There just isn't any legitimate reason to claim that GNOME Shell is
"horrible" or "terrible". It's just different.
Have to disagree.
Unity/Gnome 3 broke a number of standards and principles for no good reason.
The most important one is that GUI standards were pretty much universal,
whether you used OSX or Windows or Linux, certain aspects were reliably
similar and so one didn't have to spend time figuring out non-intuitive
methods. Gnome3 and Unity threw this out of the window.
To subject an existing user base (particularly one that was so happy with the
previous incarnations), to such a huge and stupid change was absurd (if it
used to take one click and now it takes three, that's not good design that's
arrogance on the behalf of the designers). The Gnome devs have been dragging
Gnome from a decent level of usability into childish nosense, step by step,
for some years. Every new version had more functionality stripped out, for no
good reason - not as a result of thousands of confused users, but because
they, as designers, had the power and couldn't resist using it. Rather like
spiteful children given a complicated toy going on to wreck it bit by bit. It
very much appeared to go hand in hand with the all round dumbing down that
has pervaded pretty much every aspect of society for the last15-20 years.
Canonical seems to want to distance themselves from Linux in general and make
out that they have some sort of unique product. They don't. They have the
work of a lot of other people, given freely, to humanity as a whole, in the
name of freedom, onto which they have bolted a series of badly designed bits
of nonsense, over which they then sneered at everyone who tried to disagree.
If this is "community" then I have to say I'm disappointed - when a minority
imposes changes on an unwilling majority and is nasty to anyone who
disagrees, it's no longer a community but more of a dictatorship. Again, very
typical of the way society is going in general. Very corporate, very inhuman,
very arrogant.
Then we have the various areas where backend configuration system have been
over-complicated with successive versions.
So, to recap, you personally think that Gnome3 and Unity are acceptable.
That's fine. I don't and a lot of other people don't and I don't appreciate
being told that I have no legitimate reasons for doing so. I think I have
more legitimate reasons for not liking it than you do for liking it and
throwing around psychological diagnoses is cheap. I have no problem with
switching between Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, enlightenment, blackbox, fluxbox and
windowmaker, so don't talk to me about "baby duck syndrome" as that's a poor
justification for your judgment.
None of this is to deny a design team's right to say "ok, time for something
completely different". It's to point out that the changes introduced were
introduced badly, were explained badly and there was altogether too much
sneering and selfrighteousness from those in favour of the change.
No matter - the community responded as it always does and now we have Mate
and Cinnamon.
By way of example - I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a couple of computers in a
care home. There was no opportunity to take the residents through why windows
had disappeared and been replaced, so I left a text file on the desktops with
a short paragraph explaining why they'd changed, with my phone number. A few
weeks later, having heard nothing, I asked how things were going "oh, they
love it, no problems at all" I was told. Canonical threw that intuitiveness
away when they changed to Unity as did Gnome when they changed to version 3
and that, for Linux as a whole, is a crying shame.
