Comment 70 for bug 882274

@Mark

Many of us came to Ubuntu from other distros seeing a vital combination of two components:
- A viable desktop experience,
- The offer of Long Term Stable.

I can only speak for the folks who introduced me to Ubuntu and the folks I've brought with me, but we are confused: We'd tied that LTS notion with forward-going Ubuntu support for a Linux alternative to Win/Mac on the desktop.

However: The direction and changes of 11.x *suggest* to us that Ubuntu is swapping from desktop to sub-desktop focus for it's primary distribution.

Let me put it as succinctly as I can: to many of us outside of Cannonical it seems like you've done this:

$ cd /pub/cannonical/ubuntu-spins
$ ls -d ubuntu-default
ubuntu-default -> desktop-spin
$ ln -fs netbook-spin ubuntu-default
$ rm ubuntu-netbook # redundant now

And we're trying to figure out if the next step is

$ rm -rf desktop-ubuntu
or
$ ln -fs desktop-spin desktop-ubuntu

I also understand that you're shifting focus to branded sales of desktops, but anyone who has a non-boxed/branded desktop is likely to have just ever-so slightly unusual of a configuration of hardware. If Unity is to omit any configuration that allows for adaptation to hardware/locality configurations, then such a user is not target audience and should be made aware and/or directed to a "power user" spin or something.

At heart here is the question of: Is the Unity philosophy "all options are bad" or is there a line? Can I tell it what language I speak? Can I tell it to render text right-to-left? Can I tell it which side of the screen is my natural anchor, not just for text but for the launch bar? Can I tell it to use high-contrast colors because my sight is impaired? Can I tell it what colors to use because I have color blindness? Can I customize the color of every line, widget, character, use-case and time of year?

If you can create policies to answer these questions, I think you have a great opportunity (regardless of the specific answers to the issues of my own specific interest) for Unity, because arbitrary limits on configurability in a device are equally as bad as too few or too many.