Comment 120 for bug 882274

I'm just an Ubuntu user (been one for 3 and a half years) who believes in the "Debian's arrow" and its philosophy and wants to see free software everywhere, and I would like to add that contrarily to what some people have been saying I am one of those who think that keeping Compiz and going for Unity are the best things that have ever happened to Ubuntu. Unity is the sole reason I upgraded from 9.10 to 11.04 and keep upgrading, and it made my brother get interested in Ubuntu too. It's not just the eye candy, they made me much more productive. I'm really glad we didn't get stuck with Gnome Shell like the other distros did. I love the direction Ubuntu's heading and I'm looking forward to Precise.

I would like to comment on this subject because I find it sad that Allison's post #81 is being ignored. Allison has a very important point for this discussion: it's both sides of the community who need to engage in a more healthy way, and we already got people from both sides trying to do that.

It's easy to say that the developers should get a tougher skin, but that's not something easy (or desirable) to do. Some unsatisfied users are not trying to get a tougher skin in face of what they perceive as harsh answers from the design team, so why should the developers do that? That's not a realistic request. We need to ask for politeness, not for tougher skins. When we are aggressive to someone, we should expect at least the same level of aggressiveness. We're all humans who have trouble keeping a cool head even when trying really hard to. It's naive to expect otherwise.

We should recognize that things are getting better. The UDS decision of focusing on power users and allowing more customizability is a huge step forward to settle this matter. There's increased responsiveness of the design team in some bugs, and even in this bug report we can see progress in the answers. I really don't like the facts that one single person can override at will decisions made by the teams if they don't fit their personal view and that the community isn't included in the making of these decisions, but post #110 really makes sense. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't do everything, specially things outside the blueprints. Sebastian's statistics do show that they do a lot for us. The power user community needs to be more comprehensive about the limitations of the design team and to start looking for answers to their "wontfix" problems on their own because it's not even humanely viable for the teams to do all that extra work. We can't demand that the Unity developers go out of their way to satisfy our requests, which may be a priority to us but not to other people. Maybe the community could go crowdfunding in order to raise those "several thousand dollars" for someone who has the hability to fix those bugs in Unity that affect a great deal of users but Canonical can't/won't/don't want to address at the moment?

On the other hand, there really is a great deal of users who are not feeling included in Unity development because decisions are made and reverted without their input and because their suggestions do not get a proper answer, and this must be recognized and engaged. It's the lack of communication that causes bugs like this. We know it's hard to give on every bug answers like John Lea's, but this is something I think that Canonical should do at least in those polemical bugs with a very high number of "affects me too". When a developer has already communicated a position in a bug report but the report keeps growing, an update post explaining more throughly what is the position of the design team, on what it was based, and how they would react to a community patch is too important to ignore. If there still is activity in a bug and there's even people forking Unity to fix it, then the bug's not just someone's pet peeve, it's a real problem for a lot of users. Otherwise, the "affects me too" is just pointless.

For someone experienced it may seem trivial but it's not so easy for a user to report bugs, specially for those of us who don't have english as mother language. We have to study the problem, reproduce it, find patterns, investigate the cause, gather info, search among thousands of bug reports if it has not been reported already, put the ideas together, and fill in the forms. I love when I read "Thank you for taking your time to report this bug and make Ubuntu better" because it makes me feel that this work is appreciated. Sometimes a short explanation and a link is all that is necessary to make us understand the reasoning behind something. I know time is short, but if a proper answer isn't going to be given, why bother trying to answer at all?

One thing that made Ubuntu feel more human to me was videos like Amber Graner's interviews of the developers in the UDS and the Ubuntu team in the Nokia Lumia event. It's really nice to see and hear the people behind Ubuntu, not just to read them. And lots of you guys and girls are really terrific speakers! Canonical's press team should produce more of those. Would it be too costly and demanding? Maybe there could be a video version of Daniel Hochbach's Unity Development Report or Elizabeth Krumbach's and Amber Graner's Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter presenting news, plans, talking about bug fixes and interviewing developers, users, giving us warm faces and voices instead of cold strings.

Now, I've always felt that Unity has always been several steps ahead of Gnome Shell both in usability as in customizability, but GS extensions make Unity fall behind. It's very important that a similar system for Unity like suggested be discussed instead of being so quickly dismissed. Firefox does have headaches with add-on support, but that payed off, making it a huge factor for it's dissemination. I can't live without some Firefox add-ons, and neither can Ubuntu: if we didn't have "Ubufox" and "Firefox Unity Integration", Firefox in Ubuntu wouldn't just lack overlay scrollbars, it would look like a complete alien. If Unity extensions had an extensive disclaimer about their lack of warranty and how that they break Unity's design and may possibly break other things in the system, they wouldn't need support from Canonical, would they? They don't even need to have Canonical involvement at all. I don't know if it's even technically possible to develop an Unity extension as something like a Compiz plugin or maybe a Qml mini-app, but if that's possible, the functionality is already there, we just need orientation. If it's not, maybe the Ubuntu Unity could be broken into different Compiz plugins that could be turned on and off or even forked if necessary?