One word. Audience.

Who is it for? Don’t avoid it, design to it. Enough with the mythical all and everyone.

This is how a lot of things get discovered.

It’s not how things get made or developed. But then again development isn’t creation of ideas.

Most of my friends and family are not geeks, they don’t “configure” their computers, they use them. In a simple way.
So what’s wrong with Ubuntu existing for this kind of people (basic users)?
Why don’t you use an over-geek friendly distro, if you dislike Ubuntu?

Best regards,
Johannes

No, what’s really damaging to the spirit is when a user makes the effort to go through all those options, finds what they like and sets those options as default–only to lose them\be unable to set them again as the newer versions of the desktop or software gets released. Others have mentioned the icon issue, the buttons issue, but I’m also talking about being able to do basic things like remove your username from the panel without losing the ability to shutdown the system! Or being able to use the much more accurate battstat applet instead of the buggy and inaccurate gnome-powermanager to display the amount of battery life left…

What is really difficult for a user, someone who wants to configure their systems and then work or play, or surf, etc on their computers is figuring out something that works for them and being unable to replicate that again later.

–bornagainpenguin

By the way, Eddward, you don’t actually need to use gconf-editor. You can use the command line gconftool to set it if you want, and this can be scripted.

I like my cursor in forms to blink so I know which field is active. I hate it when the cursors in all my terminals blink because I always know where the cursor is, I use many terminals and all the blinking is annoying. A decision was made to remove the blink option from the terminal and to use the blink option of text boxes. The only fix involved a patch and recompile.

I used to be able to use my right mouse button in terminals and other programs to mark the end of a cut-n-paste selection. Now the right button is almost always a menu, even in apps that don’t need one like the terminal window. There used to be options to get that behavior back. I haven’t been able to find it recently without going back to the old Xterm and giving up unicode.

I used to have sound that worked great using a very efficient multi-channel, hardware-mixing sound card. Pulse audio will not work with that card and there is no way to remove Pulse audio from Ubuntu with out breaking sound in at least some things that used to work before Pulse entered the picture. And even then you also have to remove the base Ubuntu-desktop package.

I used to be able to have the windowing system open my first window in the top left corner of the screen and then tile the rest of the windows intelligently after that. Now the first window gets opened about an inch & a half from the top of the screen and two inches from the side. If I place that window where I had wanted it in the first place all the other windows are placed fine. Otherwise I’m left with a bunch of wasted screen space.

I also prefer to not have windows jump to the top just because I clicked in them. This was a common Xwindows behavior for decades. It turns I *can* still get the behavior I want. First I have to install gconf-editor. Then I have to edit the gnome registry and look for a click-to-raise setting to turn it off. But if I want to copy my config to a multiple machines, I have to manual install gconfig-editor on each one since I have no idea how to backup just the configuration for one app from the registry. I’ve just discovered tonight there is a file .gconf/apps/metacity/general/%gconf.xml with that setting and several others I’ve never touched. I have no idea if I’m even allowed to modify that file by hand much less move it between machines.

I have to admit it. I’m way past my days of idle exploration. I just want to be able to work in the way that be very efficient for me for over a decade and a half. I’m tired of losing that ability because someone else has decided I should not need things to work in a given way any more. I don’t want to hear what is easiest for a new user. I haven’t been a new user for a long time. I just want to be a comfortable user. I don’t want to how things are done on some other operating system. If I wanted that, I’d be on some other operating system.

I hate to say it, but parts of the Open Source community are seeming to be very in favor of change and very against choice. Gnome, Fedora & Ubuntu feel like they are at the forefront of it. I know there’s Kubuntu and Xubuntu but I’ve been reading the blogs enough to see that they keep getting broken in terrible ways by changes in the main Ubuntu repository by developers who don’t care to coordinate the sub-projects.

Choice has always been a good thing about UNIX. You could tailor it to your needs. Open Source in general and Linux specifically had always been better because there was even more choice. UNIX’s slogan should have been “We’re more flexible that you are.” Linux could have followed up with “We’re more flexible than that!” But these day, it seem that if you want to run with something even close the mainstream without default options, you have to give up that choice or accept that you have to make your configuration decisions prior to compiling your own version of the software.

Edd

Example: The new notification system you speak of removed the ability to acknowledge a notification to get it out of the way once you have seen it. They have also removed the ability for users to interact with those notifications.

Example: Moved the window close/max/min buttons from the right side to the wrong(left) side with no easy/intuitive way for the average user to put it back.

Example: Not ubuntu’s call exactly, but the recent gnome decision to remove menu icons and again, no user friendly way to put them back.

My specific example was the limitation of functionality of libnotify without a coherent solution for applications that required interaction. Their solution was to leave it up to the application developer. This will result in the same sort of mess that they are trying to clean up with the indicator applets. When we tried to point this fact out, the list went private.

I have the greatest respect for the Ayatana initiative and hope that they achieve their goals, but I’m afraid some of their design decisions may splinter Ubuntu and Gnome if they are not careful.