Comment 44 for bug 438536

Well, Mr. Shuttleworth comments on this as well:

"A guiding principle in Ayatana is to *reduce* customisation, not
increase it.

Why?

First, we get much better collaboration and communication, and much
better testing, if everyone is looking at the same experience. We found
this with Ubuntu itself - we reduced the default application install set
to a single app for each major function: one browser, one mail client,
one word processor. That was controversial at the time - most
distributions were competing on HOW MANY apps they could install in one go.

One of the great failings of the community approach is that it attracts
folks who like to customise the environment to the point where it is
"perfect for them", at which point they stop caring about the
environment that the typical user sees. They run "the latest code from
CVS" so they don't care about bugs in the stable version. They swap out
components for things that are more interesting and then they have no
visibility AT ALL on the pieces a new user sees.

We will not make that mistake.

In Ayatana, we'll take an opinionated stance, and we'll apply some
common principles to the design process, and we'll live with the results.

I have no interest whatsoever in making it possible for anybody to have
any environment they want - we already have that. I'm interested in
driving forwards to build a default out of the box experience which is
as good as we can make it for the new, consumer user. Most people on
this list are NOT a new, consumer user, so I'm afraid you will have to
work hard to think from that perspective if you want your ideas to
resonate here.

Mark"

The mailing list is having slight conflicts on some of his claims, but he does make some good points (as well as some I disagree with). I still don't agree with him, though.