Comment 234 for bug 668415

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SRoesgen (s-roesgen) wrote :

@John Lea
I usually accept reasonable arguments given for decisions. And in this case I can accept that once cannot expect the launcher to be movable in the near future.

But: Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that the decision is "won't fix" and will stay "won't fix". And I had the feeling that he wanted to make very clear that we should never expect the launcher to be movable. So I am thankful for your answers and glad to hear that you yourself see a possible future of a Unity which includes a movable launcher. And as far I remember it was you, who said himself once that he wants a movable launcher himself.
Still, you should not raise too much hope. We have now a solution of a movable launcher and it needs some patches but it is there. Still there is not even the debate of including it in the default repositories. Instead one has AGAIN to add ANOTHER ppa. I hate that huge list of ppas that one has to add to Ubuntu to make some simple modifications. There is this great software center and still I have to add dozens of ppas. Why that.

On a different topic: a little bit more of honesty would be nice. (Not by you, but by the design team as a whole and by Mark Shuttleworth). Many of the arguments against a moveable launcher have become invalid during the development of the dash and the launcher itself. The only argument left now is that a moveable launcher would introduce errors.
There are more "design" issues that would be fixed by a movable launcher than there are design advantages that come to mind when thinking of a launcher that is fixed to the left edge of the screen.
So, blatantly speaking, the design decisions which made the launcher stick to the left were all simply errors. They were bad decisions. They make NO sense at all. And the fact that making a launcher movable is not possible because of bugs which would appear, the fact that giving it the flexibility that everybody in this world expects from a launcher (which you could also call a "dock") produces errors and seemingly was never considered to be configurable at all, is to me a real evidence for an absolutely wrong and bad design (decision).
So after people came up with arguments and design decisions against a movable launcher, arguments and design decisions which all have been shown to be invalid, I now really am tempted to say that a little bit of honesty would be nice. Thanks again to you, John Lea, for this honesty. But there were the others, who simply told us crap and brought forward arguments which weren't true at all and who did not even apologize for telling us crap and selling us this crap as the seemingly "true reasons" for a launcher on the left side. Nobody has said anything about the reason that the launcher should be on the same side like the BFB. A reason which obviously is now rendered irrelevant because the BFB is part of the launcher. Where are the Windicators, which were the reason for the movement of the minimize/maximze/close buttons to the left corner of the windows.
For once, I would like to hear an apology or at least an honest explanation of the design decisions which were made.