Comment 4 for bug 882274

@Tal Liron
@Constantine

I agree with Tal Liron. We should not start bashing Unity. A general problem I see is the behaviour of people to simply ignore the protest of users, when/if they see a problem with some parts of the design plans on which seemingly Unity is based. And this bug report addresses these problems perfectly.

@all
I, too, see a problem with transparency and communication between the developers (and especially the Ayatana Team) and the rest of the community. It took 148 affects me voters and nearly one year to get a reasonable response to bug 668415. The simple answer of Tim Penhey that the design team is currently rethinking the position of the launcher (or rather the whole concept/idea on which its positioning is based). I am very thankful to Tim Penhey that at least some developer gave a reasonable answer.
The simple question here is, why did it take so long to simply say "we are currently rethinking the issue".
The problems that led to rethinking the concept were discussed month before the release of Oneiric but all the good arguments simply resulted in a "won't fix". Reasonable arguments resulted in a "won't fix because of design decision" without any additional reasonable explanation.
That is no way to deal with human beings (the motto of Ubuntu being "the Operating System for human beings" became a real joke for me at that moment) and it was especially not a way to deal with intelligent people who really tried to present reasonable arguments.

So after these words: I am nevertheless starting to like unity more and more. There are very good concept and design ideas on which the whole system/environment is based. And it really matured over the course of the last two iterations. But two or three of the issues people have with Unity could have been solved already if the designers had though about the user as a "human being" and taken the complaints serious. (This is by the way the reason why I hate the "I do not like Unity" party out there. Say what you do not like; give arguments and explanations. It does not help anybody to simply say "I do not like it".)

Being human is about making decisions and a user sometimes wants to be able to make a decision. So why no at least a little bit more of configurability in Unity? At least some aspects that users are used to be able to modify? And please: reasonable arguments. Ubuntu already has a music store integrated and seemingly it will have a "bookstore" integrated as well. This is certainly not designed for company employees in a large network. This is a feature for normal users at home. But normal users at home are individuals; human individuals. These people want some features that are currently denied by the "won't fix because it is a design decision" mentality.
The moment somebody brought up the idea of including Ubuntu Tweak by default in the Ubuntu installation he already got the answer that this is for power users and thus not needed. Is this really so? Do only power users want to place the launcher at another position (something which cannot even be done with ubuntu tweak at the moment)? Do only power users want hot corner actions to be easily configurable? Do only power user want to change the appearance of a mouse pointer or change the system font? This is my problem with the discussion about features in Unity. Seemingly some people making the design decisions are very narrow minded. But it might me to help understand at least some decisions if these people started to explain their decisions instead of hiding behind the answer "it is a design decision".