Comment 55 for bug 668415

Just to point it out:

On 2010-12-16, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> When you make a comment like
this, you come across as petulant because YOUR preferred idea is not
being pursued - take the trouble to participate for a while, and you'll
have a more balanced view.

I am not quite sure, but according to the 43 votes one might point out that this all is not just only MY "preferred idea". According to 43 votes it might be not time to reconsider the "movement of the launcher" idea in its entirety. It might be time for some official statement to tell us (users) if there is now at least the discussion to make a moveable launcher a standard feature for Oneiric.

To quote now Bryan Seigneur's post (2011-04-14):
>None of my users are technical enough to have a login on this site, but they are ALL going to tell me that Narwhaal with Unity is unacceptable because of this.

That is the point. Exactly that is the point. If you get 43 votes for a feature change, or rather for a wish/suggestion to change something, the number of votes might not sound to be very high. But it is actually a high number: most users who would wish the launcher to be positioned at the bottom or the right will not have a Launchpad account. And they will not create an account. They are not technically versed enough or interested enough. 43 votes represents a high number of people if it comes to the putting forward proposals or suggestions or wishes for a technical change (or at least a reevaluation of policy) .

I always said it is good that Ubuntu/Canonical has a Benevolent Dictator like Apple has its Steve Jobs; a project needs a visionary to make progress. And I still think that it is better to have one person to make a final decision; many people that make decisions might appear democratic but a production process is nothing that should be decided in democratic ways and means; there is the need for one man to make the final decisions. BUT this one man should at least listen to other people and if there is a high representation of voters that unanimously vote for one feature, then one should reconsider the own opinion and should show the character strength to admit that there is a strong opposition against a decision that one has made.

Unity became better every single day. I really started to love it -- despite the fact that I still cannot install it on my Dell Precision 4500 without the nomodeset option. But on my other two systems it works perfectly. And I love the feature set and the way it has developed. But those changes during the last week, that convinced me the most, thatUnity is -- according to my opinion -- heading towards the right direction, those changes were the simple ones that gave some control back to the user: the gnome-controlcenter is easily reachable for everyone, the sitze of the launcher can be configureable, there is again a possibility to launcher several instances of one application (if it makes sense for the given application), there is a method to configure the way how to hide/reveal the launcher etc...
These features, though small, are the important ones. This is not too much freedom for the user to make the unity experience wholly inconsistent but it still offers enough freedom to configure the system in accordance with your own taste and wishes.

Unity is becoming a great asset for the Linux world, for the software world and for Ubuntu/Canonical. In my opinion it making a journey to a destination point which will put Canonical in a position to really challenge Apple and Microsoft on the Desktop and on Consumer products (in foreseeable time). But still there are features that have to be improved. And taking too much freedom away from the user (at least from a user working on his own desktop, which is still a user's virtual home) is the wrong way. At least the basic elements should be configurable.

Sebastian