Mint 15 freshens Ubuntu's bad bits

I have recently returned to Ubuntu with version 13.04 and to be honest I think a lot of the angst towards Unity stems back to the original release back at version 11.

It is now incredibly easy to use, navigate and it is also very fast.

Do people like bashing Ubuntu just to gain popularity?

> incredibly easy to use.

It is?

I've been using the Window basic layout, or some facsimile thereof, since W95. Intuitive? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The point is, it's been refined to weed out the shortcomings and, more importantly, I know it. Does Unity work. Not for me. Why? Cuz I DON"T KNOW IT!!

Near as I can tell, Conanical changing the DE landscape is no different than Microsoft reshuffling all the menus and changing the names, but not their actual function, in an effort to appear new. All it has accomplished is costing users wasted time re-learning something they already knew in exchange for something they didn't ask for.

> Do ppl like bashing ubuntu....?

Probably no more than having to relearn something they already knew, but it seems a natural reaction from people flummoxed by the unfamiliar for no good reason other than to gratify some over sized egos.

At least Microsoft was smart enough to re-establish the start button convention, if only for a short while. Conanical, in its arrogance, will dismissively continue to alienate some users. Gee ....jes like Microsoft used to do. ;)

> Conanical, in its arrogance, will dismissively continue to alienate some users

Agreed. But they're doing so for a simple reason. They've failed to achieve their goals with the standard desktop, and think (perhaps correctly) that the future lies elsewhere, in mobile devices. So they trying to reach that new market and establish themselves there. In their mind, doing so means abandoning standard desktop users.

Still being a standard desktop user, and there not being much chance of that changing, I honestly don't care whether they succeed or not.

Quoting:Do people like bashing Ubuntu just to gain popularity?

In all fairness, most of the "Ubuntu bashing" when the Unity desktop first came out was done by Ubuntu users. Many Mint users are former Ubuntu users, from what I understand. I have never used the Unity desktop, and I don't "bash" it, for the same reason. I don't bash the Windows8 interface because I've never used it.

Personally, I don't care whether Microsoft and Canonical continue to alienate their user bases. But I may start "ksh'ing" something soon.

@gary_newell

> Do people like bashing Ubuntu just to gain popularity?

Not really, but I think that many of us REALLY DO GET IT(!) that you and other die-hard fanbois keep trying to promote Baboontu even while Linux Mint CONTINUES to get more popular at its parent distro's expense.

2c

i don't know how having recently returned to ubuntu makes one a die-hard fanboy. if he were, he'd never have left. i had the opportunity to try ubuntu 12.4 at a customers recently, and while having to familiarize myself with the interface, i found it ok to use. not incredibly easy, but not any harder than the gnome 2 i got on my own machine.

as notbob says, it depends on your willingness to learn a new interface. that's everyone's choice. whenever i get lost in a GUI i just return to my good old friend, the commandline. now that's an interface that hasn't changed in decades.

disclaimer: i am a user of the original NeXTStep. i like big buttons. and my favourite shell is fish ( fishshell.com ) which is neither sh nor csh compatible.

greetings, eMBee.

I'm thinking that fishshell.org should be fishshell.com . Not 100% sure though...

Quoting:I'm thinking that fishshell.org should be fishshell.com .

Yep. Definitely fishshell.com.

Fish's H#ll?!?

yes, it's fishshell.com, sorry, old memories. it used to be .org and i never go to the website...

thanks for the corrections!

greetings, eMBee.

Personal preferences aside, a metric which speaks to how good, or not, a desktop environment is would be its adoption by other distros. You could describe Unity as having widespread appeal, if you define "widespread appeal" as being adopted by 10 -- count 'em, 10 -- distros other than Ubuntu.

If you're keeping score at home, here's the list (with DistroWatch ranking in parentheses): DreamStudio (49), The People's Republic of China's Ubuntu Kylin (105), Hybride Linux (108), Vinux (110), Leeenux (165); Bio-Linux (174), Ubuntu Christian Edition (188), Oz Unity (195), iQuinixOS (261), and Baltix GNU/Linux (274).

Bashing anything doesn't server anyone. It is out of style and no longer cool and ought to stop.

Justified criticism is a different story and ought to be constructive.