Hey again, I can understand where people from but all those comments overlook something easy and it goes down to that: "we don't have enough developpers to reply to every bug report, explain every change which is done, and talk to every community members in Ubuntu", the community is just an order or magnitude over the design,hackers base we have.


> But, looking at the vast majority of the comments on these bugs, the substance of the complaint seems entirely different: a strong sense of being left behind by Ubuntu.

Right, we are sorry about that but it's like any organisation (you can take governements as an example), while people in charge care (or should care, no need to sidetrack in politics ;-) they can talk to every single person they represent, it's not bad willing, it's just that one person can talk to millions of people individually


> It's not that you're saying "we can't fix this," it's that you're saying, quite explicitly: "We won't; and we won't accept patches; and we won't acknowledge the underlying problems; and we won't offer alternative solutions; and we won't tell you what our plans are, if any, that disallow this; and we won't tell you why."

Can you point to a bug where that has been said? I'm reading hundred of bugs every and I can say it's not what happen. Often design use "wontfix" saying that they ack there is an issue but it's not one that can be adressed in the coming cycles seeing the backlog we already have and the manpower to work on it. You can take the "dash screen should be customizable" as an example (bug #885738) where John took the time to explain:

"Given the time and resource constraints we have to work with, and also because 12.04 is a LTS (for LTSs we try to avoid introducing major new functional areas), it will not be possible to build a great Dash home configuration story in this cycle. However if (and it is a big *if*) we get the time/resource to look at this area in the future, we will review this thread and use all the valuable input and ideas yourself and others have provided to help to kick off the design process."


> In GNOME 3, they can close a bug by saying "Well, this is outside of our vision, so it's better handled as an extension." And now they're even actively endorsing these extensions, with an impressively friendly site.

Let's not get sidetracked on that, it's not fair to judge the Unity project as not open because its code based has not beeing designed to be modifiable at runtime the way gnome-shell has. While it's great and some users will love it, it also has drawbacks (talk to the mozilla guys about how much complains they are getting about firefox stability which are not due to bugs in firefox but in third party code, having a way to "hack" your shell is also not a replacement for having a good usable experience by default)

> Look at all those commits! But, it's doomed to fail, and we all know it: he will not be able to always keep his fork well-merged with the Unity trunk. Forks are great in many cases, but this is exactly that situation where you want to keep the main binary intact and allow for extensions. But, Golikov did not stop at the "won't fix". He saw a community need, and stepped up to the plate on his own time.

Right, there is for sure good work and great energy in the community and there is no doubt Unity could be open to extra changes, with an infinite manpower we would fix any bug and support any options requested, in real world the manpower is very far to be infinite and an agenda has to be set, work has to be done in order until we get a least a solid basis, they it will be easier to review extra suggestions

> I've been following the multiple-monitor issue as closely as I can as an outsider, and I still have absolutely no idea how Unity is going to solve it, if at all, for 12.04. 

The multimonitor work in 12.04 is mostly bug fixing work, you can follow a good part of what is coming on this blueprint!
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-multi-monitor

There is probably a bunch of unity ux bugs also on the topic

> You originally closed the bug for the movable Launcher because you said you wanted to keep the Dash button close to the Launcher. Since they are now united, it seems that your original reason is gone. But, nobody has told *us* what the new reason is for the Launcher to stay on the left. 

Right, it has been shipped with the bfb on the panel for one cycle, user testing and design iteration moved it to the launcher. It's not that nobody *told* you, it's that nobody know,knew exactly. 
Design is a dynamic process, it requires experiments and iterations, you learn from trying things and see how users react, that tweak it to fix the issues you spotted with the first round. 

> What is this "vision"? 

Is there a vision? Why do you assume there is one which is just not communicated to you? Design has ideas on where they want to go but they didn't "study" enough the field there and experiment enough to have a "vision" yet, they are still in the process of thinking and playing with the ideas to see where to go

> And, nobody told *us* what people with multiple monitors (or speakers of right-to-left languages) should do. 

Right, nobody knows, how could they tell you? That's something known to be broken and needing work and which is scheduled to be addressed this cycle, there is no bad willing there, just again lot to do and very few people to do it, all topics can't be tracked at the same time, things will come in due course over time

> This, of course, reminded me of when Ubuntu moved the window decoration button to the left, opaquely talking about a "vision" that was never elaborated. And that was the point where I suddenly realized the real, endemic problem, and opened this bug about community engagement.

That one has nothing to do with the current unity design, it's something Mark decided on using his sabdfl rights, let's not use that special case in this discussion

> I would suggest that the 15/16 fix rate is due not only to the diligence of the programmers, but also to the care by which the Ubuntu community opens these bugs on Launchpad, tends to them, responds, etc.

The reason I looked at those stats, and the bottom line is to show that bugs get fixed, works get done, and Unity designers, hackers and packagers do care about the community and spend hours every day to interact with the community. 

> I participate in many free software projects, and of course much of that work is in bug triaging, but a lot of effort goes to communicating with the opener of the bug. (Some would call that effort "wasted," but that's exactly the attitude that I'm trying to fight here.) I can honestly say that I'm impressed by how well, on a whole, bugs are *opened* in Ubuntu.

I'm not sure what your point is, we do communicate on bugs, I spend tens of hours every month triaging bugs, and that include commenting on them with rationals, explaining changes, pointing issues that seems like we should fix to the hackers working on the code, pointing bugs we should milestone to the release manager, pointing design issues to the designers. Do you say that the work I and other are doing is not enough? Well I'm sorry but for one triager,hacker,design there is probably 10 000 users, do you think I don't care because I'm able to have a close conversation with only 15 users a week and then I "ignored" the remaining 9 985 other ones?

It would be good if the community would stop assuming bad willing from other community members and players (including Canonical employees) where the issue is mostly that the Ubuntu community is just too dynamic for us to be able to keep up with everything which is asked or said