I, and I believe many others, have long used and admired Ubuntu for its unrelenting pragmatism. It's long been the distro of getting stuff done. It's had an agressive release cycle, and its had a great focus on usability.<p>However, this is going to be the release that's going to force everyone showing Ubuntu off to friends/coworkers to say "oh yeah, the buttons are on the left, yeah that's stupid, I agree but I can fix that" <i>clickity command line clack</i>.<p>What's most disappointing is the utter failure of the UI team to communicate why they've done this, which is insulting. Yes, they've said "we've had meetings and thought about it!", but no reasons other than 'we like it', have been disclosed to my knowledge. Ubuntu's made decisions like this before, but never one so fundamental.<p>All in all, I've been left with a bitter taste in my mouth from both the stupidness of the decision, and the stupidness of not handling the PR crisis that this is (and this is a PR crisis).<p>I understand it's Shuttleworth's baby, and he can do what he wants, but if decisions like this keep up I'll be looking for greener pastures.
Both root comments so far complain about the UI changes - I really don't get it. I've switched between OSX, Win, Linux, and the button issue is trivial (OSX has top left buttons). I couldn't give two shits about whether to yank the mouse to the top right or top left to close a window. Mostly I use alt-space or ctrl-w/q for window control anyway. Foreign languages have slightly different keyboard layouts and it takes about 30 seconds to adjust (motor memory ftw).<p>What I care about are the fundamentals - hardware (sound, brightness, video driver support, battery life). The availability of quality software and ease of installing/removing it (cleanly) - mostly great.<p>The same people who learn arcane vi/emacs/cli syntax complain about moving their mouse to the opposite corner - please!<p>I've been running Ubuntu 9.10 exclusively for a while now, and besides hardware support issues (nvidia driver crashing X), shitty sound (midi, and the kde vs. gnome way of handling sound), and Adobe Flash/Air suckage I haven't had any complaints.<p>Win7 feels far worse. In fact, just install kubuntu and be done with it. UI-wise: KDE => like Window, Gnome => like OS X - pick your poison.