Ubuntu Dropped the Ball

    As a long time Ubuntu user and a Linux enthusiast I can't stress enough what a mistake Ubuntu made by forcing everyone into using the unity interface.  But luckily I don't have to, the community speaking loudly through it's actions.  Distrowatch is now reporting that Mint Linux has overtaken Ubuntu.

    It's really a shame because Ubuntu had the user base in place and was making strides to be more mainstream as a desktop operating system.  It was starting to gain a business presence.  I just don't see how they can convince business users to move to Unity.  I can see folks moving to Gnome 2, it was proven, stable, reliable and not so different that business folks would revolt.  But Unity is none of these things.  On top of it Unity is just too buggy to be used.  You see my previous post and personally I have given up on Unity and moved to Gnome 3.  To be honest I am considering giving up on Ubuntu all together.  It is just such a waste of the progress they made with Linux.  To the point that it feels like they are alienating the community hat made them popular and business that have adopted them already.  Of course this won't affect business users who are using the server release, which I suspect is the majority of business users.

    To be clear I understand that Gnome declared Gnome 2 is dead and gave us Gnome 3, which is no small departure from Gnome 2 in itself.  If they didn't want to move to Gnome 3 they had other choices than to just create a new UI.  Other UI's exist and they could have used (XFCE/KDE/etc), they could have forked and took over Gnome 2.  They could have moved to Gnome 3 and customized it (like Mint is now doing in their next release).  But I certainly feel like they had better options than Unity.

    Maybe they will realize Unity isn't what people want and correct themselves.  Maybe this won't be the undoing of Ubuntu, maybe they will revert the Unity manifesto, maybe I am way off base and Unity will catch on, confetti will fall from the skies and users will start to love it.  I think Ubuntu as a distribution was heading in the right direction prior to this Unity fiasco, so we will see where they go from here. Maybe it's time for all of the alienated Ubuntu users, like me, to try Mint or go (back) to Debian.