want to do, great, but it probably will not result in a great desktop environment any time soon.