Ubuntu is not a democracy and nor should it be

Democracy is a damping utility: it pretty much guarantees that nobody too horrible will damage the country or organization but it also pretty much guarantees that nobody really good still can't make appropriate progress easily. Democracy is kind of the safe, average choice of how to rule a group of people.<p>A good dictator would be really effective and could do tremendous amount of good. The downside is that generally in a dictatorship, the ruler could also be an evil dictator and cause lots of damage.<p>In business, the owner is the dictator but luckily, he can only crash his own company, and people are voluntarily employed by him. Dictating what the company must do is often called the leader's vision.<p>If the vision is any good, the company will thrive. If it's bad, it will go down under.<p>However, if it's about the damn close button, we can only watch how it goes since Mr Shuttleworth has the final say and he will go up or down by his decisions. I don't understand peoples' moaning either: the buttons in Metacity are <i>configurable</i> and even if they weren't, people are not so stupid that if they want to use Ubuntu in the first place it would all break down <i>because they can't close the damn windows</i>.

It's nothing to do with democracy. It's about unjustified stubbornness over a poor design choice that will making upgrading implausible for a great deal of users.

Buttons left or right, whatever.* What annoys me is that, so far, we have heard <i>no reasoning</i> as to why the close button is <i>the third from the left</i> instead of the most outer one. It makes no sense other than covering their asses for Apple repercussions.<p>*Except, you know, having the menu bar and window control options 5px apart isn't the smartest thing you can do.

Are they still harping on about buttons on the left? I admit, from a usability point of view it's clearly a fail, but the good thing about Linux is that if you don't like it you can alter it and make a new release. Perhaps they could call it "RightHandSideBuntu: Linux for human beings who don't want to re-learn basic aspects of window behavor because of some designer's whim".

They're making a mountain out of a molehill. Someone can just build a package or a distribution variant (a la Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that overrides what people perceive to be a problem and, bam, problem solved.<p>People didn't like the brown theme either, but just <i>changed their theme once Ubuntu was installed</i>. They can do the same with this.

How did I know that this was going to be over the ridiculous button-shuffle on the window decorators: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186958" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186958</a><p>Ubuntu is the only Linux distro in the position to be able to make bold design decisions, but unfortunately the people they have making those decisions are just as mediocre as the rest of the clowns, if not worse.<p>The few times they've exercised this have been fuckups, like the focus-stealing cpu-churning auto-update popup, and now this childish theme nonsense.

The free software community benefits from free software, not from people nitpicking on the mailing list. As the T-shirt says, "Shut the fuck up and write some code."

Ah meritocracy; nice in theory, in practice it generally falls apart pretty quickly. (been there, tried it a couple of times)<p>Anyway; the problem is there is a claimed meritocracy around Ubuntu but it's a bit of a facade. A friend who is a beta tester (and very active bug poster) says it's a bit of an old boys crowd in reality. (not that it's necessarily bad thing; but I hate these sham organisations everyone builds to make it look prettier)

Thought experiment: what's the open-source analogue to market pressure that would force Canonical to reverse course?<p>The market system isn't a democracy either, except in one sense - money votes. But when the product is free, and the infrastructure for automatic updates and upgrades from a single vendor is baked in, how do users express their preferences?

<i>I trust a qualified doctor to prescribe my medicine based on what he knows.</i><p>OK, if the author refers to Mr. Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu team, I should remind him that the actual doctors behind the new changes are Mr. Steve Jobs and his team. Copying from Apple and doing it right is difficult. We should give credits to Ubuntu team for doing this right.<p>The idea of free software in my opinion is not just going with GPL and other licenses. Free software communities used to have a free culture. That's what Ubuntu lacks.<p>But since what Ubuntu actually does is building a business, what's going on is totally ok. Maybe free culture is the barrier of building a good business with free software. So if Ubuntu is taking that path...<p>"OK Ubuntu, Good Luck with that".