Ubuntu and the great button debate

[reed9]

So this thread over here got me thinking about Ubuntu and the intense criticism that is happening over this button placement thing.

When I first read the webupd8 article, I thought, eh, who the heck cares, and moved along...until running into this craziness here: fewt@blog:~$ _: Bye Ubuntu, it could have been fun .. but it wasn't

I am flabbergasted over the rancor that has developed over some friggin' buttons. I understand, bigger picture, community input, Ubuntu not a democracy, yada yada. But this all seems blown incredibly out of proportion.

Here's what I don't get. Almost no distro is run as a democracy. I mean, the people who make the distro are always the final arbiters. Shuttleworth saying Ubuntu is not a democracy doesn't seem like a big revelation to me. Plus, it's open source, they can change it however they want. Isn't that the point?

Seems to me, if Canonical and Ubuntu wanted to radically change the whole look and feel of the desktop, or abandon the desktop metaphor altogether, that's their prerogative. I mean, no one is screaming that Moblin doesn't look like any other distro out there.

The analogous scenario I'm imagining is this: If Apple suddenly open-sourced OSX now, people would be dancing in the streets. No one would complain that it's deviated too much from traditional BSD or Unix. If Apple always had it open sourced, and made frequently releases over the years, each just a little different from BSD, with occasional noticeable changes, I think people would have been in an uproar whenever something they had become used to changed. Let Canonical make Ubuntu what it wants. If they want to fork the whole darn thing away from upstream, kernel and all, fine, great, let them. As long as their code is under an open source license, I don't give a damn and I support their right to do it.

Also, I'm really sick of the argument I keep reading that 90% of people use Windows, and Windows has the buttons on the right, and how dare Ubuntu alienate all those potential Windows converts. No, no cloning Windows. No chasing the Redmond dragon. That's silly. Plus, again, it's some friggin' buttons.

[GNU-Fan]

Ubuntu appears to outsiders as predominately community driven. "From humans for humans" etc. At least this is the impression I always have had.

Maybe some people like the blog author are simply too disappointed if they find out that's not the case. Hence the very emotional reaction.

[Freston]

Quote taken from here (clicky)

(...) Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely,
and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options
there. It's much easier to do that if we make this change now. I
appreciate that it's an emotive subject, and apologise for the fact that (...)

Seems reasonable enough.


It's more than just a GUI change, they are trying to create space to include new options. Might even be interesting

[elija]

Yeah... I'm not talking about normal users who will move the buttons wherever they want. But the new users who (those coming from Windows) will be very annoyed to have the buttons on the left and they will look for an option everywhere but they won't find it.

I don't care who this person is, even if he's a regular here

It seems to me that you are arguing the case that Windows users are incapable of learning anything new and frankly, that attitude amonst Linux advocates will drive more people away than moving a few buttons around!

Most Windows users are intelligent people who are able and willing to learn new things and will find the left aligned buttons with only a moments puzzlement.

As an ex-Windows and now Ubuntu user, I strongly resent the implication of stupidity from someone who appears to be nothing more than an elitist prick who actually struggles with the concept of buttons being in a different place!

Some things just make me angry and I can't stop myself :P