Comment 778 for bug 532633

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 15:09, Mark Shuttleworth
<email address hidden> wrote:
> On 23/07/10 13:18, Martin Wildam wrote:
>> the Ubuntu team is causing separation and
>> not uniting forces which would be so important for the whole Linux
>> community.
> I'd like to hear your justification for that statement. We've:
>  - built a bug tracker that explicitly lets us share bugs and fixes with
> other distributions and upstreams (and is still the only open source
> comprehensive hosting platform)
>  - consistently invited people from other distributions (debian, red
> hat, suse) to our conference, even sponsoring them
>  - supported multiple efforts to converge on open standards across
> desktop environments and distributions

Don't get me wrong please! - I was really not talking about the
infrastructure and about your community activities! The whole
launchpad is awesome very effective KISS software - Participating in
the Ubuntu community is a lot more pleasureful for me than e.g. in
Fedora/redhat world (at least my experience).

I was talking about decisions like the positioning of the buttons.
This and some other decisions have been taken without coordinating
with the community. I read a lot of Linux related blogs and listen to
a lot of Linux related podcasts. The vast majority of people is
definitely agains decisions like this - changing window control
buttons. I do consider myself as a GTD focus person and mouse miles
driven vastly increased (not just because I was first moving right and
then left only after discovering that the buttons are not there any
more. ;-) )

> You're entitled to your opinions, but simply repeating something you
> heard (potentially from a competitor) is a poor way to form or shape
> opinions.

Again, I was not talking about the general interaction with the
community or the service in general!

I was talking about a few design decisions that have been taken
without really considering the opinion of the community. And I am not
just repeating what I have heard or read elsewhere - it is my very own
experience that I only get confirmed when readin/listening on the web.
I am trying hard to spread the word for Ubuntu and my testing and
intallations done for friends, I do in the nights when family sleeps
and all other work is done. I face a lot of potential new end users
and I am working in IT business for about 20 years (mostly as software
developer), so I think I have some experience regarding usability.

And it is not, that I am not flexible: If you can give me something on
the free space at the Window border that I find awesome useful, I am
willing to adapt. That said, I am quite sure that the new feature
could also perfectly go to the left so the minimize, maximize and
close buttons could remain where they have ever been. And: Why not
waiting with that change until the new feature is availble?

With the current situation I do face either different themes design
broken because they got hit in the cold with the change in 10.04 - oh
and as we are talking about 10.04: It is definitely the worst idea
introducing such experiments with an LTS - I am far from being alone
with this opinion!

But let me come to a very positive end of my reply: I am very happy
about the fact that you are personally here - never ever would I
expect Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison to
personally read and respond to my feedback - so thumbs up for you!

--
Martin Wildam