I find the vitriol directed towards Unity puzzling, and regardless of your technical disagreements with the decisions its designers made, it's surely a tad over the top to call them "wrong, pathetic and contemptible".
FWIW I recently switched to using Unity with 12.04 and overall have found it very useful and efficient. From a classic usability perspective (e.g., Fitts' Law), moving the application menu bar to the window is much more efficient. And I appreciate the speed and ease-of-use of the HUD.
My wife had an oldish laptop running Windows that was becoming increasingly slow and unreliable. Since 99% of her computer use is in a web browser, I installed Ubuntu and Chrome and it's as good as new.
My wife doesn't want an "exciting experience", she just wants the computer to work reliably. Same for me. Generally I don't particularly care what changes are made at the desktop level since most of my time is spent in applications or the shell, but for the record I appreciate and applaud the work that Ubuntu has put into Unity, and kudos to the designers for their good work.
The problems some people have with Unity might be bugs or simple design mistakes (that kind of stuff certainly appears in any large application and I'm sure Unity's developers were highly competent, well-intentioned and deserving of appreciation despite any bugs). However, the problem I have in particular with Unity is that it's intended to solve making easy stuff easy by making even slightly hard stuff impossible. I don't believe that's a good philosophy for an OS that's going to spread by word-of-mouth, that will inspire loyalty in its users. (if you read my post carefully, my vitriol is directed as those who put forward the "improvement by removing options". I'm sorry if I went a bit over the top. Linux does seem to have a heritage of blunt-to-the-point-of-rudeness expression).
I also believe that it is quite possible to create a graphic shell that satisfies both minimal users and more sophisticated users.
FWIW I recently switched to using Unity with 12.04 and overall have found it very useful and efficient. From a classic usability perspective (e.g., Fitts' Law), moving the application menu bar to the window is much more efficient. And I appreciate the speed and ease-of-use of the HUD.
My wife had an oldish laptop running Windows that was becoming increasingly slow and unreliable. Since 99% of her computer use is in a web browser, I installed Ubuntu and Chrome and it's as good as new.
My wife doesn't want an "exciting experience", she just wants the computer to work reliably. Same for me. Generally I don't particularly care what changes are made at the desktop level since most of my time is spent in applications or the shell, but for the record I appreciate and applaud the work that Ubuntu has put into Unity, and kudos to the designers for their good work.