Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.
So Ubuntu is for people who aren't willing to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, but are willing to edit /etc/default/grub ? I've run (K)Ubuntu for six years, coming from Debian, and Slack before that. I don't want to tinker, and I'm not even that picky on my desktop environment as long as it looks reasonably good and I can setup some hotkeys. But any distribution has to be serviceable, or you wind up with MS Windows where the fix for all problems is forum folklore, and failing that, reinstall.
And furthermore, why would I recommend Ubuntu to new users knowing that I'm not going to be able to help them as easily? A bit of an exaggeration right now, but an inevitable result of the path Ubuntu is on. A user friendly distribution should work with existing conventions, not discard them by creating a whole new layer on top.
The advantage of using Ubuntu even for "power users" is the level of support available.
Since it has such a large share of the Linux desktop market it's easy to find solutions for most of your common Ubuntu problems.
I don't really want to go back to the days when everyone used a different distribution where if you had an obscure problem and used google for a solution you would come to a page describing how to fix it in another distro with a completely different package management system and where the contents of /etc were completely different.
I remember posting questions on the forums of various distributions relating to problems I was having just seeing them go unreplied to in perpetuity.
How long will Ubuntu have this user base if they keep pissing people off? Is it that hard to give the users who want the old shell in its usable form what they want?
Benevolent Dictator is what Bill Gates somewhat pretended to be for years.
I'm not sure of Shuttleworth's credentials as the benevolent dictator/UI designer.
He made his money selling SSL certificates in large quantities, I don't really think he is a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
He reminds me more of the type of entrepreneur who makes his money then decides to buy an English Football club and run it into the ground.
That's possibly unkind though, there was enough good work going into Ubuntu providing good support and sorting out allot of the common Linux Desktop issues to award him some credit, but I don't really see Ubuntu as any kind of creative juggernaut.
Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop.
Windows 8 is doing the same, and MS's TV ads trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.
Maybe they are right, and the future of mass computing is in entertainment consumption and not productive work. Maybe the dream of a popular powerful OS is dead. Maybe it's time for power users to return to being a.nich
The Bill Gates comparison was meant to illustrate the perception people had of him. Originally, (after his rant about people stealing his Basic for the... IMSI? Name escapes me) he was perceived as trying to do the things that the common man wanted. Remember the "Information at your fingertips" marketing crap?
Shuttleworth started out the same way, except with Linux instead of DOS/Windows, and now he's insisting on making unpopular changes because he thinks he can see the future. Remember when Gates believed there was no future in the Internet?
Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop.
Windows 8 is doing the same, and trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.
