Comment 114 for bug 527458

Theres nothing in this comment that you haven't seen if you've already read this far, but I'm writing it because it important that our SABDFL and others know how widespread this issue is.

I first encountered this issue when i discovered that i could no longer click on Rhythmbox for the convenient minimize-to-tray functionality, and I could no longer hover to see media information. I figured it was a bug that was due to lucid being in-development, and it would soon be fixed. When I discovered that the problem was even worse with the elimination of the tooltip for the battery indicator, i started looking for the bug report. I was amazed when I arrived here and found out that this important functionality was being intentionally thrown out because a few programs might abuse it to create clutter. useful, important, easily accessible information is not 'clutter', and the new set of steps, which I must now perform to obtain the information that was previously easily available, go against everything I learned in the UI design class at my university.

To me, it is much more of a problem to loose important functionality in important applications that it is to see abused functionality in some accessory applets. (I almost wonder if Mark Shuttleworth has used the new interface in a situation where he is unsure if his battery will die in the middle of his work, on hardware where hibernate is still hit-and-miss.) However, I realize that the definitions of 'important functionality' and 'abused functionality' are different to different people, which is why the most upsetting thing to me about this is the lack of a choice. I would be OK with this change if theres was an option to go back to the old behavior, or even an assurance that no option was available yet, but someone is working on it. I might even work on it myself despite my horribly poor understanding of the inner workings of Ubuntu. However, to simply tell us that the decision from The Top is that "Its gone and thats that" is a very bad move. I used to think Ubuntu was great because it combined the customizability of Linux with the user experience of other mainstream operating systems, but this and other non-configurable changes that are forced on users by the executives in the name of progress may lead me to reconsider that opinion.

I originally came to Ubuntu from Windows because I wanted control over how my computer behaved. I was tired of The People at The Top telling me what my software could and could not do. I'm not saying Canonical is as bad as M$, but its a step in the wrong direction.

At the top of this page I've marked myself as affected because this bug-not-a-feature not only affects how i interact with my computer, but also how I view Ubuntu and the way I represent it when i recommend it to others. The Ubuntu community on launchpad is probably not as big as the Ubuntu community other places, but this may be the closest we come to a vote on this issue, and in that case every vote counts. If you feel as I do that the user should have a choice, please take the time to create an account and click the green "Does this bug affect you?" text at the top of the page to let His Benevolencey know that this bug affects you too.