Ubuntu’s move to Unity is the best thing that ever happened to Linux

Worth noting that Android for all intents and purposes is fighting a closed, one-device (or at least one brand of device) Apple iOS. Commanding a place on desktops (not sure the relevance of this is still the same) will be arguably a different fight than on the mobile space.

Windows runs on all hardware, its a familiar albeit crappy at times interface. What tells me most that Linux as a viable desktop for non-geeks is a fairytale never going to happen is the fact that right now, apart from a select group of pc vendors, the only way for anyone non-technical to get access to a ubuntu install is to install it themselves.

It doesn't matter if its such a simple install, users are frightened to install a simple application at times.

On this note, I always find it mystifying who all these non-geeks we are trying to appeal to are, I'm all for a slicker, easier to use desktop but why not target it at the market which have stood by and held up Linux for all these years.

With Ubuntu 11, friends personally asked me how to switch back to the previous system, or to dump linux completely because the system got too slow with updates. And, sadly, that's true: the experience of the Ubuntu desktop, performance-wise, has degraded to the point of being significantly slower than windows xp or 7.

I have witnessed netbooks (decent netbooks running either android or ubuntu with unity) considered as "crap" by several non-tecnical people talking in the building, simply because they don't work "as expected" and thus being almost unuseable by them.

The way I see it, most people expect a standard windows-like interface. I've long stopped being a "go-to guy for computers" so I don't enter these discussions anymore, but that's very sad for me to realize that Ubuntu had everything two years ago for both technical users and new users, while now people simply flock away.

Even at work, I'm seriously considering to dump Ubuntu LTS on servers due to the increasing (unfixed) issues we have on large systems, mostly due to Ubuntu changes compared to debian and/or ubuntu projects such as upstart. Bugs on launchpad (let alone the crappyness that is launchpad itself) don't get fixed, but are simply "waited for" from upstream (either debian or source author).

I'm disappointed, really. Having the choice of the interface would have been so damn easy.

I've had Windows 7, Ubuntu with Gnome 2, and OSX Snow Leopard and Lion in front of her. She was ok with Windows 7...it was tolerable, but we hit our first virus soon in and I ordered it off the machine. She liked Gnome 2 better, but it took a bit of getting used. Unity was pretty straight-forward for her...she likes it very much and prefers it above all others. OS X, however, was an entirely frustrating experience. I gave her my Macbook Pro because I was using my Lenovo Ubuntu notebook far more often and felt my hard-earned Apple investment was going to waste. She gave it a fair shot but HATED it. OS X's insistence on keeping applications open in the background even after the last window is closed slowly ate up memory. If two users are logged into the system and simply running a web browser and nothing more, the system crawls...no clue why. But the absolute worst part of her experience was the completely obstinate, bizarre OS X window switching and minimizing behavior. I realize many of you are accustomed to it by now, but she still rants about the fact that command-tab won't switch between all windows, and how minimizing a window requires right-clicking the icon to find it. Anyway, I'm sure there are ways to work around this behavior, but it should give one pause when someone calls Mac OS intuitive...I'd argue it's far from it.