I need a new distro
I'm hitting the escape key. As an Ubuntu user since Gutsy Gibbon, I've been a keen fan of the distro, until the last year or so. Its been suitable for a range of requirements, from a PC for a 7 year old up to power user professional use.
Ubuntu was the most sanely configured distro I have tried. However over the last 18 months an increasing number of irritations have crept in. The awful notifications that pop up, cannot be canceled and cannot be responded to by clicking on them, window buttons in the wrong place followed by the removal of the % indication from the battery notification, all retrograde steps. It seems that the premature forcing of Unity upon the community is just symptomatic of the increasing arrogance of Canonical in telling me how I should use my computer. Additionally on the same hardware set the Ubuntu UI has appeared to be becoming increasingly less responsive, as Canonical appear to have become less responsive to the community.
I agree that the desktop OS should be unobtrusive to the end user, who should only have to deal with applications. It has to improve to stay/become relevant to ordinary users (in that respect the iPad and Android are showing the way). Unity, or a later derivation of it, perhaps running on Wayland, may well be the answer for a general purpose laptop, tablet or PC, but in its current form it should have been released along side a more conservative Gnome 2 version, until it has been tried and tested enough by real users.
Hopefully Ubuntu will once again become a sane distribution, after all Canonical has done a fantastic job until recently, in the mean time I'm looking around for a workable alternative to moving to 11.04. I'll either have to move back to the last LTS or more likely to another Debian derivative or maybe even Suse.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
