Kind of Ticked off

Honestly, when you do something nobody likes, its not usually a good idea to continue down that path.  But OS designers seem to just keep plugging away, deteriorating good designs in the search of something new.  New is not a guarantee of better.

And as shocking as it may be to people that know me, I'm actually ranting today on my personal operating system of choice, Ubuntu.

For almost a year-and-a-half now, I've been an avid user of Ubuntu, and have sung its praise from the roof tops.  But now I'm complaining.  I went and up-graded my system to ver. 11.10.  I didn't know that this was the release that was officially killing support for Gnome 2, so I was forced into using Unity, Ubuntu's new desktop.

The problem I'm having with it, and the problem that will soon plague Windows 8, and possibly even Mac systems, is the move to completely touch-centric UI.  And with Unity, it shows.  Everything has been shifted, re-arranged, and altered, and the problem is, it isn't quick or easy to get around with a mouse.  Now, if there were obvious plans to move everything to tablets, and this would satisfy the computing needs of everyone, I could see the need for these kind of changes.  But there are no such plans!  Tablets suck as full form factor computers, and have very limited options in terms of hardware.  The desktop is still the major hardware platform of choice.  Most people still use a mouse and keyboard.  So now, in stead of my computing experience being easy and efficient, I'm stuck relearning a clunky interface.  (For those Linux fans that are saying to themselves, 'just switch to Gnome 3', Gnome 3 is at best, unfinished, and I will not say what I think about it.  In a head-to-head, I actually prefer Unity, its designed more like the other modern OSes out on the market.)

I'm hoping there are enough complaints about this that the Ubuntu developers take notice, because if they don't I'm tempted to do something stupid enough as to try and develop my own desktop, because I don't see much of a future in the other to major OSes either.