Comment 51 for bug 882274

I have effectively abandoned Ubuntu as a result of Unity. I have been a log time converter of friends and family and EVERY person I updated to unity dislikes it immensely. I have moved back to debian proper and have stopped promoting Ubuntu.

I don't post here often but I lurk. I do feel that Ubuntu devs are looking at users outside of the current user base almost exclusively. I don't feel that any attention is given to the 20m or so people out there using the product.

There is a truth that cannot be overlooked. The existing users are your 'dealers' or ambassadors. They are the ones to lure future users in. How to get from 20m users to 200m users? Certainly don't abandon the first 20m, you will lose your sales force.

I like the dash concept ('task bar' in the common language), I just don't think the current execution is great. I have been moving my task bar/launcher to the left edge forever (gentoo days, circa 2002, fluxbox) and am happy with this move. My issue with unity is first of all performance, which compared to a classic gnome panel, xfce, or windows 7, is sluggish. I have seen unity on no less than 100 computers so this is not a hardware specific thing, this is universal. Secondly, there MUST be the ability to customize it to some degree. OSX being the lease customizable, still is must better than unity in this regard.

and so back to the core issue. There have been hundreds of suggestions that are squashed with prejudice and the topic abandoned. GREAT suggestions. Not massive, unreasonable wants, but real, obvious gaps in the product.

So, this is canonical's game. they can choose to take the suggestions or not. I am not angry, I don't feel ripped off. But I exercise my right to use something else. What is my impact? probably not huge, but I do own the largest pro-linux computer service and sales shop in my town of 200k people.