I'm also going to add one more comment. It is easy to criticize Canonical for
what they have done wrong. However it is a good thing that companies and
developers are taking risks. It would be better if there was less copying
going on for changes that were unproven though.
What we need is a combination of risk takers (It is fair to say Canonical has
been doing that) and stability (Trisquel's new model). One without the other
is also bad. Somebody has to develop new tools, refine them, etc before they
can be deployed for the masses.
Somebody has to push out theoretical improvements and take risks of a
backlash. While Unity was a bad idea it took someone time to develop it, test
it, and realize this. On paper I'm sure it seemed like a great idea. I think
there are some features/elements which are better. Had they been implemented
slightly different they might even work great. There are some aspects of it
that are better than Gnome 2. For example it is much harder for novice users
to muck things up.
With Gnome 2 for instance we found 90% of novice users would delete there
toolbars and be unable to get them back. When 99% of users leave things as is
the adaptability features are just creating problems. Lets lock those
features down just a bit.
